The following story is excerpted from the book, "Prairie Kitchen Sampler," a 66-year personal history of Midwestern farm kitchens from the stories of Alice Mickish Hendrickson as told to her daughter, Ethel Mae Hendrickson Fritz. More than a cookbook, "Prairie Kitchen Sampler" is a storybook, too. Mrs. Hendrickson was born in Buffalo County, and the book reflects her life as the farm wife of Walter Hendrickson in this county. She now resides in Kearney.

THE SHACK

        The Shack was our first home. We lived there together only three months. Walter moved into the one-room house and "batched," a 1920s word describing a young man who lived alone, for nearly eight months before we were married in November of 1922.

        The farm was located halfway between Gibbon and Ravenna, four miles northwest of Walter's parents, and, like all the farms we rented or owned the next sixty years, it was in Buffalo County, Nebraska. The buildings of the farmstead were laid out between a pasture and plowed fields about an eighth of a mile from a graded dirt road.

        "Does it have running water?" was one of my first questions about the house.
        "Sure it's got running water," Walter answered. "When the water pail is empty, you
run out to the windmill, fill the pail and run back to the house."

        And every pail of water carried into the house had to be carried out as dish water, bath water, wash water or it went out in the slop pail. That pail did the job of a garbage disposal. It collected potato and apple peelings, pea hulls and other kitchen scraps--anything the dog or cat wouldn't eat.

        There was no need to ask if the house had a bathroom; without running water, somewhere, out behind the Shack, there'd be a two-hole privy.

Alice Mickish Hendrickson, 1988

        The windmill stood as a sentinel in the center of the farmyard about a hundred yards from the house. Water from its pump ran to tanks in the corrals through underground pipes, except, of course, when temperatures fell below zero in the winter freezing the iron pump solid. Then we ran to the windmill with a teakettle full of boiling water which was poured slowly over the pump to thaw it out and get the water flowing again.

        The November day we moved me and my things into the Shack wasn't the first time I'd seen the place. I'd seen it earlier in September. I was spending the weekend at Hendricksons' when, right at the dinner table in front of his whole family, Walter asked if I'd like to see his "batching quarters" meaning the Shack. Before I could answer, it was arranged that his older sister, Jessie, would go to the Shack with us, because, as Walter's mother pointed out, "It wouldn't look right to take your girl to your place alone."

        As we approached from the east, I had to look twice to see the squatty, little white house surrounded on three sides by apricot and apple trees. Next to a full-sized barn, corncrib and other sheds, the house looked even smaller than twelve-by-twenty-four feet. ... Inside, the Shack was wall-to-wall furniture. The door, near the north end of the east wall, opened between the bedroom and kitchen ends of the room, beside a high, broad, double-door oak wardrobe in the northeast corner, near a small dining table and four chairs under a big east window. On the other side of the table, in the southeast corner, was an oak kitchen cabinet. Its four-foot zinc work surface topped two pull-out bins which held flour and sugar; on its upper shelves, Walter stored cereals. The south end of the room was all stove--a huge, dull black cookstove. In the southwest corner, crowded behind a tall, wide and handsome oak cupboard with etched glass upper doors, was a small, three-drawer walnut chest. It held a pail of water and wash basin and served as a wash stand. A rocking chair stood beside the bed. Linoleum covered the kitchen area of the floor and a trail of rag rugs went from the door to the bed and to the wardrobe.

        A "tour" of the place took less than five minutes.

        As each Hendrickson son or daughter married, Will and Carrie (Walters parents) gave them a team of horses, a sow and a cow. Two families who were long-time friends and neighbors of the Hendrickson’s went together on their wedding gift for us--a dozen laying hens. None of the "gifts" came boxed or adorned with fancy paper and ribbons. They came wrapped with lots of practical and genuine good wishes and affection and we were mighty happy to get them. Having our own livestock and our own milk and eggs--that was all a farm couple just getting started could wish for.

        What little machinery Walter had--a plow, harrow, corn planter, "go-devil" (a tillage tool), and cultivator--he bought secondhand at farm sales. What he couldn't afford to buy the first year he farmed--a grain drill, mower, rake, hay buck and other hay-making tools--he borrowed from his father.

