2JFM0000HD_Jerry_Apps_Food_and_Memories_Transcript

[uplifting music]

- The following program is a PBS Wisconsin original production.
[metal clinking]

- Jerry Apps: Food was beyond the nutritional part of it.
[bacon sizzling]

Food brought us together. Food created community. That makes us what we are as a people. It makes, it makes us more than what we are as individuals. It makes us a part of a collective.
[warm acoustic music]

My mother's name was Eleanor. She spent 50 years or so on the home farm with my dad, four-and-a-half miles west of Wild Rose. And she had lived a long and interesting life, having done all of the things that farm women of her generation were asked to do. And yet, when you think back, when I think back about my mother and what she knew and the wisdom that she had, it was quite, quite astounding. And when she passed, my daughter Susie and I found her little white recipe box, and it was absolutely stuffed full of pieces of paper. Recipes, notes, all kinds of things. 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. I saw stories as I looked at those recipes, and we saw, we saw history. I saw history.
[warm gentle music]

- Announcer: Funding for Jerry Apps Food & Memories is provided by the Wooden Nickel Fund, Greg and Carol Griffin, the A.C.V. and Mary Elston Family, Elizabeth Olson, the Eleanor and Thomas Wildrick Family, Stanley J. Cottrill Fund, Focus Fund for Wisconsin Programs, and Friends of PBS Wisconsin.
[gentle piano music]

- The important stuff of our lives took place in the kitchen. When visitors would come, beyond the Watkins man, the neighbor would stop by and would sit by the stove and share with my dad a story or two, or maybe even a "lie," as my mother might describe some of the stories, it was at a pleasant place.
[gentle music]

The kitchen was the warmest, the friendliest. It's where most everything happened that was important. And not just our farm, but, as I'd been in a lot of farm kitchens during those days, was the headquarters for the farm. Headquarters in a sense that the decisions made about the farm's operation, they were made in the kitchen. As headquarters was where the seeds were ordered from the seed catalog, where the-- my, my dad would sit and read the Wisconsin Agriculturist magazine. So, the kitchen table was a centerpiece of the kitchen. It was the place where so much happened. It was on the kitchen table where the sauerkraut was prepared, the cabbage was chopped up into little pieces, and it was put into a crock, and made into sauerkraut. It was on the kitchen table when all of the berries were prepared for canning. So, the kitchen table had multiple functions during the course of the year: from where we ate, where decisions were made, where the food was prepared, all of that took place on this old kitchen table. And if, if it could talk, oh, what stories it would have. My goodness, what stories it would have! When my mother passed, we found her recipe box. And that recipe box had most of the recipes that we have. And so, I knew that we needed to have, looking at my mother's recipes, we needed to have someone who could translate a pinch of this, a pinch of that, put your arm on the oven for the heat, into language that today's cook might be able to use. That was Susie's job. The second thing that we decided to do, we decided to build it around stories, to build it around the events of the year on the farm. And those are my stories.
[light upbeat music]

- Susan Apps Bodilly: So, we're making Grandma's special birthday banana cake. It's the cake I remember her making for birthdays and really any party because it's pretty easy. I mistakenly thought it would be easy to take some recipes and just cook from them. But what we realized is that the recipes did not have directions and did not have measurements, in some cases. It took quite a lot longer than I thought to go ahead and translate the recipes into things that cooks can use today.
[water hisses]

So, working on this book with my dad, you'd think that I would've heard every Jerry Apps story there was. But it was interesting because when I started pulling out my grandma's recipe cards, and I would mention a food, it really triggered a whole different kind of memory for him. He started telling me all sorts of different things that I had not heard, and it was because of the food.
[gentle upbeat music]

- Gee, Susie, that really looks good. My goodness! I'm waiting to dig in.

- This is, this is Grandma's Special Banana Chiffon Cake. Tell me about where she would get bananas, 'cause obviously she didn't have bananas at the farm.

- The Wild Rose Mercantile, which is where we did-- where she did her trading, which means she traded eggs for groceries. "How many egg, how many bananas--

- Bananas.

- ...do you want, Eleanor?" And she'd say, "Oh, four or five." And that was, that was a real treat.

- It's interesting to think about how, something like a recipe, and an old recipe, and making something from the past provides a brand-new story. I didn't know that, that she traded her eggs for bananas and that they were sold a different way than we have today. It really tells you something about the time period and how it was very special.

- It evokes all kinds of memories.

- Let's try a bite.
[laughs]

- Ooh.

- It's very moist cake, and she had, it has seven eggs in it, which she had plenty of eggs available, so that was ...

- Oh, sure.

- Mm.

- Mm!

- It's good.

- Well, I tell you, that takes me back about 75 years.
[Susie laughs]

- That's a long time.

