- 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.
>> HI.
I'M JON MISKOWSKI, DIRECTOR OF
PBS WISCONSIN.
WE'RE ENJOYING JERRY APPS, FOOD
& MEMORIES.
JERRY IS WITH US HERE TONIGHT SO
WE'LL HAVE A CHANCE TO TALK TO
HIM A LITTLE BIT ABOUT THE FOOD
& MEMORIES.
WE'D ALSO LIKE TO INVITE YOU TO
SUPPORT PBS WISCONSIN.
WE HAVE THE COMPANION BOOK THAT
YOU SAW.
IT'S A WONDERFUL BOOK WITH
RECIPES.
ALSO FOR A GIFT OF $10 A MONTH,
WE HAVE THE PROGRAM DVD.
ACTUALLY FOR BOTH TOGETHER WITH