1922 - 1934

        Babies and moving dominate memories of our first twelve years of marriage. We lived on four different farms and our children, a boy, William Wayne, and a girl, Ethel Mae, were born during those years. Between 1923 and 1930, we moved three times. I'd just get us settled into one house and I'd be packing us up to move into another. I knew how to drive a car and that was a big help when we moved.

        The summer I turned sixteen, my father taught me to drive the family car--a dark green, four-door, Buick touring car with isinglass side windows. The car was an "easy starter"; it only took a couple of quick spins of the crank to get the motor running and from then on it was a matter of coordinating the stick shift with the clutch pedal to get the car in motion. To my father, it was a necessity that, as the oldest child, I knew how to drive; I considered it a privilege. I drove Mother to town for groceries on Saturdays so Dad could stay in the field and I drove her and my two brothers and sister to afternoon kolache and coffee visits with her widowered father or to see her sisters, Anna and Julia.

        One day, not long after we were married, when we were getting ready to go for a drive, my new husband motioned for me to get into the driver's seat of his Model T Ford.

        "It's your car, too," he said, "you may as well start driving it."

        Driving the Ford was a little different than driving the Buick. For one thing, the Ford didn't start as easily. As one of our neighbors put it, "Spinning hard the crank was the only way to get 'her' going." And shifting gears on the Ford was also different. It had five gears--first, low, high, second and reverse--the position of the clutch pedal determined which gear the car's transmission was in. Once I got the hang of finding each gear, besides trips to town for groceries and other shopping, Walter soon had me running errands for him. I picked up medicine from the drugstore to treat livestock, took plow shares and cultivator shovels to the blacksmith to be sharpened and, when there was a machinery breakdown, I was the one who ran to the implement dealer's shop for repairs. On moving days, I made several trips with the car packed with dishes, pots and pans and other housewares--towels, bedding, clothes, mirrors, framed pictures--any items not well-suited to an open-air wagon ride.

        Each move took us to a larger farm, one with more tillable acres where the "lay of the land" and the soil was better. The last move was to an irrigated farm. We were willing to move whenever and wherever the farming prospects appeared more promising. And while the houses on the four farms varied in size and appearance, their facilities were standard for farmhouses of the time--cob-burning cookstoves in the kitchen, wood and coal-burning basin heaters in the dining room and "front room" (living room or parlor), kerosene and gasoline lamps and lanterns and outdoor privies. Until we installed utilities in the last house, none of the houses had hot and cold running water, central heating, electrical service or basements though each farm did have a cave or cellar, none of which were directly under the house. They were thirty to fifty feet from the kitchen door. Some were dug into the side of a hill and some were covered with a low, earthen dome. Either way, a cave might have gone completely unnoticed except for a wooden door laid at about a thirty degree angle over the cave's stairwell and a small chimney-like air vent which protruded out of the ground above the cave.

        My kitchen routine ran smoothly and almost constantly, day in and day out. I baked pies, cakes or cookies nearly every day; bread, every other day; rolls, two or three times a week; and churned butter once or twice a week.

        Churning was, admittedly, a monotonous job but it had one redeeming value--you could sit down and do it. I'd fill the one-gallon glass jar of my Daisy churn with thick sour cream--butter can be made from either sweet or sour cream but I preferred the flavor of butter made from sour cream--then I'd sit down with the churn on my lap and begin turning the crank, rapidly at first, to get the cream thoroughly agitated and frothy. Thirty or forty minutes later, as the cream thickened and turned to butter and the crank became harder to turn, the cranking pace slackened. When butter held together in large clumps in the churn, the buttermilk was drained off and the soft butter was turned into a bowl where excess water and buttermilk were "worked out" and salt was "worked in." "Working" the butter, a continuous stirring, pressing and kneading of the butter, was done with a flat, six-inch wide wooden paddle. When no more moisture could be "worked out" of the butter, the butter was pressed into a one-pound block-shaped, wooden butter mold. A gallon of rich, heavy cream made about a pound and half of butter. If, when I churned, I knew we would be having company, I packed some of the fresh-churned butter into a round, wooden butter mold with a fancy flowery design on the top. The mold was one of my mother's; she’d slipped it into my hope chest along with a butter paddle my father had whittled for me.