- Well, longer than that.
[gentle music]

People today have difficulty understanding the multiple roles that farm women had during the years that I was growing up. My mother, for example. She did all of her cooking on a wood-burning cook stove. 

But preparing food was only part of the many jobs that she had. She mended our clothes. Washing and ironing and mending, all of that was a part of what she was doing. She was in charge of preparing all of the food; not only preparing it but preserving it. Besides all the things I've just mentioned, she was also in charge of our health. I never heard her once complain about having to do all of these things because that's what farm women did at that time.
[gentle music]

In my mother's generation, the farm women learned from their mothers, who had learned from their mothers. Just as farming skills were passed on from generation to generation, the cooking skills in the family were passed on from generation to generation. My mother, as I mentioned, is 100% German. And so, all these German recipes that went back to her grandmother, and to her mother, she had these skills as well, but I'm sure that she was a stickler, in making sure that my mother knew just how to prepare sauerkraut, knew just how to prepare ham, knew just how to prepare pork chops with sauerkraut, and so on. My mother was an excellent cook. 

Aprons came with the job. My mother had several aprons. She made them from feed sacks. In those days, well, during the Depression and World War II, the feed sacks often had patterns on them. So, she didn't have to buy the cloth. She would put on the apron in the morning, and the last thing she took off at night was the apron. And they were the kind that covered the whole front of you, you put the thing around the back of your neck. It had a couple of pockets. In one pocket, her everyday apron with one pocket, she would have some sewing, a needle maybe, and some thread. Never can tell when something needs to be repaired. 

And the apron had multiple functions. Not only did it keep the splashes from her dress, from the cooking, but it provided a place to wipe your hands. If somebody was coming to the door, you wiped their hands on the apron. It was a place, if one of the kids fell down, scraped a knee, you could, you could brush away the tears with the apron. The apron just had all kinds of, all kinds of uses. 

One of the interesting things that my mother was able to do, that I so much appreciate today and took for granted then, was that in cooking on a wood stove, you not only had to deal with the recipes, you had to deal with the stove. My mother would know the difference between the heating potential of oak wood and pine wood, because that was all stacked in the wood box. And so, she had to know so much more than just the recipes themselves. She and this wood stove became partners.

- Susie: So, she really had to know which type of wood to use for whatever she was planning to make.

- Jerry: That's right, and which was long-lasting, and when do you add some more wood? I mean, it's very complicated when you think about it.

- It is.

- And it's not, in no place have I seen all that written down, because I suspect there was an art to cooking with a wood stove.
[fire crackles gently]

- Susie: I think she just knew how to cook. And she knew how to use her wood stove and the things in her kitchen. And like you said, I think she just assumed people knew how to do things in the kitchen. And maybe they had learned from their sisters or their mother. I don't remember ever hearing her complain about being in the kitchen.

- No, she never complained about.

- She just seemed to really enjoy it. So, I feel like her kitchen was a very important place for her.

- Well, that was her domain, and she, well, she ruled the roost in the kitchen.
[fire crackling softly, gentle upbeat music]

Because we were up early, breakfast was a very important meal because it helped satisfy the fact that we'd already worked a couple, three hours, and it set us up for the rest of the day. One of the items that she thought, and it's true, was most useful, was a cast iron frying pan about this big around. And she prepared almost everything in that cast iron pan, whether it was bacon or eggs or whatever, or pancakes, whatever it was she was preparing. Now, if you were in winter, that would be eggs and bacon, and so on. It would be a much heavier breakfast.
[gentle upbeat music]

[bacon sizzling]

The fact that we butchered our own pig each year meant that we had a side of bacon, as I remember, about yea, gosh, about yea big.
[bacon sizzling]

What wonderful smell when you'd open the door to the cellar, and you could smell the, the smoked ham and the smoked bacon. So, when my mother would bring that big old side of bacon, put it on the kitchen table, and slice nice big thick slices of bacon, man, that was good! And then, that into the frying pan.
[egg cracking]

[bacon sizzling]

As I remember, the eggs were always fried eggs, I don't remember scrambled eggs. I think my dad liked to see the yolks there looking back at him. So, I don't remember ever scrambled eggs. And they were good because, well, first off, we, we knew exactly where they came from, just down, down the hill to the chicken house. But the fact that they were prepared in bacon juice, you know, gave them a special taste, as well.
[gentle upbeat music]

Breakfast in the summertime was much lighter. Well, we had a pretty good size bowl, each of us, like this,
[clicks tongue]

and we'd fill that up with cornflakes. During World War II, when you couldn't get sugar, and we're eating cornflakes. And our sweetener was sorghum. And if you can imagine putting some sorghum on, on cornflakes, I mean, they all stuck together. It was a, but we did it because that's what we had to do.
[gentle music]

