Okay, rolling again.
Let me just go out of your spot.
As a complete aside, I taught
philosophy at the university for 30
years.
Yeah, you
can do that.
Yeah, you don't know what it's like.
Look, look, look.
All right. Make sure it's cut again
when we get it.
Alright, so this is
a second interview shot.
Let me know when you're ready.
You do it as a clap.
Clap?
Jerry, can you clap like this?
So we're good? Yep.
We'll come back. So here, why don't
you tell me about your spices
that your mom used.
My mother didn't use
a lot of fancy spices.
Onion was very popular because we
grew our own onions, used a lot on
onions, and salt
of course was necessary.
But pepper was the
number one, it was
the no.
1 spice, if it is
that I guess, that we might talk
about. And my dad, I will
never forget.
He would, in the morning, have two
eggs. He had two eggs forever.
And the sunny side up, and they were
so covered with pepper, they
looked black.
He liked pepper, and
my mother knew he liked pepper.
So pepper was a part of a lot
of our seasoning.
Beyond that, maybe a little
cinnamon, cinnamon rolls were
a very important part of what
she made.
But there were no fancy
spices.
Because there was no.
There was no spice cupboard,
for example, and no such a thing as
that.
Why don't you, since we're just on
that line, why don't you tell me a
little bit about the importance
of her using like a fat, like a
butter or a lard, how important that
was to the cooking.
There were two things
that she used a lot of, especially
for frying things, and that
was butter.
The fact that we had a dairy farm
and had all the butter we
wanted, that was important.
We also used lard.
She baked pies
using lard and
making the crust and all of that,
and said that that was the only way
to do it.
There wasn't any of the stuff that
you use today or...
There wasn't any margarine, nothing
like that. It was just butter and
lard were the two things that
were used.
And I should mention, one of the
very important
cooking items was a cast
iron skillet.
She prepared everything,
so many things in that
big cast iron skillset.
Lard in the bottom or butter in the
bomb, pancakes coming
up, pork chops coming up.
Sauerkraut sizzling.
Oh, I can smell all of that today.
Let's go back to how we're going to
open this show once you again, I
know you gave me a great
intro. Give me an abbreviated
biography of your mom.
My mother was born
in the United States,
my grandparents had come from
Germany.
She was born on
a farm near Kellner,
and that was near Wisconsin Rapids.
She spent most of her time on
the home farm married to my father,
four and a half miles west of
Wildrose. She spent 50
plus years on this farm before
they moved to Wild Rose and
their retirement.
And she passed away in
1993.
Tell me about, okay,
so, let's
move on to when you guys
found or you came
across your mother's recipe
book. Okay.
And tell me about just the
members associated with that and
then how you and Susie or you
decided what are we going to do with
this?
Sure.
When my mother passed
away,
we were responsible for
doing something with everything
that we found, as to maybe the
polite way of saying it.
And in the collection of
materials that we've found was
this recipe box that I
remember from a kid,
a little white recipe box.
And it was absolutely stuffed
full of pieces
of paper, recipes,
notes, all kinds
of things. And I began looking at
that and I said, Susie!
Maybe somebody would be interested
in this. And she said, well, maybe.
And the recipes were,
they lacked directions.
My mother assumed if you
were a cook, you would know
how to run a wood-burning
cook stove.
My mother's assumed that if you are
baking pie, you knew how
much wood to put in the stove.
Well, who today?
Can translate what
a piece of pine
wood would create against
what the temperature ought
to be for baking a pie.
And so what we had done, Susie and I
agreed that these
recipes might
jar in my memory a
story.
Well, it doesn't take much, but
it did, of
course. There were recipes around
Thanksgiving, around Christmas,
around Easter.
Round thrashing around, all of that
sort of thing, all the
meat of good stories.
And Suzy agreed.
To translate these
recipes into today's
language so today's
cook could know what
a pinch of salt
might mean, what a
medium oven
might be, and so
on.
And so as soon as you began working
on these recipes, and I began
working the stories, but
this little recipe box was the
key to it all.
It was the motherlode.
Of stories, and
also it was where
we could identify
what went on
during a certain time in
the history of our family
and in the state.
