Semi-Fictional Foods: The ‘Little House’ Series

This series of children’s books about a simple homesteading family in late-1800s America has become a complicated cultural phenomenon. Anney and Lauren dig into Laura Ingalls Wilder’s ‘Little House’ series and TV show, featuring an extended interview with Emily Marinoff and Glynnis MacNicol of the podcast ‘Wilder’.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:08):
Hello, and welcome to Saver, a protection of iHeartRadio. I'm
Annie Red and.

Speaker 2 (00:12):
I'm Loren vogel Baum, and today we have an episode
for you about the semi fictional foods of Little House.

Speaker 1 (00:19):
Yes, yes, yes, yes, And this was such a fun
one for me because I know nothing about it. We
will talk about more because this is an interview episode.

Speaker 2 (00:29):
Yes, yes, we got to do an interview with Okay,
so a couple of our co workers just launched a show,
a podcast called Wilder, which is about Laura Ingles Wilder,
the author of the Little House series, and they go
on this whole journey and so so yeah, so we're
gonna have an interview with with their producer Emily Meronoff

(00:52):
and the host Glennis McNichol in a little bit here,
which was a terrific conversation and really places that I
did not did not expect to go.

Speaker 1 (01:05):
Me either, And I mean, even as someone who didn't
really know much about this at all, I was like, oh, really,
goldn has commented and that she said that she wished
we had like video, there's a way to translate my
facial expressions, as I was like learning.

Speaker 2 (01:22):
Yeah, yeah, and I say this having a lot of
experience with this series because I read and reread the
books a lot. It had to have been dozens of
times when I was a child, Like this is very
much something that I grew up with, and uh, you
know rereading. I reread the first book in preparation for

(01:42):
doing this episode, and like I remembered a lot of
the wording verbatim. Is how often I read those books.
So wow, Yeah, yeah, it's really weird to revisit as
an adult, by the way.

Speaker 1 (01:59):
Yeah, which we talk about a lot in the interview,
but I have friends who love it for sure, and
this to be fully transparent, I kind of just got
to sit back on this one because I didn't know
anything about it. And then the interview, which is fantastic,
was so thorough and I was like, all right, all

(02:21):
right around, and then you came in and contributed a
bunch more.

Speaker 2 (02:25):
I love it. Hey, we have a weird division of
labor around here. It all comes back around in different ways.

Speaker 1 (02:33):
It does, it does. But I am very excited about
this one. And I know a lot of you listeners
have written in about this.

Speaker 3 (02:38):
Yeah yeah, But for.

Speaker 1 (02:41):
Those listeners who are like me, no idea, I guess
that brings us to our question, Little House, what is it?

Speaker 2 (02:53):
Well? The Little House Series is a set of books
and various media adapted from them, written by Laura Ingles
Wilder as autobiographical fiction depicting events from her childhood through
her starting her own family in the American West and
or Midwest, and like the eighteen seventies through the eighteen nineties,

(03:14):
the main series consists of nine children's novels. Wilder wrote
and published the first eight in nineteen thirty two through
nineteen forty three, and the last one was published after
her death, plus then a TV show adapted from them
that ran from nineteen seventy four through nineteen eighty three.
They're like warm, family oriented slice of life stories about

(03:39):
growing up as a homesteader out in the country and
in very small towns, about being poor but creating richness
for yourself and your family through like hard work and
simple pleasures, often those pleasures being food. It's hard times
seen through rose colored glasses. That is a pun because

(04:01):
her daughter, whose name was Rose, had a large impact
on the series. More about that in the interview portion.

Speaker 3 (04:08):
But yeah, it's.

Speaker 2 (04:09):
Like comforting and homey and polished to an absolute gloss
and also very ugly sometimes and really blind to greater context.
So it is just the most dang American thing I
can possibly think of.

Speaker 1 (04:31):
Yeah, yep, I was picking up on that vibe a
little bit.

Speaker 3 (04:34):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (04:37):
So yes, Wilder was born in eighteen sixty seven and
lived through nineteen fifty seven. And like this is a
phrase that we say a lot sardonically around here, but
earnestly in this case, what a time to be alive,
Like just you know, like she grew up going around

(04:57):
the prairie and covered wagons, and she took an airplane
to go to to like tour the world as an
author as before her death. Like wow, like wild no
pun intended the books. I'm pretty sure I use that
put in the interview too. I'm so sorry anyway, So right,
the books do give super detailed descriptions of meals, end

(05:21):
of treats, which is kind of why we're talking about
it here, but also of the sheer labor that went
into getting supplies, most often by hunting and gathering and
farming and then producing what you need by hand, sometimes
less often by like traveling to buy something or ordering
something through like a very distant and still developing supply chain,

(05:44):
and at many points, especially reading this as an adult,
the books are more about hunger than they really are
about food, about crops failing, like literal plagues of grasshoppers,
about getting snowed in. For example, in the book The
Law Winter, they're just absolutely stuck with no hope of
supplies coming, like they have to eat their seed wheat,

(06:07):
like they're not going to have anything to plant the
next year. But they are literally starving alone in this house. Laura, then,
a teenager, is sort of doing the math, and in
the book she says, half a bushel of wheat they
could grind to make flour, and there worthy few potatoes,
but nothing more to eat until the train came. The
wheat and the potatoes would never be enough. Yeah right, houfta. Nonetheless,

(06:32):
like what depictions of food that there is in the
books are glorious, and amidst the series popularity, a couple
of cookbooks have been published. The Little House Cookbook was
first published in nineteen seventy nine, right when the show
was super popular. It was written by Barbara Walker and
illustrated by Garth Williams, who illustrated a version of the

(06:53):
book series as well. A Walker wrote in an interview,
food looms large in this Pioneer Chronicle because there was
rarely enough of it. The real grown up Laura's memory
for daily fair and holiday feasts says more about her
eagerness for meals, her longing for enough to eat, than
it does about her interesting cooking.

Speaker 3 (07:15):
Yeah right.