[food sizzling]

Once a week, generally on Saturday, we would have pancakes. And that was a big treat, and she cooked that on that, on that, with that big skillet. And we would pride ourselves-- the pancakes were, oh, I don't know what, that big around. And if you could eat 10 pancakes, then you were really with it, and I was able to eat 10 pancakes.
[warm gentle music]

[gentle music]

Food has been, and continues to be, a part of our lives. That's how we stay,
[chuckles]

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? But I do remember during that time, of having people stopping by, men, usually, young men out of work. They had come on the train. And I will never forget the young man one time, I suspect he was in his late twenties, early thirties, he stopped at the house and rapped on the door. And he said, "If you've got some work that I can do, maybe split some wood for you." And my mother said, "I'll bet you're hungry." And he said, "Yes, I'm hungry." 

And she said, "Why don't you come in and I'll make some sandwiches for you." And she did. And I will never forget to look on his face. It was a look of no hope. And he was so thankful to get the sandwiches that my mother prepared. And she made some extra ones for him to take with him. 

And I saw him leaving the house and walking down our dusty country road. His shoulders slumped forward. No sense of where he was going, why he was going there. He was looking for something to eat, looking for some sense of hope, because there were so many people without hope in those days.
[tender music]

Food made life during those tough years of the Depression and World War II bearable. The role of food was so much more than just something to eat. And we as farm people, and my mother, especially, was so pleased that she could be of a little help.
[gentle music]

She had grown up with not much, as had my father. And she knew that if we had enough for ourselves, we could share some of that, and make someone's, someone else's life just a little bit better.
[gentle music fades]

[birds chirping]

Any time I'm working in my garden, I can hear the voice of my mother and my dad, both of whom not only depended on the garden during those tough years of the Depression and World War II, but saw the garden as I see it now, as something one has to do. It's a part of my life as it was a part of my folks' life.
[gentle upbeat music]

Well, during, during the years of the Depression, when so many people were unemployed and when prices were nothing, milk prices were down, everything is down. But there were a lot of people going hungry at that time in this country. And those of us who had big gardens did not have that problem. We always had something to eat. And we had from a quarter- to a half-acre of garden at that time. And I was a little guy, of course, and didn't have an appreciation for how valuable that patch of ground was, whatever you think about in a garden, we pretty much had. We were planting sweet corn, and we were planting tomatoes, watermelons, and pumpkins, and rutabagas, and all that stuff. 

The soil had to be a certain temperature before seeds would germinate. And we never checked it. My dad simply knew it. He had a fifth-grade education, how he knew all this I don't know, probably learned it from his dad. But he could put his hand on the ground and say, "It's ready for potatoes." He could put his hand on the ground and say, "I think it's ready for green beans."
[gentle upbeat music]

My dad was the one who would try something different. He would always order something that was unusual. One year he ordered squash. He'd seen a picture in a catalog of a huge squash, weighed 75 pounds. Huge! My dad said, "I'm gonna try that." And all the kids came by to see this giant squash, because he did have a giant squash. The thing, I don't know, weighed 75, 85 pounds. A huge squash! Nobody could even lift it. All the little kids looked and said, "Whoa, what is that? Oh, my gosh!" 

And my dad was smiling all the way. Gardening kept him going. And he, he loved that mystique of it. I would say, "Pa, what's gonna be good this year?" "I don't know. "We're gonna see. We're gonna have to watch and see."
[gentle upbeat music]

Other thing my dad would insist on in my mother's garden, there had to be something that was pretty, and that would be a flower, zinnias maybe, or something like that. He would always have something that was pretty, a sunflower, maybe. I have flowers in my little garden here. I'm following his advice, something pretty is important in a garden, as well.
[gentle upbeat music]

We never once watered anything in the garden.
[music brightens]

And so, we depended on the rain, totally depended on the rains. And for some reason, I don't remember ever a failed garden because of dry weather. I don't. There were very limited insecticides. We controlled bugs mostly by-- potato bugs, for example, you would pick them off by hand, go down the row and pick them off by hand. Can you imagine doing that? My brothers and I were in charge of hoeing, help with the planting, with the hoeing, getting rid of the weeds, with the harvesting. It was very much a family operation. Even though my mother was in charge, we all were involved.
[gentle acoustic music]

- Let's talk about the first spring things. Like, did you have asparagus?

- And rhubarb was one of the very first ones to sneak out of the ground, and asparagus wasn't long after that.

- Yeah, rhubarb is pretty hardy. And it can-- lasts through the summer, so it keeps producing. You can keep cutting it.