Meaning, what was it
like in the 1930s
when the big depression was on,
and the 1940s when World
War II was on?
What was it like from a
food perspective?
For me, that was an interesting
angle because food
has been and continues to be a
part of our lives.
That's how we stay going.
What was it like during the 30s
and 40s?
What was the place of food
during the Depression?
Were we without, as
so many people were?
How did we make do during World
War II when sugar was
not available?
All of that was wrapped up
in that little box
that we found when my
mother passed away
in 1993.
Great. I'm going to have you say
that one more time, a little bit
shorter, and I'd like you just,
if you could make sure you say, my
daughter, Suzy.
So we make sure that we have the
relationship, so whenever you're
ready.
When we found,
when my mother died in 1993,
we found this little recipe box.
My daughter Susie and I began
to look at it.
And we saw history,
I saw history.
Susie was interested,
she wanted to know more about what
was the place of food during
the Great Depression and during
World War II, because that's the
time. Of this recipe box.
And so I saw stories,
Susie saw the potential
for translating these recipes.
So today's
cook could see
and could practice what my
mother had done using today's
utensils, using todays
ranges, cooking
ranges and so on.
Okay, can you do it one more time?
One more time.
Take three.
No, you're doing great.
There's like part of it here and
there. I just want to have this one
more time
Are you ready for one more time?
In 1993,
my mother, whose name was
Eleanor,
passed away.
And when she passed, my daughter
Susie and I found her
little white recipe box.
And at that time,
we looked at each other and said, I
think there's maybe a book here.
I saw stories as I
looked at those recipes.
Susie saw the opportunity to
translate the recipes into today's
language so today's cook
could prepare the food
that we had enjoyed
during the Great Depression and
during World War II.
Great, wonderful.
That's as brief as that gets.
You guys
heard anything that he
said or anything caught in your head
or any other areas?
Again, sometimes you're hearing this
and you're like, I want to know more
about that.
And one thing that I don't know if
you talked about it the first time
remember your mom was saying how she
Would stole the temperature to find
a temperature. She stuck her hand in
was that
Oh, we did get that.
We got that.
Wow, we can do that.
Yeah, no, we got you.
You have
You have it already?
I sometimes forget where our stories
are being told.
No, no, we've got...
No, no, we've got all that actually.
We've got a great segment about the
whole thing.
And so, is there anything else that
you wanted to say or cover or
before we wrap today?
I hope
it becomes clear that
the importance of
food in our lives
and in the lives of many during
that time, food was
more important than merely
nutrition.
Food was an opportunity
to socialize.
Food was a trigger for
stories. Turk food
made life
during those tough years
of the depression and
World War II, terrible.
The role of food was so much
more than just something
to eat.
What do you hope that someone
who is looking through your
and Susie's books, what do you hope
the book does for them?
What response would you like them
to get?
I would hope that people
watching this program
and reading my book
would see food as
something more than
just something to eat.
That food had a sociological
dimension, a philosophical
dimension, and
a spiritual dimension.
Food was so
much more.
And food during
those days.
During those years,
played all of these roles,
even if you would ask someone.
As I just explained,
to say what food was doing for them,
they would have difficulty doing
it, but they knew,
deep down they knew
that it was taking place.
Do you hope that if you
could state somehow that you would,
I would assume you would hope that
someone's reading through this book,
that it would evoke their own
memories of their own relatives
or family.
For all of my work that
I've done. And I've been at it for a
very long time.
My hope is that
I might trigger in
someone's mind, oh, I remember
a funeral that I went to that
was something like this.
Or I remember sauerkraut
sizzling in
a cast iron skillet.
Or, I Remember the
year that we butchered a
pig and howl?
Sweet those pork chops
were.
I get that all the time now
and I want to continue
helping people see
their lives in a way that may have
been different from how they've
been seeing them in the past.
That's good.
I'm good. We got it.
Thank you, Jerry. That's awesome.
It's great.
The check will be in the mail.
Oh sure yeah,
we have
30 seconds of quiet, please
Good, all right, we're good, yay.
Okay, we'll.
Okay, we'll see you on the Saturday.