        How much and how often I baked or churned depended on how many people I guessed might pull their chairs up to my table for breakfast, dinner or supper on any given day. Walter's folks and several of his brothers and sisters lived nearby and we ate meals together quite often. Sometimes they were invited but more likely than not, our "guests" came unexpectedly but they were always welcome.

        With a well-stocked cave and pantry, putting an extra plate or two or three or more on the table was never a problem. Each winter I processed home-butchered pork and beef and each summer I canned hundreds of quart and pint jars of fruits and vegetables. Shelves lined with sparkling glass Mason and Kerr jars filled with green beans, corn, tomatoes, pickles, sauerkraut, peaches, cherries, applesauce, pickles, jams and jellies made a colorful fall mosaic in the cellar's filtered light. There were potatoes in the bins, apples in baskets and carrots and parsnips buried in tubs of sand. With one trip to the cellar even in the middle of winter, I could put a meal together to feed a six-man corn shelling crew with half a day's notice.

        Shelling crews were about half the size of grain threshing crews and there was one other difference--threshers got two meals a day and shellers got only one.

        In 1929, at the time we lived in the smallest of all the houses we ever lived in, we entertained the Hendrickson family--fifteen adults and five children--on Christmas Eve. It was a full house but it wasn't too crowded to squeeze in Santa Claus and his bag of goodies for our gift exchange.

        The New York stock market had crashed that October and while the jolt could be felt out here on the prairie, it probably didn't hit farmers quite as hard as it did city folks. Farmers had been walking around with empty wallet's in  their overall pockets for so long, they didn't notice any big financial slumps, at least not right away. We felt lucky to be able to draw names so every one in the family, kids and grown-ups alike, got at least one gift for Christmas. There was a one-dollar limit on the price of each gift but in 1929, a dollar bought something--a purse, a tie, a pair of gloves, a small doll, a baseball glove ...

        The next year, 1930, we moved again. The new decade got underway with the country in fiscal shock. Two years later, it was bogged down in the Great Depression. Under President Franklin Delano Roosevelt many "lettered" programs spewed out of Washington--PWA, WPA, NRA, TVA, NIRA and the AAA. That last one, the Agricultural Adjustment Act, was aimed at helping the farmer. Recovery was slow to come. At the same time the economic outlook was under clouds of financial gloom and doom, the Great Plains states were under dark and dirty clouds of the Dust Bowl. Topsoil from the Dakotas, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma and Texas filled the skies, drifted across fields and roads burying fences; it sifted through closed windows and under closed doors. Not even the drought-proof, irrigated valley escaped the dusty and gritty onslaught.

        It was a lucky thing for me that we had purchased the new and used household furnishings when we did. In the "dirty thirties" we could barely eke out five dollars from the cream-and-egg money to buy a much-needed used icebox. We had our hands full trying to pay for the one brand new tractor we'd bought in 1930. It was a gray International Harvester Farmall Regular. It looked like an over-sized tricycle with its two small, close-set, iron rimmed wheels on the front end and two, big open-lugged iron wheels on the rear. It cost somewhere around six hundred dollars and it took us more than two years to pay for it. We couldn't afford to buy any of the machinery manufactured especially for use with the Farmall--planters, cultivators, grain binders and plows. Walter adapted horse-drawn machinery to pull behind the new tractor, and since that was long before tractors and machinery were equipped with hydraulic lifts, someone--sometimes that someone was me--had to ride on the planter or the cultivator to manually drop and lift shovels in and out of the ground at the start and the end of the rows.

        Hard times didn't stop recipe collecting. . . We shared family recipes among ourselves. I got them from my mother and mother-in-law, sister and sisters-in-law and neighbors and friends. Some of those old, home-tested recipes written on scraps of note paper, backs of used envelopes or brown wrapping paper are still in my collection.

EDITOR'S NOTE: Prairie Kitchen Sampler is now in its second printing. The 435-page, hard cover book is available from Prairie Winds Press, 5515 North 7th St., Suite 5-163, Phoenix, AZ 85014, for $16.95 postpaid.

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