As our family went through my mother’s personal effects, we discovered these essays, handwritten in a spiral notebook. Immediately, we knew we had found a very special look into the early life of someone we loved and admired. We’re sharing them here in the hope that others may enjoy them as well.
November 23, 1986
These essays are being written because I have often thought how nice it would be if, say, my great-grandmother had written about what life was like when she was growing up. It would have been so interesting to know how people’s daily life and experiences fitted in with the history that was being made at that time.
Each season, each month
Each season, in fact, each month there was lots of time spent in food preparation and food preservation. January and February were the main months for butchering, sausage making, salting and smoking, making head cheese, making pickled pigs feet, and canning beef. In February, when it froze at night and warmed in the daytime, we collected maple water in buckets and cooked it down for maple syrup. Farmers who had an ice house usually cut ice on a pond in the winter. This was covered with sawdust. One of our favorite visiting places was the Umthum home near Sugar Creek. They put up ice and made ice cream on summer Sundays.
In the spring we enjoyed mushrooms, rhubarb, and asparagus. Also home ground horseradish. Then we started berrying – first strawberries, then gooseberries, raspberries, and blackberries and dew berries. By that time we had radish, lettuce, onions, new peas, then green beans, cabbage, roasting ears, tomatoes, early Transparent apples, cherries, new potatoes.
In the fall we gathered hickory nuts, walnuts and hazelnuts, harvested apples, grapes, peaches, plums, pears, squash, and pumpkins. My dad hunted squirrel, rabbit, quail and ducks. We dug the carrots and put them in a stoneware jar with sand.
Sausage and Sauerkraut
I should also mention that we fried down sausage. You fried it and put it in a stoneware jar, then covered it with the grease that fried out. Grandpa Isadore Link made excellent sausage. He waited until it was really cold, then made ricewürst. This was ground beef, ground pork, a little ground liver, cooked rice and seasonings. Because of the rice, it wouldn’t keep unless it was very cold. He also made good blood sausage. He made all kinds of wine – cherry, elderberry, dandelion and grape. Grandpa had a friend in Franklin, Jacob Hohl. He would go to visit him and take samples of his sausage and wine and receive samples of Jake’s in return.
Everybody made sauerkraut. Some older Germans made a kraut of green beans. These were cooked with potatoes and a piece of pork. A few people pressed drop apples for cider. Also one or two farmers raised cane and pressed the juice and made molasses.
Baking a cake
Baking a cake was an adventure then due to no oven controls and baking powder wasn’t as reliable. I know you had to walk carefully and not slam doors as the cake might fall. Aunt Teresa Wellman and Mrs. Al Harmeyer were expert angel food cake makers. Mrs. Ben Fullenkamp made devil food cake that was so good. We all tried to trade Anna Marie something from our lunch for a piece of that cake.
Walt’s Comments
It’s pretty hard to imagine a life without refrigeration, isn’t it? But that’s how Mom grew up. Even in the 1960’s Grandma Link’s fridge was an ancient Frigidaire with a door like a bank vault. It wouldn’t keep ice cream frozen in the summer. There was a Tastee Freeze (or something – a generic DQ, basically) on the east end of town where we’d take Grandma for ice cream. I remember one time Grandma sent me uptown to one of the bars to buy ice cream. Might have been the Fourth Street Bar & Grill (or whatever it was called in the early 1970’s). It felt pretty weird to walk alone into a bar as a ten year old, but it was West Point so nobody seemed surprised. I remember the ice cream tasted kind of smoky.
We always got sausage at Schierbrock’s Grocery. They made all their sausage in the butcher shop, and it was amazing. We were all pretty sad when they closed. Fullenkamp’s Insurance is in the building now.
Head Cheese
Despite its name, head cheese is really more of a sausage than a cheese. It is made of finely chopped meat from the head of a pig. The meat is seasoned and cooked in a gelatinous broth and molded, usually in the skull of the pig. It is eaten as a luncheon meat.
Cooking broth to a gelled state was a common way of preserving it. The blocks of “portable soup” were used on ships as well as in homes. The book The Swiss Family Robinson by Johann Davis Wyss has the family eating soup made from gelled broth on the first night on the island. Today it is popularly known as bone broth.
Digging Deeper
Some interesting facts about sausage and it’s history can be found here.
This website has a lot of interesting information about preserving food, including a whole page about different types of sausage.
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