Okay, I'm rolling again.
Am I still out of your spot?
As a complete aside, I taught
philosophy at the university for 30
years.
Yeah, I don't think
you can tell.
Yeah, you don't know anything.
Come on.
All right. Next let's cut again.
We're going to change
the...
There's some lights charging in a
case over there.
Am I rolling? All right, so this is
a second interview shot.
Let me know when you're ready.
Gary, can you clap like this?
So we're good?
OK, we'll
come back. So Mia, why don't you
tell me about your spices
that your mom used.
They, my mother
didn't use a
lot of fancy spices.
Onion was very popular because we
grew our own onions, used a lot o'
onions.
And salt, of course, was necessary.
But pepper was the
number one, was
the the number-one 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 I had 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.
And she also, 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 this spray
stuff that you use today or.
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 skillet,
lard in the bottom or butter in the
bottle, pancakes coming
up, pork chops coming up.
Sauerkraut sizzling.
Oh, I can smell all that today.
Let's go back to how we're going to
open this show. Why don't you,
again, I know you gave me
a great intro, give me again 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 Kelner,
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 Wildrose in
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 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 when my mother passed
away,
we were responsible for
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 maybe these
recipes might
jar in my bring a story.
It doesn't take much.
But it
did, of course.
There were recipes around
Thanksgiving, around Christmas,
around Easter, around 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 begin working
on these recipes and I began working
on 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?
And 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.
And 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?
And 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 would 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 of cooking
ranges and so on.
Okay, can you do it one more time?
One more time.
No, you're doing great.
There's like part of it here and
there. I just want to have it one
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.
Suzy 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.
That was great.
Wonderful.
That's as brief as that sketch.
No, no, that was great.
You guys heard anything that
he said or anything pop
in your head or any other areas?
Again, sometimes you're hearing this
and you're like, I want to know more
about that.
One thing that you talked about, you
talked about it the first time.
Remember, your mom was saying how
she would store
the temperature, to find the
temperature she stuck her hand in,
was that? Oh, we did get that.
We got that.
Well, we can do that.
No, we got that already.
You have it already?
I sometimes forget where our stories
are being told.
No, no, we've got all that,
actually.
No, no, we've got all that. I've actually got a great
segment about the whole wood 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.
Food
made life.
During those tough years
of the Depression and
World War II, irritable.
The role of food was so
much more than just something
to eat.
What do you hope that someone
who is looking through your
enthusiast book, what do you hope
the book does for them?
What response would you like them to
get as they look through your book?
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, a
spiritual dimension.
Food was so
much more.
And food during those days.
During those years,
played all of these roles,
even if you were to 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.
Would 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 grandmothers.
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 howled.
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.
That was great.
The chuck will be in the mail.
What? Some lines on it.
Oh, sure. Yeah.
Can we just get 30 seconds?
We have shared.
We have 30 seconds of quiet.
Good? All right, we're good!
Yay!
Okay, we'll see you on Saturday.