Speaker 2 (07:19):
Another cookbook called the Laura Ingles Wilder Country Cookbook was
published in nineteen ninety seven. That one was written by
one William Anderson, and it's based on the scrap book
that Wilder compiled and cooked from herself, like using recipes
for magazines and newspapers along with her own memory of
family recipes. Anderson said about it, recipes were pasted over

(07:43):
pages of a cardboard covered invoice book used by her husband, Almonzo,
when he was a fuel oil delivery man in the
early nineteen hundreds. Internal evidence suggests that the bulk of
the cookbook was assembled by Laura during the nineteen thirties
and forties, so when she was in the midst of
writing the series, and it does include a recipe for gingerbread,

(08:06):
which became a kind of iconic as Wilder rose to
celebrity as an author in the forties and fifties and
was asked to share some favorite recipes. That's one that
really often comes up. We'll talk about this a bunch
of the interview, but I wanted to put here in
this intro that like, part of why the family struggled
so much was that after you know, this is all

(08:28):
happening like right after the Civil War, and during that time,
the American government and a number of private interests were
encouraging colonists to go settle the West as part of
like this grand idea of manifest destiny and also the
growth of industry, and also to push Native Americans out.
But like a lot of the land was not good

(08:50):
for settling the way that white people were trying to
settle it. Laura's own biographer later wrote, homesteaders could not
succeed no matter how hard they worked, they were bound
to fail. The land had limits, and no solitary, undercapitalized
farmer could ever hope to overcome them. Also, in twenty eighteen,

(09:12):
amidst a growing conversation about Laura's portrayal of Native Americans
and other non white groups in the books, the American
Library Association's Association for Library Service to Children changed changed
the name of their book award from the Laura Ingalls
Wilder Prize or oh gosh, I forget, I'm sorry it
had her name in the title and now it does not.

(09:33):
Because yeah, there was rightfully so growing conversation about about
like the appropriateness of these books to give to children
without any further comment, right, because yeah, it does depict
very real sentiments that people very really held and sometimes

(09:58):
do still hold. You know, like, just putting that out
there without commenting on it is maybe not maybe not
the best idea, right, Yeah, all of that being said,
it is. It was really remarkable to me reading the
first book and going through some other passages after having

(10:18):
worked on this podcast for a few years, like the
sheer number of historical touch points that come up in
Laura's like everyday narrative. They make maple syrup. They talk
about needing to slaughter a calf in order to make
cheese because at that point you didn't have mass produced rennet,

(10:39):
you didn't have vegetable or you didn't have microbial grown
rennet substitutions. So you wanted to make cheese, you had
to slaughter a calf. They talk about eating squeaky curds.
They talk about gram flour bread. At one point they
make hard candy by painting sugar into the snow and
then taking I'm like sugar panting what like. I never

(11:01):
thought that that would come up. I didn't remember. And yeah,
you know, like the food that's talked about. You know,
she describes her father hunting deer and bears and buffalo
and fish and breaking breaking down the venison. The family
raises pigs. Sometimes they have cows for dairy and chickens

(11:22):
for eggs and for meat. You know, there's corn and
whole wheat and oats and maple sugar and honey if
you can get it away from a bear. You know,
there's all kinds of wild berries and a gardenless squash
and carrots and cabbages, potatoes, beets. They go gathering for
walnuts and hazelnuts in the woods. On special occasions, like

(11:43):
when company comes, they might put store sugar out on
the table for your tea, or gets store bought candy,
like like pretty sticks made of pulled sugar, and wants
a candy heart that was too pretty to ever eat.

Speaker 1 (11:59):
Wow, Yeah, I saw people. I came up in a
lot of examples looking this up.

Speaker 4 (12:05):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (12:05):
Yeah, they make baked goods of all kinds. There's bread
and pies, sweet and savory pies. Vanity cakes come up
in the first book, which are like an egg and
flour dough deep fried and lard until they ballooned out
into a sort of crunchy puff, sort of like an
unsweetened doughnut. One time, she describes making a rhubarb pie

(12:26):
and forgetting to put in the sugar. Yeah, yeah, yes, yes,
I think in the interview I mistakenly said that she
put in salt instead of sugar. I think she just
forgot to put in the sugar. Anyway, It's been more
than twenty years since I've read that book, and I
it is stuck in my brain, like that.

Speaker 5 (12:46):
Is just yeah, it's so weird.

Speaker 1 (12:51):
I do that too. Sometimes I'm like, I don't know
why I was so convinced of this, and it still
trips me up. Yeah, but that's what it is.

Speaker 2 (12:58):
Yeah, And Okay, I wanted to read a couple passages
just you know, for anyone who like Annie, you know,
might not have any experience with the actual verbiage from
the books. And so the first one, the first one
is about it's from the first book from from Little

(13:18):
House in the Big Woods, and they slaughter their yearly pig.
And this is a detail that is stuck in everyone's mind,
and so okay, here we go. Paul was blowing up
the bladder. It made a little white balloon, and he
tied the end tight with a string and gave it
to Mary and Laura to play with. They could throw

(13:40):
it into the air and spat it back and forth
with their hands, or it would bounce along the ground
and they could kick it. But even better fun than
a balloon was the pig's tail. Pa skinned it for
them carefully, and into the large end he thrust a
sharpened stick. Ma opened the front of the cookstove and
raked hot coals out into the iron heart. Then Mary
and Laura took turn holding the pig's tail over the coals.

(14:02):
It sizzled and fried, and drops of fat dripped off
it and blazed on the coals. Mos sprinkled it with salt.
Their hands and their faces got very hot, and Laura
burned her finger, but she was so excited she did
not care. A roasting the pig's tail was such fun
that it was hard to play fair. Taking turns at
last it was done. It was nicely browned all over,
and how good it smelled. They carried it into the

(14:24):
yard to cool it, and even before it was cool enough,
they began tasting it and burned their tongues. They ate
every little bit of meat off the bones, and then
they gave the bones to Jack and that was the
end of the pig's tail. There would not be another
one until next year.

Speaker 3 (14:39):
Wow.

Speaker 1 (14:41):
I mean it does sound good.

Speaker 2 (14:44):
It's heck evocatives. It's yeah, like, it's just really good writing.
Jack is their little bulldog. Yeah, anyway, Yeah, and just
write like like that the description of that bladder balloon

(15:07):
and that most succulent, amazing pigs tail.

