So I’ve been reading Little House in the Big Woods. Normally this is my “skipper,” which means that when I reread the series, I may or may not include this one in the mix. It depends on my mood. But right now I’m reading it aloud to my six-year-old son, so I’m able to labor lovingly over every word.
I’m wondering about the food. Is it just me, or is this the Farmer Boy of Little House books? Many readers equate Farmer Boy with food. Well, in Big Woods, there seem to be an awful lot of food mentions — or more than I realized, anyway. In making sure my son was listening I was asking him questions along the way. What is stored down cellar? (potatoes, carrots, beets, turnips, cabbages) What things are in the attic? (onions, red peppers, pumpkins, squashes) It got me to thinking: Wow, the Ingalls ate red peppers. Is there any other time we hear of them eating red peppers?
And then there’s all the meat-making (smoked ham, headcheese, sausage –which, OK, I just discovered sausage had the word “sage” in it … lightbulb!). I think it’s the only book besides Farmer Boy that has actually made my mouth water. (With the mysterious exception of the cottage cheese balls with onions and cold creamed peas Ma makes for Mary’s last dinner in Little Town on the Prairie. I don’t even like raw onions! And creamed peas? Cold creamed peas? Whatever.)
And this is all in the very first chapter.
One passage in particular struck me, specifically the last phrase:
The hams and the venison hung in their paper wrappings, and all the bunches of dried herbs, the spicy herbs for cooking and the bitter herbs for medicine, gave the place a dusty-spicy smell.
Funny how something described as dusty can be considered pleasurable. And help me out here: Besides the sage-onion debacle between Mary and Laura (captured first in the pages of the Missouri Ruralist before being memorialized in The Long Winter), this strikes me as one of the only times herbs are mentioned in the series. Could that be true?
There has been talk about the perceived abundance in Big Woods as opposed to the hardship of most of the rest of the books. I think this is the first time I’ve really felt it. Taken on their own without the rest of the series for context, Big Woods and Farmer Boy indeed seem to be two books about abundance. Consider an elderly couple, Missouri farmers whose hardest-working days are behind them. One book relays his childhood, the other her childhood. The pair of books together are a tribute to each childhood. Or early childhood, in Laura’s case. A childhood of abundance.