- Yeah, it's, it's very pretty, and you can make some interesting dishes from it. The first thing that they would prepare with the rhubarb was rhubarb sauce. My dad insisted that every one of us-- my two brothers, my mother, and I-- ate rhubarb sauce.
[gentle music]

And I'd say, "Pa, why do we eat this stuff that's so sour, and it's bitter, and it's awful?" He said, "You need to be cleansed from winter."
[gentle music]

- Susie: So, it was for medicinal purposes.
[Susie laughs]

- Well, it was terrible. It was just God awful. But so, the earliest, the earliest things were rhubarb and, and asparagus.

- And some, and lettuce, if it comes up.

- Yeah, and then soon after that, lettuce, and then the--

- Radishes.

- And the radishes would be coming, sure. When we ate lettuce, I, I knew that spring had arrived. I wasn't too sure when I ate rhubarb. But when, when the lettuce arrived, I knew that spring was here. She had a special, a special recipe that made lettuce literally jump right out of the bowl.

- Susie: It's good. I remember this.

- It is so good, it's so good.
[Susie laughs]

- There's nothing better than the taste of fresh vegetables from--

- Well, the fact that you, you, you pick the green beans in the morning, and you eat 'em at noon. How much fresher could it, could it be?

- Can't get any fresher.

- And you could tell the difference.

- And there's something to be said for knowing that you put in the work.

- Whatever we were to grow, that's what we had.

- That is the true farm-to-table experience.

- Exactly, 100%.
[warm gentle music]

We had a small orchard, half a dozen trees, or so, we grew what was called Whitney crabapples. And they are an apple about this large. And my mother canned them. And they were really good. We also went into the wild for fruit. And by that I meant, we picked wild blackberries, wild raspberries-- they were called blackcaps, that's what we call them. And she would send us into the woods with a little pail, a lard pail, put a belt around your waist so that you could pick with both hands. You don't want be holding a pail with one hand and only picking with one hand, you gotta pick with both hands. And so, that resulted in raspberry jam, raspberry pie, raspberry jelly. Raspberries, raspberries were a big deal. Now, the premier fruit crop of course, was strawberries. My mother had as much as a quarter of an acre of strawberries at one time or another. And she would trade those strawberries for groceries at the mercantile. Very little money was exchanged during the Depression. We traded crops, vegetables, fruits, for groceries at the grocery store.
[leaves rustling, gentle music]

But the strawberry patch was hers, along with the garden, and it was large enough so that she would invite neighbors, relatives, whomever, to come and pick.
[fruit thudding softly]

And in between times, when we were picking strawberries, and my mother had fresh homemade bread,
[knife clicks]

and we would smear some butter, thick, on this nice big hunk of homemade bread. And then we would put one, two, three, four, five strawberries on it! And we would mush 'em down with the knife
[warm gentle music]

and then put the second slice of bread on top, and we would have a strawberry sandwich. And so the juice would be running down our chins and people'd say, "What are you doing?" "Uh, we're eating a strawberry sandwich." And they'd, "What in the world is that?" "Let me show you." And that became very popular in our strawberry patch, the strawberry sandwich. Nothing, nothing, nothing comes close to eating a strawberry that's just fresh-picked. Oh, my gosh, they're good.
[warm gentle music]

Gardening goes way beyond the utilitarian, the economic, the fresh vegetables, which is essential. Each year's garden is a new lesson. I must also say that it's fun. It's therapeutic. It's something for this old guy to go out and dig in the dirt, and smell what it's like, and remember what it was like on the farm.
[warm nostalgic music]

One of the themes of life on the farm in the '30s and the '40s, everything revolved around preparation for winter. Everything. Preparation of feed for the cattle and the hogs and the chickens, that was what we were doing. Preparation for our own food for the winter, that's what we were doing. 

Everything was in preparation for winter. And without electricity, of course, we had no freezer. And so, my mother canned everything. She canned peas, sweet corn, strawberries, blackcap raspberries, red raspberries, crabapples, beets, dill pickles, sweet and sour pickles. She made strawberry jam, raspberry jam. She canned peas, she canned peaches, she canned beans, she canned cherries. She was canning all the time! And can you imagine now, she's doing all of this on a wood stove and it's a temperature of 90 degrees outside and she's working on this wood stove. It's gotta be 100 degrees, and she's canning all these things. Canning was essential to our survival. Maybe that's an extreme way of saying it, but it, it, along with a bin of potatoes and a bin of rutabagas-- we had a lot of rutabagas-- and carrots and onions, canning was essential. If you went to our cellar-- and it was indeed a cellar, not a basement-- it had a dirt floor, one whole wall was lined up with canned goods. That was our winter supply.
[warm gentle music]

- Susie: The root cellar, I remember going down to the, it's a true cellar, dirt floor, and then, the--

- Dirt, under a house had, had a dirt floor. And we had one bin for potatoes and another, and then a big pile of squash in another one. And then, the pumpkins and the watermelons and the squash, especially the watermelons, we would bury them in the oat bin in the granary to prevent them from freezing. We had another cellar that was in the side of a hill to the west of the buildings. That's where we stored the, the main potato crop. So, we had a big bin of-- a bin, not just a little pile-- a bin of rutabagas.