Speaker 1 (15:12):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (15:15):
And then in case you guys aren't excited about pigstails
and bladder balloons, I wanted to give you one more example.
This is like maybe the most uh one of the
more like like luscious descriptions of foods that you get
from Laura growing up. And this is during a town
Thanksgiving where a whole like like one of the ladies

(15:38):
societies has has brought in this big feast for the
whole town, and so okay, in the very center of
one table, a pig was standing, roasted brown and holding
in its mouth a beautiful red apple. In all their lives,
Laura and Carrie had never seen so much food. Those
tables were loaded. There were heaped dishes of mashed potatoes,
and of mash turnips, and of mashed yellow squash, all

(16:00):
dribbling melted butter down their sides from little hollows in
their peaks. And there were large bowls of dried corn,
soaked soft again and cooked with cream. There were plates
piled high with golden squares of corn bread, and slices
of white bread, and of brown, nutty tasting gram bread.
There were cucumber pickles and beet pickles, and green tomato pickles,
and glass bowls on tall glass stems were full of

(16:22):
red tomato preserves and wild choke cherry jelly. On each
table was a long, wide, deep pan of chicken pie,
with steam rising through the slits in its flaky crust.
Most marvelous of all was the pig. It stood so lifelike,
propped up by short sticks above a great pan filled
with baked apples. It smelled so good, Better than any

(16:43):
smell of any other food, was that rich, oily brown
smell of roasted pork that Laura had not smelled for
so long.

Speaker 3 (16:53):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (16:53):
Yeah, I love a good feast description.

Speaker 3 (16:57):
Right, oh my hair.

Speaker 2 (17:00):
And right. And it's so weird because like she doesn't
even get to eat that feast at that moment. She
goes into the kitchen immediately and starts washing dishes, and
she's washing dishes for the entire feast because she's being
a good and dutiful daughter and helpful child. And like
she she gets like like the like the scraps from
the bones later and you know, talks about how delicious

(17:24):
it is anyway. But yes, threaded through the books, there's
this real like pull yourself up by your bootstraps self
sufficiency kind of thread that I didn't I certainly as
a child was not thinking about the fact that that's
like kind of really insidious, right, Yeah, And even as

(17:45):
an adult it had not occurred to me.

Speaker 3 (17:50):
How much.

Speaker 2 (17:51):
Yeah, that's kind of propaganda.

Speaker 6 (17:54):
Mm hmm.

Speaker 1 (17:55):
Yeah, we talked about a little bit in the interview. Yeah, yeah,
for sure. Well what about.

Speaker 2 (18:02):
The nutrition donate propaganda? Yes, agreed, I'm on board with that,
no matter how lovely it is.

Speaker 1 (18:16):
We do have some numbers for you.

Speaker 2 (18:18):
A couple a couple sort of and some like random
facts that I didn't fit in anywhere else.

Speaker 1 (18:21):
But yeah, yes, okay, here's my contribution. They're very popular.
They have sold millions of copies and have been translated
into over forty languages.

Speaker 2 (18:33):
Yeah, I didn't realize how big they are in other countries.
That's very weird to me because they are so American.

Speaker 3 (18:42):
But okay.

Speaker 2 (18:43):
There are also spin off book series about Laura's mother
and grandmother and daughter. Her diary and a number of
her letters have also been published as books. In twenty seventeen,
a biography called Prairie Fires, written by Caroline Fraser, won
a Pulitzer or it was published that year. I don't
know how the Pulitzers work off the top of my head,

(19:04):
but in addition to the original TV series, there have
been TV movies and mini series, and a stage musical,
a documentary, an anime in Japan seventies. Also wanted to
throw this in on the side of the TV show.
Apparently what the cast was eating was very often fried

(19:25):
chicken from KFC.

Speaker 1 (19:27):
Wow, it feels like some kind of metaphor symbolism or something.

Speaker 2 (19:39):
There are also like this. It's so the fandom of
this is so big and I had no idea. There
are museums located around all of the places that she
talks about in the books where the family lived, and
a couple others. For example, the Laura Ingalls Wilder Historic

(20:02):
Home and Museum is out on Rocky Ridge Farm, which
was Wilder's adult home. Like her daughter Rose helped set
it up after her mother's death. They have a garden
there with heirloom vegetables representative of a late nineteenth early
twentieth century home. They They also host a Wilder Days
every September, which is like a festival. This year it's

(20:24):
going to include their eighth annual fiddle contest. They also
have someone come play pause fiddle.

Speaker 3 (20:32):
Wow. The whole thing.

Speaker 2 (20:33):
It is a whole thing.

Speaker 1 (20:36):
It really is.

Speaker 5 (20:37):
It really is.

Speaker 1 (20:39):
Now it's the whole thing that as a podcast.

Speaker 3 (20:41):
Oh yeah, oh man.

Speaker 7 (20:44):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (20:44):
And like they're they're I mean they're they're not sponsors,
they're like like Emily's a friend. Yeah, it's they're just
doing a really cool job. And and we've been, or
i'd been This might have not been on your radar
at all, but but I've been wanting to do a
little house episode for a while.

Speaker 1 (21:02):
So yeah, it's just a good fit.

Speaker 2 (21:04):
The timing is right, yeah, yeah, yeah, And we are
going to get into that interview we keep talking about.
But first we are going to take a quick break
forward from our sponsors.

Speaker 1 (21:25):
And we're back. Thank you sponsors. Let us get into
our fabulous interview.

Speaker 2 (21:33):
First of all, Hello, Hi, thank you so much for
being here.

Speaker 5 (21:36):
Thank you for having us. We're so excited.

Speaker 6 (21:38):
Yeah, thank you.

Speaker 2 (21:40):
And we like to start these things off with a
nice easy or hypothetically easy, depending on how you're feeling today.

Speaker 5 (21:46):
Who are you? Wow, that could get very existential very quickly.

Speaker 3 (21:52):
I know, right.

Speaker 5 (21:55):
I'm Glennas McNicol and I am.

Speaker 7 (21:59):
The host and writer of the Wilder Podcast and also
a writer and journalist outside of the Wilder Podcast.

Speaker 4 (22:09):
And I am Emily Maronov, not usually on Mike, usually
behind Mike, producing the podcast.

Speaker 6 (22:15):
I'm producer and.

Speaker 4 (22:16):
Co creator of Wilder and yeah and all around, yeah,
all around producer currently for iHeart Podcasts.

Speaker 2 (22:25):
Hello, thank you. It's very succinct, not too existential. So okay, So,
so Wilder is a podcast about Laura Ingles Wilder and
the Little House phenomenon. Did did you both grow up
reading the books or watching the show.

Speaker 3 (22:42):
A little bit of both.

