From My Mother's Cookbook: Cottage Pudding with Lemon Sauce

My Mother's Cookbook circa 1950

     Mommy was a good cook.  Her little accounting book where she wrote or pasted her favorite recipes certainly wasn't fancy but it contained many of the good things I remember from our supper table. Our meals in those days were breakfast, dinner at noon, and supper at night.  The largest meal of the day was usually at noon.  Farming is hard physical labor.  By midday, everyone had already been working for 5 or 6 hours and appetites were hearty.  If we had a smaller meal, it was at night, but often we had two good sized meals.  The breakfast, lunch, dinner regime was clearly for city living, the way Aunt Opal and Uncle Frank lived.

Midwestern Blizzards

Our One-Room Country Schoolhouse

     The winters of 1948-49 and 1949-50 were absolutely brutal in the Midwest.  Some regions had over 100 inches of snow each winter.  The Great Blizzard of 1949 occurred the first week of January.  Much has been written about that record-breaking storm, but there were many blizzards those years and I cannot separate them in my mind.

     As one storm was followed by another with no melting in between, the snow packed solid, deeper and deeper.  The snowdrifts around our farm became so high that the cattle could literally walk across the fences.  The water tanks for the animals froze solid and tank heaters had to be used to make drinking water available for the livestock.  It was always a worry that we would lose electric power because then no water could be pumped from the well to the tanks.

The Watkins Man

J.R. Watkins Pain Relieving
Liniment, the original first product

     After Mommy and Grammy died, Daddy and Uncle Frank decided to sell the milk cows.  Our weekly income from selling cream stopped.  Until then, Daddy sold the cream at the creamery in town, took the cream check to the IGA grocery store, and bought food and supplies for the coming week.  Daddy could not boil water without burning it so given his limited sense of what was needed for cooking, we sometimes had a humorous variety of things to eat.  But we did have food.

    Daddy had chosen to stay on the farm with us children in order to keep our small family together.  Financially, it probably would have been easier for him to move to town where he could have found a day job.  But he rejected that idea because we children would have been alone at home for long periods of time while he worked.  Alternatively, he could have given us up totally to Mommy's relatives in New England, but he did not want to part with us permanently or to have the three of us split up among relatives.

Making Bricks

Threshing oats was a dirty, labor intensive operation in the 1940s,
that is if  children did not burn down your oat field before harvest!

     Bricks seemed like simple things or so we thought based on our lessons at school.  It was nearing the end of a hot, drowsy summer.  My brother and I were in the lower grades but our younger sister would not start school for another year.  We were all bored.

Our New Car

A 1949 Two-Door Sedan - similar to our "new" car
 which was white and probably had "blackwalls".

     In the 1930s and 1940s. automobiles became the primary means of transportation in the heartland of America. The days of the horse and buggy had passed into history.  We can argue perhaps over horse manure versus gasoline fumes, but the fact was that the automobile, and particularly the truck in farm country, saved valuable time and was much more than a mere convenience.  Motorized vehicles were also a symbol of status and affluence. 

    In the car department, we young Norrises were challenged.  Our family vehicles until about 1952 were a 1939 black Chevy and a Model T Ford truck.  The truck sat discarded in the yard among the

The New York Times

Grandpa And The Entire 1938 Corn Crop
The Year Before Daddy Returned To The Farm

     I doubt than anyone else in our county subscribed to the Sunday New York Times with the possible exception of public libraries in the larger towns near by.   Our rural mailman delivered it by car each Tuesday morning.  I was always amazed that it came all the way from New York City to our mailbox within 48 hours of its publication.  I don't remember when Daddy's subscription to the Times began, but I cannot connect the paper in my memory with Mommy or Grammy.  So I assume it began to arrive after they had passed away.  If the paper did not come on Tuesday for some reason, Daddy was very disappointed and in a blue funk until the Wednesday mail delivery arrived.

The Gypsies

Yours Truly
About One Year Old

     Grammy called them Romanies, the Travelers, and told us they came from Romania.  Most farmers referred to them as "The Gypsies".  I remember seeing them only two or three times during my early childhood.  That was probably at the end of an era when hundreds of thousands of gypsies emigrated from Russia and Eastern Europe during World War II.  Hitler dislike gypsies almost as much as he did the Jews and persecuted them mercilessly.  Nearly 500,000 were killed or starved in concentration camps.  Many fled from Europe to other parts of the world to avoid incarceration in death camps. 

     The gypsies were shrouded in mystery and carried historical baggage that followed them everywhere they went.  Grammy obviously had heard all the stories.  Daddy and Mommy had lived the previous years in New York and New England, respectively, and had little first-hand knowledge of the Romanies, but I remember them both being silent but a bit grim during the infrequent visitations.

The Back-up Generator

Grammy and Her "New" Farm House

and Farm in the Mid-1930's 

     A basement was put under our small farm house during the fall of 1950. I do not know whose idea that was but we certainly needed the space. It was quite a process for our little old house built in 1867 by Peter Woodson, the original homesteader of our land.

     The house was raised on concrete blocks and tall blue house jacks. After the dirt underneath was dug out, new concrete block walls were built with a number of glass block windows on the four sides to let in some light. Lastly, the house was lowered carefully onto the new basement walls after the mortar had dried.

Home on The Farm

A Sad Day - Leaving The Farm for Last Time in 1965

          The wind blows unhindered across the small plot of land where I spent my childhood. Unlike Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, I can never go home. The farm buildings, fences, and trees have been gone for many years now, the soil returned to cropland by some other family or agribusiness. The only Norrises remaining from our branch of the family rest peacefully in the town cemetery. 
     Many years ago, I began to document my memories so that my children and grandchildren would have a glimpse of an era long gone, a way of life remembered by only a few of us lucky enough to have experienced life in rural America during the mid-Twentieth Century.