- You like rutabagas.

- We couldn't get along without rutabagas. My goodness, they're right up there with sauerkraut. Most every vegetable you might think about, she had, and almost every one of those vegetables, she knew how to preserve.

- I was always very impressed with that root cellar, 'cause there's just so much food.

- Well, exactly.
[gentle upbeat music]

Breakfast, dinner, and supper were the three meals, and noon was dinnertime. And the reason that dinner was a major meal was that there was a lot of work to be done yet in the afternoon on the farm. And the idea was to make sure that you had plenty of fuel so that you could last through the afternoon. And the dinners varied with the seasons, as you might guess. As you would come into spring, a dinner would immediately depend somewhat on, on the earlier crops in the garden. 

Early spring might be some canned meat leftover. As we worked through the summer, that noon meal would depend more and more on the garden, and there was sweet corn and tomatoes. It was wonderful, those, those noon meals. Generally, there was always some meat, pork chops were, were stored in a crock with lard, and so you'd get some pork chops and prepare those. And the ham, that lasted through, pretty much through the summer. 

So, each season, the noon meal was just a little bit different and there was generally some dessert. There might be pie. That was all part of the noon meal. So, the noon meals were special, and she was good at preparing them.
[metal clinks]

[gentle upbeat music]

The threshing machine went from farm to farm in our community to thresh the farmer's grain, and I was privileged to be on a threshing crew. And as we worked around the neighborhood and going from farm to farm, we ate a huge meal, a noon meal, dinner, at each of these farms. There would be 10 or 12 men at noon, when we're threshing, would come in after they'd sort of washed up a bit at the stock tank and they would sit around the dining room table now, and my mother would serve maybe pork chops, maybe roast beef, maybe ham, and beans, and peas, and maybe corn. It was a wonderful, wonderful meal.
[warm gentle music]

Not all of the meals were wonderful. If the place where we were eating was especially good, and we all knew that, and I would say to my friend Jim and I'd, "Let's just slow everything down a little bit, we might get a second meal if we made it last longer." And we would come to another place, and it wasn't near as good, and I'd say, "Jim, we gotta hurry up and get the heck out of here "because you get to the next place, it's gonna be a lot better." The women in the neighborhood would never admit it, but they competed with each other like everything, to have the best meal for the threshing crew. On the other hand, to show you how contradictory all of this was, they all helped each other. The women would, as we went from place to place, two or three would always go to help the other one. They had no problem competing with each other. They had no trouble helping each other. And the women, of course, then got to know each other very well, as well.
[gentle music]

- Susie: I can see the ladies sitting at their Ladies' Aid luncheon and they were sharing recipes and in a way of women getting together, like they did, it's really interesting to think about how women would connect with each other through a recipe.

- Yes.

- And how, when you wrote down a recipe for something and you signed your name on it, that that was sort of a part of you that you are sharing with the neighborhood.

- That's right.

- Susie: And I feel like people still do this today. Like, if I'm going to a friend's house and there's something really delicious, I kind of want the recipe. And then, you have to decide if you're gonna share that recipe's secret or not.

- All of these women with their recipes, they were very proud of these recipes, and they enjoyed doing it.

- I know for the threshing dinners it was a big deal to have the best recipes.

- I don't think, back in the day, that my mother would ever hesitate to give a recipe to somebody.

- It's just a way of remembering what life was like in a different time. And I think I appreciate knowing about it.
[gentle music]

[warm gentle music]

- Well, what was threshing all about? It was enjoying this wonderful meal. But it was also an opportunity to get to know our neighbors at a way that you can't get to know them any other way, working together, eating together, lying to each other, telling these wonderful stories, some of which were true, and most were not. 

We just had just the greatest time doing that. The social part of the threshing crew was as important as the eating and the threshing itself because that brought communities together round that threshing table. We were one. We were a community. We were sharing bread with each other, but we were also sharing who we were with each other.
[gentle upbeat music]

- I'm making sorghum cookies. The sorghum smells a little bit like molasses. It has a little bit of the same color and the same texture and sort of the same smell, but it's not molasses. And my grandma, at the time when sugar was rationed, she would use sorghum instead of sugar.

- Starting in World War II, sugar was rationed. You only were allowed, oh, just a few pounds. My mother baked all kinds of things, and now there wasn't any sugar to do it. And during the war, we would have three, four acres of sorghum. And my mother made sorghum cookies, sorghum cakes, and all kinds of things from sorghum. It was our major sugar substitute.