Speaker 7 (22:44):
Emily and I are very different ages, I think, maybe
a good way to begin this conversation. You're twenty years
younger than me, Yeah, twenty seven. Yeah, I'm forty eight,
I think. Yeah, so we have very different experiences with
Little House. But I actually think that that has, you know,

(23:06):
propelled the podcast and a lot of takes on it
and a lot of interest in it. When I grew
up fully gen X, Little House the TV show was
still on in primetime new episodes and was also on
in reruns in the afternoon on different channels, so that
I could come home from school and watch one episode

(23:28):
and Laura would be, you know, like a teenager in
love with Almonzo, and then at five o'clock she'd be
eight years old and a child, and then you could
switch to the primetime one and she'd be a grown.

Speaker 5 (23:39):
Up with a kid. It was just like it was
just she was everywhere.

Speaker 7 (23:43):
And I was a very and continue to be so
voracious reader as a kid, So I also had all
of the books. But it's very hard for me to
separate what I came to first, because they were both
so present, omnipresent.

Speaker 5 (23:59):
Yeah, yeah, is very true of a lot of people
my age.

Speaker 7 (24:03):
That's like a very Not everybody was as devoted to
the books, but Little House was very present, whether you
liked it or not. I think most people have some
impression of it because there was fewer channels, fewer TV
sets in the home, and like it just was everywhere.

Speaker 3 (24:22):
Uh wow. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (24:25):
I'm forty one, so I when I was growing up,
the show was already in reruns entirely, so I grew
up with the books. I was rereading the first one
a little bit just before we came in here, and
it's wild to me, no pun intended, how much of
it I just remember because I had to have read
them dozens of times.

Speaker 7 (24:42):
Were you surprised at how much of the first book
is like animals being slaughtered and eaten?

Speaker 4 (24:49):
Yeah?

Speaker 5 (24:49):
A little bit, Yeah, a little bit.

Speaker 2 (24:51):
I did love the food parts the best. I've always
been a little bit obsessed with food, so I was like, oh, cool, yeah,
tell me about that. I know about the pigs bladder.
Is the tail really the tastiest part?

Speaker 3 (25:03):
I don't know.

Speaker 7 (25:03):
I make fun of on this podcast for bringing up
the pigs blatter so much, but I think as a
kid it really resonates with You're like a pigs blatter
sounds awfully fun to play with, and that pigs tail
sounds delicious.

Speaker 2 (25:15):
Right. Okay, So so Annie meanwhile, has not consumed any
of this meeting.

Speaker 3 (25:21):
Right.

Speaker 7 (25:21):
I'm really appreciating the look on your face as we
say that, because it seems very normal to me. But yeah,
I feel like pigs blatter could be code for did
you read Little House or did you not read Little House?

Speaker 1 (25:34):
I did. I did research before coming in here, but
it was It's interesting to me because I'm normally in
a lot of these situations. I'm a very fanish person,
like I'm the fan one that was like I can
tell you what episode this happened in, this happened in.
I'm not usually on the side, so it's very interesting.

(25:54):
I have friends who are very big fans. But my
only interaction with it research was I just had a
vague image of like a wagon in the prairie and
that's like it.

Speaker 7 (26:08):
Yeah, but I mean that's an over That's where the
books and the TV show overlap, is that's the opening scene,
that's like the credits opening of the every show. And
also that's sort of the emblematic of all the books,
like that iconic covered wagon I think comes from the
Little House. Like our idea of the covered wagon, the
prairie is very much rooted in Little House.

Speaker 2 (26:31):
Yeah, Little House and also Oregon Trail. I guess for
me growing up as a kid. But Emily, you you
grew up watching the show, right, I did that.

Speaker 6 (26:40):
Yeah. I came to that first.

Speaker 4 (26:41):
I was a big like Hallmark TV land Nick at
Night kid, so I was already watching a lot of
seventies TV. And then I don't know who introduced it
to who, but my friend and I became obsessed with
the TV show, the Little House TV show and just
got all of the DVD box sets and I actually
remember it being really dramatic of like convincing my dad

(27:04):
to get me the first box set and it was
like fourteen dollars.

Speaker 6 (27:07):
It was expensive at like best Buy or something.

Speaker 4 (27:10):
And I like don't know if I threw a lot
of fits as a kid, but I think I did
throw a fit about that, and I was like, just
like I want it, yeah, And I just watched that constantly,
and my friend and I would like play in our
backyard pretend to be pioneers, would want a forage for
food and all this stuff, and then I think I
did read the books after that, but kind of opposite

(27:30):
to you, Lauren, I like that was so different from
the TV show that I was also maybe a little
bit too old at that point, and like I wasn't
really ready for it yet, but I did and I
brought it somehow got my hands on the Little House
Cookbook as a as a kid while I was a
fan of the TV show, And that's one of my
main memories of being a Little House fan growing up,

(27:52):
is like then reading these recipes and being like, Mom,
what's lard?

Speaker 6 (27:56):
Can we get lard? And can we like and can
we make some?

Speaker 4 (28:01):
But now for this podcast, I've obviously reread all of
the books, and I mean, yeah, the food is still
my favorite part.

Speaker 7 (28:08):
Unsurprisingly, I feel like I have to do a full
disclosure right now and tell you guys, the food is
the part of the books I cared about least. And
a running joke of this podcast is we interview so
many people who who took like this love of making

(28:29):
things and there's sort of survivalist skills and it came
out during the pandemic and I was like, I live
in a studio in New York, and I've never turned
my oven on, So.

Speaker 5 (28:37):
Whatever was that appealed at the Little House books?

Speaker 7 (28:41):
To me, I liked reading about the food, but it
never translated into I want to make the food for
whatever reason. I was much more like I want to
run around the prairie on a horse and see some wolves. So,
but it's fascinating to me how going back to read it,

(29:01):
how she's sort of like an original food blogger almost
like she's so good at writing food.

Speaker 5 (29:09):
It's kind of amazing.

Speaker 2 (29:10):
No, Yeah, and the detail that she puts into it,
and how clear and present from because she was writing
these when she was in her what late fifties, early sixties.

Speaker 5 (29:19):
Mid sixties, since she was sixty five.

Speaker 2 (29:21):
The first when the first book came out, and yeah,
and so she was recalling these details from childhood. That's
I think to when we're talking about her writing of food.
The first book came out in nineteen thirty two, at
the at the beginning of the depression. It wasn't quite
the height of the depression, but the depression was in

(29:42):
full swing, and she was writing about her childhood in
the eighteen seventies, which I don't know that we learn
about it in these terms anymore. But that was sort
of the first great depression. There was a huge depression
in the eighteen seventies. So she's writing about a childhood
of real deprivation and poverty at a time when the
country is also experiencing it in the depression.

Speaker 5 (30:05):
And I think.

Speaker 7 (30:07):
The degree of the vividness that she puts into the
descriptions of food almost feel like she's feeding her childhood
self at a time when so many people are starving,
and that this is offering sort of some strange I
don't know if food porn is quite the right description,
but this like she's providing people with a sustenance that

(30:31):
they don't have access to in real life, while also
providing her childhood self with this bounty that was not
available to her as a kid. So there's a like
the bracketing of those two things. Once you understand the
time line of when the books are written is really intense, I.

Speaker 3 (30:48):
Think, yeah.

Speaker 2 (30:50):
And I mean the food that she's writing about is
often very much not fancy. I mean, it's not some
of the other properties that we've talked about an episode
and in fictional foods, episodes are like Game of Thrones
or you know something like that where you have these
lavish feasts and there's like pages and pages devoted to
talking about all of the fanciest ices and whatever it is,

(31:12):
and pineapples everywhere, and this is like for Christmas, we
each got one stick of candy. Holy crap, it was
the best thing that ever happened to us.

Speaker 4 (31:21):
And you believe it like that was that was truly
the highlight of their year. And she never forgot it,
and she wanted to give that to her readers too,
which is yeah.

Speaker 7 (31:30):
Yeah, But you know, she talks in one of the
books about getting oranges, right, they each had an orange,
or she went to that party and she had a
slice of orange, and the way she describes that, she
could have been describing sort of a Game of Thrones feast.
And I remember my grandmother, who grew up during the Depression,
saying when I was a child, getting an orange was

(31:50):
such a big deal because of course they are not native.
I grew up in Canada and you didn't have you know,
fruit was not transported the same way. So it rings
true in that sense of if you've never had an orange,
you had no access to sugar whatsoever. And you got
that one stick of sugar that mister Edwards swam across
the Vertigrius River and you know, Indian territory, or you

(32:13):
had one orange that would probably stand out in your
memory the same way that my going to like a
ten course feast might or I'm not even sure that
would stand out in my memory to degree like sugar
would have for her.

Speaker 2 (32:28):
Yeah, it's it's very strange. Like we talk, we wind
up talking on the show a lot about sugar because
it impacted so many so much of colonization and just
everything else that was going on in the world from
the time that the American colonies were started up through

(32:50):
I mean easily the beginning of the nineteen hundreds, I
mean easily the time that that Laura was alive. And
we talk a lot about this time period, like the
eighteen seventies the eighteen nineties, being a time when sugar
was becoming very much more ubiquitous, like like or very
much more like something that like any old anybody could afford.

Speaker 5 (33:11):
But it's so not true for them.

Speaker 7 (33:13):
It's even as you say that, I can think of
the moments in the book where she gets sugar in
Little House in the Big Woods, when they go to
the store and they each get the little sugar candies,
but she's jealous of the one Mary gets. And at
Christmas where they get something wrapped up in a little ball,
or the little house in the Prairie, the book where
they get you know, the Christmas candy or paw eats

(33:35):
the Christmas candies survive snow bank, like.

Speaker 2 (33:38):
He's starving in a snow bank and she doesn't mind
that he ate it because he would have starved, right,
but he still apologizes like it's like the worst thing
that could have possibly, like.

Speaker 7 (33:46):
The oyster crackers too, they had oyster crackers, And she's
so good at imparting the significance of everything that they have,
and like the attitude for even the smallest things that
as a kid, you're just like this sounds like the

(34:07):
I don't know what an oyster cracker is, but I
bet it's delicious. Or in the long winter when the
turkey barrel comes in and you're like, oh my.

Speaker 5 (34:14):
God, they got a whole turkey.

Speaker 7 (34:16):
And meanwhile, as a kid, you're probably reading this with
like a plate of chips, ahoy cookie, glass of milk,
your peanut butter and jam sandwich. You like, you know,
crap dinner and like four other meals you had that day.

Speaker 3 (34:30):
Yeah, it's oh my goodness.

Speaker 2 (34:32):
Well okay, so you guys, is part of your research
and experience for this podcast. You went to a bunch
of the locations that she was writing about in the books.
And I mean, you know, obviously the world has changed
a great deal in the past one hundred plus years
that that part of the country has changed a lot,
or has it, Like, like, how much of a sense
of place did you get from from going to there.

Speaker 7 (34:56):
Well, all of the houses that she writes about in
the book, they're not standing, but they have been either
reconstructed or turned into museum sites. So you actually can
drive around to each of the little houses and many
of them have artifacts, actual artifacts from the books, and
they hold pageants in the summer, which is what we toured,

(35:17):
and a lot of people do this. I've been to
them more than once. This is Emily's first impressions there.
But like a lot of these places in the country,
it doesn't feel like they've changed hardly at all. They
are all three to four hours away from an airport
by car. The population if you look up what the

(35:38):
population when Laura lived there. It's you know, similar to
what the population is today. They're very, very small. The
landscape is not identical to what she describes. You know,
environmental factors have a lot to do with that, but
there's a similar sort of remoteness to it. And so
when you're in sort of desmet South dakotahich is where

(36:00):
the last four books take place, you can walk down
that main street and really feel like you are walking
in a chapter of her book, which increases sort of
the intensity and the veracity of some of the experiences
is like it doesn't feel that far removed, which is strange.

Speaker 5 (36:18):
But a lot of the middle of the country. You know,
this is a huge country.

Speaker 7 (36:22):
America is enormous, and I sometimes that sounds funny to say,
but I'm not.

Speaker 5 (36:26):
Sure people fully grasp how big America is.

Speaker 7 (36:29):
And so you try and drive across it and you're
just like, yeah, oh my god, we've been living on
gas station food seven hours.

Speaker 2 (36:37):
Oh yeah, yeah, well right, and and yeah that the
sheer luxury of when you live in a city like
New York. You guys are in New York, where in Atlanta,
of having a grocery store once every three miles, you know,
at the most, at.

Speaker 7 (36:50):
The most stores downstairs within one block of my apartment.

Speaker 5 (36:57):
Really, I mean I'm literally.