- I can smell that sorghum. It smells really good.

- In fact, she went to town when she heard that sorghum, that sugar was available and she bought, I don't know, 200 pounds, and, and put it up in the attic and said, "I will never run out of sugar again." I don't know, it probably was still there when they sold the house, but...
[chuckles]

[gentle upbeat music]

Well, my mother was an excellent baker, and her, her specialties were pies, especially apple pie. We picked wild blueberries, and we'd pick a whole bucket full and bring those home. And so, there would be blueberry pie. There would be blackberry pie that we picked blackberries from the woods. There would be blackcap pie, different from blackberries. Blackcaps are wild raspberries.

- Susie: So, I did cook with her, and I spent a lot of time with her in the kitchen when she lived on the farm. And I remember that kitchen fondly because it always smelled really good. And she was always very busy in the kitchen, and she loved to bake.

- Jerry: The cakes my mother was making, too. She would make a wonderful devil's food cake, a wonderful angel food cake, a cherry cake. Made all kinds of cakes.

- Susie: So, I sort of like to bake the way she does. When I use her recipes, I don't ever use my mixer. I just use a wooden spoon like this one, and I use, I don't use electricity. I just mix everything up by hand. And I feel like that's a really great way to honor her. And to honor her, honor all my ancestors, my female farm-woman ancestors, who worked so hard to provide food for everyone on the farm. And I like to think about that when I'm baking her recipes.
[gentle upbeat music]

- Yeah, she, she baked a lot. She, well, and she, she loved doing it.

- Susie: How often did she bake bread? Was that a--

- Jerry: At least once a week.

- Susie: And then, multiple loaves of bread.

- Jerry: Oh, we had six or eight
[chuckles]

loaves of bread. Those six loaves of bread were wonderful! And it was an accomplishment. And there's nothing I looked forward to more than a slice of homemade bread. My gosh, it smelled good, it tastes good, felt good in, in your mouth. It was just wonderful. In fact, my dad would say, "I want you never, Eleanor, to buy any baker's bread," as he called it.

- I was gonna ask you, I don't remember you... yeah.

- And you know why he said--

- You didn't buy bread.

- You know what he said about baker's bread?

- Yeah.

- There's no power in it.

- No store-bought bread.

- Meaning it's got too much air in it.
[both chuckle]

There's no power in it, and when you eat bread, it should have power because you got a lot of hard work to do.

- So, bread day, it just seems like what a wonderful way to spend your day. And it's, like I said, it's very, it's something very meditative about that, the yeast smell and the dough in bread.

- The smell of baked bread.

- Isn't it the best?

- You just can't, there's nothing much--

- It smells so good.

- But the only thing that compares to it is drying alfalfa.

- What?
[both laughing]

I would have to say, I like the baking bread smell better. Although I don't have a lot of experience with the smell of drying alfalfa.
[Jerry chuckles]

[birds chirping]

- There are two picnics that I remember vividly. One was at the last day of school at the country school. We had a potluck picnic for all of the kids and all of the parents. And it was a fantastic event.
[happy chatter in background]

The school board would buy ice cream in tubs, two-and-a-half gallon tubs, I think they were, metal. And they would furnish the ice cream. And we all brought something to eat: cookies, sandwiches. So, it was a wonderful picnic. Second kind of picnic that I remember was on the 4th of July. And the 4th of July, of course, was in the middle of haying season, which meant we were cutting hay, drying hay, hauling hay, stuffing up into the barn. It was a busy, busy time. But on the 4th of July, my dad would announce at the kitchen table, "This is the 4th of July. We're not going to work this afternoon. We're gonna go to Silver Lake, so you kids could swim,
[crowd speaking faintly]

and we're gonna have a picnic." And my mother knew this ahead of time, of course. 

And so, we did the morning work, traipsed off to Silver Lake, which was about five miles away. And my mother laid out this wonderful spread for our picnic. One of the Catholic organizations had their picnic there, and they had a, had a foot race for kids. And I kind of saw that race and some guy said, "Come on over here." And I come over there and they said, "Oh, you, what? Who? We're gonna have a foot race, you wanna ..." 

"Well, sure, that'd be fine. I'd be good." So, I line up with all these other kids, and by golly if I don't beat 'em! They gave me, as a prize for winning, a can of asparagus. 

And my mother said, "Where'd you get that asparagus?" 

And I said, "I just won the foot race over there." 

"You run the foot race! You have no business being in that Catholic group." 

And "Gosh," you went. And "Whoa, what is this?" 

"Take that asparagus and give it back to them." 