Speaker 7 (36:59):
Upstairs from Trader Joe's, Faraway, Cinderella, and a Key Foods
that's always in a one block radius of my apartment,
So it's very But I also think it's access to
I think a lot of times, when you're in the
middle of the country, your best source of fruits and
vegetables is Walmart. And a lot of the conversations we
have in urban centers around you know, the proliferation of

(37:20):
Walmart's and whether or not that it's problematic and unionization
sometimes loses sight of that being a source of the
reality sure food that you wouldn't otherwise have access to,
Like that might be the only place you're getting avocados,
and that might be the only place you're getting fresh fruit,
and both of those things are true at the same time.

Speaker 5 (37:39):
Sorry, but Emily, what was your first impression with No I.

Speaker 4 (37:42):
Mean, yeah, all of that, I mean, and we talk
about that so much. I think the biggest thing was, Yeah,
the thing that you mentioned that, Yeah, the towns are
almost always the same close to the same population as
when Laura lived there.

Speaker 6 (37:55):
Some of them even less.

Speaker 4 (37:57):
Burroke, Iowa, which is not in the books but is
a huge chapter of Laura's life that she left out
of the books, isn't even a city anymore. It's it's
like an in what was the word that.

Speaker 7 (38:07):
They used to think it's I think it's just incorporated.
And what's fascinating some of these places that, like Burr Oak,
they it was more thriving in Laura's time than now.
They thought the railway depots were coming that way, they
thought trade was coming through there, and then it just
got rerouted a slight distance away and the town has
sort of disappeared. Or when the Interstate, I mean, we

(38:30):
know that on Root sixty six in the South, like
when the Interstate went through and took traffic off of
Root sixty six, which had initially been linking all the
main streets through America together, all of those small towns died.
So it can be intense to be in places that
were far more thriving and diverse in some cases then

(38:51):
than they are now.

Speaker 4 (38:52):
Yeah, yeah, I And I think the main difference from
when she lived there is that now the people who
live there know how powerful the draw Laura Ingles Wilder
is like when she was alive, obviously this was just like,
oh Laura went and later in her life, now she's
writing about all of us.

Speaker 6 (39:07):
Now people know what our town is.

Speaker 4 (39:09):
But it is like the americanness of being able to
capitalize on this icon. And that's really the only reason
all these tourists, Like these towns might still exist because
of farmland or because of other industries, but Laura really
is the main industry of all of these towns, and
everyone kind of knows.

Speaker 6 (39:28):
Each other because of it.

Speaker 4 (39:29):
It really was when we were prepping to go on
the road trip and finding contacts in all of these
small towns, sometimes they were very hard to find, and
I'm like Producer freaking out of like we're not ready,
We're not ready, like we don't know who we're going
to talk to, and Glennas is like, it's fine, we
meet one person, we'll meet the entire town. They'll just
walk us and sure enough, and sure enough we met
Anne Leash, who we love, who runs the Ingles Homestead.

(39:51):
Into Smet, South Dakota connected us to pretty much every
single person we needed to know and more. Into Smet
like walked us into a retirement home, sat us down
with a woman who like constructed all of the oral
histories about the Ingles family with people who actually knew them,
and that it was those moments were really magical, and

(40:12):
that is I am from LA and I now live
in New York. I am definition of just a coastal person.
And this one was actually my first time driving through
the Midwest and I really really loved it, and just
having those experiences were yeah, really wonderful.

Speaker 2 (40:31):
Uh you you mentioned you mentioned gas station food. I
hope that you got some other things than gas station
food at some points in your journey. Did you get
any like regional specialties, Like was anyone like, oh man,
you have to go to this diner and get the
pie like it. Were there any moments like that on
the road or was it more like, oh, heck, let
me eat a cheese sandwich and keep going, Like what

(40:52):
was the most boasts?

Speaker 5 (40:53):
I think it was.

Speaker 7 (40:55):
I've done enough road trips to know to go to
Walmart and pick up the baby care bags and the
you know, apples and whatever it is that you might
want because you might not see fruit or vegetables again
for a while, or like you get super excited if
you spot a cracker barrel.

Speaker 3 (41:10):
Oh yeah.

Speaker 7 (41:11):
But also, I mean there are food deserts in the
Midwest without question, but there's also you know, when we
were in here on South Dakota, there's this place called
the Primetime Tavern, which serves you like I've been dreaming.
It's like you get a slide of prime rib with
a baked potato with sour cream and a wedge of

(41:32):
iceberg lettuce and it's so with ranch dressing and it's
like the only thing they serve and it's so good.
And some of the little coffee shops would have homemade pie.
And you know, with con when we were in Wisconsin,
we ate really well, like it's a hit and miss
sort of thing. And I think it's just this sounds

(41:55):
it's hard to talk about traveling around the middle of
the country. That's sort of sometimes veering into sort of
Norman Rockwell territory. But a lot of it is like
generosity when you meet people. And when we were driving
was it from bur Oak to Mankato when we was
made through Minnesota and we stopped and they're like, oh,
I've just I went in to get a coffee and
they're like, oh, we've just pulled out this tray of
fresh baked chocolate chip cookies, or like the people had

(42:17):
brought their eggs in from the farm. And then at
the same time, you go three hours and you're like,
I cannot eat another bag of cheese. It's or I
literally am going to die. But that's the best thing
they have at this gas station. So like it's a
real hit. And miss I will also say that there's
weird quiss, not weird weird it's the wrong word. But
there's cuisine that you would not expect to find in

(42:39):
certain places, like there's we had really great sushi and
shared in Wyoming, you know, and it's and it's funny
to go into places like that sometimes because it'll be
it's a sushi restaurant set up, and like everyone walks
in in a cowboy hat and cowboy boots and they're
also thrilled to have access to sushi, so you know,
those sorts of pockets. I had been in a lot

(43:02):
of these places before them. I made Emily. We were
doing an interview and I go, we have ten minutes
if we want sushi, because it's an hour and a
half to get to the sushi and it's closing at
six and I want some sushi.

Speaker 5 (43:14):
I was like, speed up, the speed it up.

Speaker 4 (43:16):
That that was the same energy for the primetime Tavern,
which glenns was speaking about for months before.

Speaker 6 (43:21):
We actually went on the road. So like all of.

Speaker 4 (43:23):
It was leading up to that, to the primetime tavern.
And here on South Dakota and there were two we
were there into smet for two nights.

Speaker 6 (43:31):
There were pageants both nights.

Speaker 4 (43:32):
We got everything we needed the first night, so that
the second night we went and we went we said
goodbye to the pageant directors and we're like, we're so
sorry we have to leave the Primetime Tavern closes, and
they said, oh, no, you have to go go.

Speaker 5 (43:47):
Out there too.

Speaker 7 (43:48):
I think we think driving, you know, you drive twenty
minutes to dinner or whatever, even just in the suburbs,
and when you're in that part of the country, it's
not unusual to drive an hour to dinner, like that's
just a normal thing. But yeah, where was there was
I'm trying to think of. We had some really good
molkshakes too. I mean, of course we had really good
breakfast in Pepin, Wisconsin. But Pepin, Wisconsin is right in

(44:09):
little house in the big Woods. When they're on Lake Pepin.
Lake Pepin is actually I don't know if the right
term is it's actually part of the Mississippi tributary. It's
like an estuary maybe, like it's actually just the Mississippi
that's widened, so it's not actually a lake. And a
lot of people from Minneapolis Saint Paul have their cottages
there now, so when you go there. We went to
a great winery there, but you don't feel like you're

(44:32):
in the middle of the country in Wisconsin, whereas when
you're in Wannack Grover when you go west of just
smet like when you hit Waldrug. But Waldrug has great
pancakes for breakfast.

Speaker 4 (44:41):
So Waldrug was well. I feel like Waldrug is worth mentioning.

Speaker 5 (44:44):
That was a highlight.

Speaker 4 (44:45):
I also think that was the start of like Bisenberger territory.
I think that's what I ate in the wal Drug.

Speaker 7 (44:50):
I don't know if you guys are like when you
my perception of the West is if you're doing that
northern route, you are in eastern South Dakota and it
still feels like the Midwest and farming, and then you
cross the Missouri River and you hit Buffalo grassland into
and that's when you start feeling like you're in the west,
like there's a really clear divide that once you cross,

(45:12):
you feel like you've switched to the West.

Speaker 2 (45:15):
And yeah, it's like flat and no trees and right,
and it's just that.

Speaker 7 (45:19):
There's a wildness to it that's so beautiful and the
farming sort of disappears. And then you hit Waldrug, which
is right by the bad Lands, the bad Lands National Park.

Speaker 5 (45:30):
Have you guys been to Waldrug? No, it's this very Americana.

Speaker 7 (45:35):
They have literally hand painted posters for hundreds of miles
that are like glasses of water five cents and if
you're if you're part of the military, you drink coffee
for free. And they are so persistent that by the
time you get to Waldrug, there's no chance you're not
stopping because.

Speaker 5 (45:51):
You're like, what is this place? Waldrug?

Speaker 7 (45:54):
And it started because people driving across when vehicles first
came around, even before that, they would just literally the
pharmacists that lived there started offering free water to people
on the road, and then they started pulling off and
they started selling them something. And that's where wal Drug
comes from. And they have it's like this crazy Americana,
like Warren of stores. And also they have wonderful breakfasts.

(46:18):
It's it's what do we have for breakfast?

Speaker 4 (46:20):
I don't think we we didn't actually have breakfast there.
We had we had a lunch there. Oh yeah, because
I had I had a burger because we were in
the middle. We went to a rapid city that night, and.

Speaker 7 (46:27):
We went to rapid city is very glamorous too, some
of those very western places that hot all the railroad
money in the turn of the century.

Speaker 5 (46:34):
We went to this very sheet hotel with this like roofed.

Speaker 7 (46:37):
We'd just gotten off eight hours on the road of
gas station food and Beisenberger's.

Speaker 5 (46:40):
And I was like, can I please have a martini?

Speaker 2 (46:46):
It is funny have something in like a really awkwardly
shaped glass, just like scream civilization. You're like, oh man,
I finally feel like a human again.

Speaker 1 (46:53):
Thank you like it.

Speaker 5 (46:55):
It's so funny too.

Speaker 7 (46:56):
And then bartender is like absolutely, and I'm like, okay, okay,
thank you.

Speaker 1 (47:07):
We do have some more of our interview, but first
we have one more group break for word from our sponsor.

Speaker 2 (47:22):
And we're back. Thank you sponsors, and back to the interview.
I wonder I don't expect either of you to know
the answer to this question, but I'm just sort of
musing aloud, like I like, I wonder how many food
ways that you know are from that colonial period have
stuck around, Like how many? How many foods and dishes?

(47:42):
And I mean they probably weren't making burgers out of
bison back then, but right like, like how many how
many of those plants and animals are still staples?

Speaker 7 (47:51):
I I don't know, And part of me thinks some
I mean not this maybe is obvious, but like so
much of that is like just what did you have
access to? And now we have access to so much
more that when I noticed that it's the baked goods,
right like, it's it's the pies and the pastries and

(48:13):
the cookies more than the prime rib.

Speaker 5 (48:16):
Like you're really in meat. You're in like steak and meatland.

Speaker 7 (48:20):
But it's much different, I think, in that part of
the country than when you do the southern route and
you start getting down south into more southern cooking, where
I think the history of culinary is much more obvious
than when you're in the Midwest, because how would you
I mean, I guess it's just once you get out
into Wyoming and Montana, there's a lot more beef.

Speaker 3 (48:43):
H oh.

Speaker 4 (48:44):
Yeah, it might be obvious, but dairy definitely was not.
Well again, I live in Brooklyn, which is the land
of oat milk. Now, the default, the default latte is
oat milk, and you could not get that at a
lot of the places I went unless you were in
like more of a little college town and similar to

(49:05):
what I think. It was the same place where we
stopped in and they brought us the tray of homemade cookies.
I got a coffee and asked for milk. I had
learned then not to ask for alternative milk. I was like,
I know, I know, I'm getting regular milk. But it
wasn't just whole milk. It was like in a jar
like this, and I'm holding up like a glass canister
that looks like it could be in Laura's house. And

(49:26):
it was like the thickest, like foamy thing of cream,
as if it had just come out of the cow.
And I was like, I am in the middle of Minnesota,
like there is not another town for a long while,
and I like, I did I am, Hey, I'm Jewish,
I'm lactose intolerant. I brought I did prepare for I
brought a lot of lactate on the trip and got

(49:47):
made fun of for it.

Speaker 5 (49:48):
So I don't remember me.