My dad said, "He won the race. He keeps the asparagus." That's a memory that I've never, ever forgotten.
[laughs]

[gentle upbeat music]

Well, Thanksgiving was one of those days that we really always looked forward to. Unfortunately, it always occurred in the middle of deer hunting season. My dad hated turkey. He would not, he thought turkey was the worst kind of food in the world, it was just too dry. So, prior to Thanksgiving, we would go to the farmer's fair in Stevens Point. 

In addition to vegetables, live animals: pigs and ducks. And so, my dad liked duck. He bought this great big old duck, live, now, live duck, chucked it into a gunny bag, burlap bag, put a string on it, and I'm to hold this duck as we're driving back. The duck is not liking it inside that burlap bag. It's kind of quacking and flapping and I'm, "Please, I'm holding onto the duck." Well, the duck ended up on the Thanksgiving table, of course, and it was pretty good, I must say. We may have had some ham to go along with the duck, in case somebody didn't like duck. 

We had cranberries. Cranberries, of course, were near Wisconsin Rapids, which was not far from us, and we had a lot of cranberries always by that time of the year. We had apple pie, sometimes cherry pie, so it was a big deal. And, of course, we-- I couldn't wait to finish eating because I had to get back out on my deer stand.
[gentle upbeat music]

Now, now Christmas was a day of celebration, generally with the family, either coming to our place at, at noon, or we going to one of my aunts' or uncles' homes. No, that was very commonly done.

- Susie: What do you remember about food at Christmas?

- Jerry: First off, the, the premier food, passed on from generation to generation, was oyster stew.

- Yes, which we still eat to this day at Christmas Eve. Do you know why they started having oyster stew on Christmas Eve?

- I don't. It went back to Europe.

- Okay. It went back to my German relatives in Europe and come to find out my, Ruth's Norwegian relatives did the same thing. Then, what else did we have at Christmas? Well, it would vary, just as we had at Thanksgiving, we might have duck, we might have ham.

- And pickles. I remember, I remember a relish tray with--

- Exactly.

- What kinds of pickles?

- Well, dill pickles, sweet and sour pickles, crabapple pickles.

- Right.

- Mother made a lot of pickles.

- She did make, and there was always special dishes for relishes. Lots of pickles.

- Yes, that's, that's correct. That's correct.

- So, there wasn't a certain meal for Christmas. Just some things that were saved over.

- A lot of the things that she made for Christmas had previously been preserved and were in cans downstairs. And then, we had these, these... My mother made wonderful cinnamon rolls.

- Yes. We might have those at Christmas time. It was very special time. We did not open presents until Christmas morning, until after the cows were milked.

- Susie: Even on Christmas?

- Even on Christmas, my--

- Cows first.

- My dad said the cows come first. So, we would get up early, walk by Christmas tree, all the presents, and put on my outdoor clothes, and run off to the barn and milk cows, and wonder, "What in the world is under that Christmas tree?" My mother would say, "You, you get two presents."

- Two presents?

- One, one toy, and one clothing. One of my favorite presents, I always picked out a book, and this book was a, a, a book for boys. And in there, oh, my gosh, was that a fine book! Because it's, it taught people how, boys how to throw their voices. Then there were stories about, there were chapters in this book on how to spot German airplanes.

- Did you ever see one?

- I never saw one.
[laughing]

- You never saw one.

- I never saw one, but I was ready. I was ready.

- So, your tradition was to open the presents after you'd milked cows. And then, did you do anything else?

- We sometimes, we'd go ice fishing in the afternoon of Christmas Day.

- No, that sounds like fun. It's a fun day.
[gentle music]

- My mother, she was much more active in the church than my dad. And the Ladies' Aid was the women's group connected to the church, who met in the homes, generally in the winter months. The pastor would come by, and you would try and impress the women with your, with your cooking skills by providing a fancy kind of dessert. It might be a, a lemon something or another, something my mother ordinarily wouldn't make. And the women would all gush and, "Oh, Eleanor, that was so good." 

And I can't imagine that the preacher wouldn't have weighed 300 pounds because he went around, he ate everything, liked everything. And it must have been taught in the seminary how to balance a plate of food on your knee, because he could do that with a skill. And I, I tried it, I'd go, "Gee," dump food on the floor. It takes skill.
[gentle music]

Well, a shivaree is a form of welcoming a newly married couple into the community. And, when somebody was newly married, the first night that they had returned, they knew to expect the neighbors would come. But before we would come to the house, we would, we would all gather, all the neighbors, quietly, very quietly, we didn't want them to know we were there. And when we'd see the lights go out in their bedroom, ah, that was the time. 

This sounds so primitive. Those of us with deer rifles shot them into the air. Those of us with shotguns, whoo-wham! Oh, my God, the lights came on upstairs. I wondered if they thought they were being attacked, but they knew that it was a shivaree. We pounded on, on metal. We made the more darn noise you could ever imagine. I thought it was wonderful. 

We went and marched up to the door and they appeared kind of bleary-eyed and embarrassed, and we had, we said, "We just couldn't believe what you've done. Welcome to the community. We're so happy to see you here." And then, we drank beer and had all kinds of cookies and cake. It was an event that took place every year, depending on who got married. And it was looked forward to by the couple, as well as everybody in the community.
[gentle music]

Often, you'd go to someplace and it would say, "Bring a dish to pass."

- Right. So, what does that mean again?

- And that means--

- Susie: Bring a dish to pass?

- Bring the hot dish. And so, we would have a collection of hot dishes, but that was common language when something was set up, bring a dish to pass. The other, the other use of hot dishes, if somebody were injured in the community.

- Oh.

- Or somebody died, everybody would bring the hot dish to the family.

- So, like, at the home?

- Yeah, to the home, for the place. Very common.
[gentle music]

It was in 1941 that my grandfather died, and I was, what, seven years old. It was the tradition, in our farming community, that you celebrated the life of a person by having them in your home, albeit in a casket, surrounded by flowers. To this day, by the way, when I smell certain kinds of flowers my mind immediately goes back to my grandfather's death and funeral. People brought all kinds of food. Mostly casseroles, hot dishes of various kinds. You know, the food was an expression of thanks and, and an expression of appreciation. A chance to say, "Here, enjoy. Enjoy, enjoy this hot dish that we've prepared." 

It was a very respectful, interesting kind of event when people would bring all these different kinds of foods. And, as a hungry kid, I was usually hungry, it was wonderful to have all these different kinds of hot dishes available. And my mother, of course, during that time, didn't have to do any food preparation. She could grieve the loss of her dad along with all of the neighbors who had come. So, there was an opportunity for people to gather. It was more of a celebration, as I remember. Food was a part of it, no question about it, but the stories, oh, all the stories were always a part of it. I so much appreciated the opportunity as a little kid, seven years old, to sit in on these stories.
[gentle music]

It told me what life was really like, and that death was a part of it. I didn't realize at the time-- I do now-- how important food was to bringing people together, to providing a sense of, you're part of our family, and we like you, and here's, here's a way to express some of our love for you, is through the food we serve. And my mother knew this intuitively, I think, so did my dad, that food was a way of doing that. 

Whether it was a funeral, whether it was the new neighbors that are coming in and a chance to see what they were like, oh my gosh, and decide that we're gonna have to live with them anyway, 'cause they're our neighbors. Food was, was behind all of that. Food brought us together. Food created community, and for community to exist one has to know, in depth, the neighbor. And there's no better way of knowing a neighbor than working aside of them, sharing a story with them, and sharing a piece of bread with them.
[food sizzling gently]

[gentle music]

Food has been, and continues to be, a part of our lives. That's how we stay. Food was more important than merely nutrition.
[metal clicking]

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 bearable.
[liquid burbling]

The role of food was so much more than just something to eat. Food was so much more.
[warm gentle music]

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, in a cast iron skillet." Or "I remember the year that we butchered a pig, and how 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. 

One year we had wild grapes. All over there were wild grapes and my dad said, "We should do something with those wild grapes." And so, they, we had, folks never mentioned this, but they had bottles left over from Prohibition. Everybody had bottles, beer bottles. And so they began, they chucked a bunch of these grapes into these beer bottles. We had a capper, so we capped all these bottles, and now they're all in the basement. 

And, and all of a sudden, one night, there was an explosion and a ka-boom! Oh, my gosh! Everybody woke up. We ran downstairs, thought-- Well, we didn't know what to think. And Pa said, "I bet one of those bottles blew up."
[gentle music]

And he went downstairs, and he brought up a bottle, very carefully. My dad opened the bottle and ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-choo, right up against the ceiling. Grapes began falling back down again, partially-fermented grapes. And my mother was, she couldn't believe it. 

She said, "Herman, it's raining." 

"It's not raining. It's the grapes that are dripping off the ceiling." 

That was one of our failed attempts at canning.
[laughing]

But it provided a moment, and we always needed a moment of something that was different because life during the Depression was bloody boring if you were a kid. And this provided a story that made the rounds of the neighborhood, the Apps's with their exploding bottles.

- Announcer: Funding for Jerry Apps Food & Memories is provided by the Wooden Nickel Fund, Greg and Carol Griffin, the A.C.V. and Mary Elston Family, Elizabeth Olson, the Eleanor and Thomas Wildrick Family, Stanley J. Cottrill Fund, Focus Fund for Wisconsin Programs, and Friends of PBS Wisconsin.