Speaker 7 (49:49):
Maybe that was Joe, but I do think you know,
you find you know that you're in a college town,
or you know you're in a place where someone has
either gone to college in a big city, come home
and opened something up, or has like returned moved there.
Where you walk into a coffee shop and they're like, oh,
look they have almond milk, or oh look they have

(50:10):
like two different types of milk. There's signifiers like that
where you're like someone has gone and come back, or
someone has left, like been priced out of a city
and brought some of these things we associate with more
options here. And I think I noticed that more than
any sort of in that part of the country, than

(50:30):
any sort of cooking that feels native to the history
of that part of the country. Is this more like
a migration of while there's a little hashtag brand Brooklyn,
like that sense of whether that applies like Nashville and
Atlanta and Portland, all these places you find these little
like pockets and you're like, oh, I can sense it's

(50:51):
almost like a new type of emigration or immigration where
you're sensing like a movement has happened that has dropped
this into this cop fee shop, some milk options for
my coffee, or you can get an ice coffee, or
they have simple syrup. Like it's these very small things
that sort of stand out to you when you're on

(51:12):
the road in those parts of the country. And that's
very interesting to me because I think, as we all know,
housing prices are pushing people out of urban centers and
COVID at the same time too. I mean, this road
trip was done last summer, so this is the first
time a lot of people have been back out on
the road since COVID, So that to me is interesting
of what signifies city living, moving returning, or moving or arriving.

Speaker 2 (51:38):
Yeah, yeah, because I mean, you know, the Laura's stories
are all about migration anyway, you know, like like starting
in a home place where what like like Ma's family
was near little house in the big woods, and then
just being like, well, there's too many people here now,
so we need to move, we need to go find
better resources.

Speaker 7 (51:59):
Well, well, you know one of the things we talk
about is did they have to do that or.

Speaker 5 (52:04):
Was palm man? Because I think a grown up reading
of this.

Speaker 7 (52:07):
Book after quite a lot of therapy leads you to
a lot of people, not just us, but so many
people were like, Yeah. When I reread this as an adult,
I was like, what is wrong with paw? And I
think that's a real question because but her book is
a lot about migration. And someone pointed out to us
that even though sort of the sense of the book
is that sort of movement west and manifest destiny, in

(52:30):
fact the Ingles family travel north and south, there's very
little Western movement. It's up and down. And of course
when they went down the first time, it was to
what is now Kansas, what is then the Osage Diminished Reserve,
and they were illegally squatting there. So there's a lot
of complicated. All movement in America is complicated, I think,
and fraught when.

Speaker 5 (52:50):
You really start to peel back the layers.

Speaker 7 (52:52):
But in this book, especially from the beginning, it was
who gets to go where?

Speaker 5 (52:58):
And why?

Speaker 7 (53:00):
What's not being said in this you know, as someone
pointed out, just when you said that land is too
crowded and there's not resource as well, there is some
truth to that. You know, all of the Homestead Act
and everyone who was invited into this land that had
been cleared by the government of Native Americans in brutal
and violent fashion. And then all of these homesteaders were

(53:23):
moved in as a way sort of an occupying force,
right in some ways by the end the railroad, and
they stripped the land bear. And so the extinction of
bison on the plains in such a short period of
time is evidence of a removal of a main food
source of a people who were native to the land,

(53:44):
and subsequently their removal which opened the land up to
occupation and everything that followed. And of course you don't
get any sense of that in the book. You get
a very you get an echo of it. Someone pointed
out to us in one of the books, Laura talks
about the buffalo the flowers growing in the buffalo wallow,
but of course there's no buffalo there, and there's no

(54:05):
mention of why there's no buffalo there. So there's that
is that sense of sort of elegy in the books
of a lost World, but without any not without grounding
it in what was lost and why.

Speaker 3 (54:17):
Absolutely yeah, and you know.

Speaker 5 (54:21):
We've been talking about this NonStop for a year.

Speaker 2 (54:24):
Just no, no, no, no, it's great it's great.

Speaker 6 (54:28):
Keep going.

Speaker 5 (54:31):
Deep end of this for quite some time.

Speaker 6 (54:34):
Yeah, No, I think.

Speaker 4 (54:35):
The only thing I would add to that food wise,
also is like she Yeah, we talk a lot. We
have an episode coming up that will talk a lot
about the environmental history of the region and how because
of the homesteaders it's all gone. They dug up the
buffalo grass and that caused, you know, eventually caused the
dust bowl that Laura was living through while she was

(54:56):
writing these books. So she was definitely memorializing what the
land looked like before humans had completely manipulated it.

Speaker 6 (55:03):
But also back to food.

Speaker 4 (55:05):
And food and just any household chore, just like their
way of life like before when Laura, Laura and Almonzo
and their daughter Rose had moved to Mansfield, Missouri after
South Dakota, and that's where they settled for the rest
of their life, and that's where she.

Speaker 6 (55:21):
Wrote all of the books.

Speaker 4 (55:22):
And her daughter, Rose was was a very famous at
her time, uh freelance journalist, which is a whole other
thing that we also have many episodes on. But she
was the one who convinced Laura to start writing, and
originally as a journalist, and she was writing for the
Missouri ruralist basically articles of just like practical tips for

(55:43):
housewives and.

Speaker 6 (55:44):
Or for farmwives.

Speaker 4 (55:45):
Sorry, and her and yeah, and it was like product
are what are these titles?

Speaker 6 (55:50):
We say? Production of eggs?

Speaker 7 (55:52):
And Laura was an egg farmer and she wrote about
egg farming. It was so funny because we met someone
in Mansfield who was, like, I was so disappointed to
find out she.

Speaker 5 (56:01):
Farmed white eggs and not brown eggs.

Speaker 7 (56:04):
And lie, clearly the significance of this was lost on me,
but this was a real The people we were talking
to who I think maybe were they, And many women
we talked to referred to themselves as farm wives, like
that was that's a term that was relayed to us
by them.

Speaker 5 (56:22):
Her sense of disappointment at the type of.

Speaker 7 (56:25):
Eggs that Laura raised was palpable, and that to me
was so interesting, like that Laura's early journalism was very
servicey and very food oriented, and like the degree of
responsibility and conservation. You even see that in that first
book where I really think Little House in Big Woods

(56:46):
could be a survivalist guide if you really got stuck.
And they described the churning of the butter and but
then Ma Molding the butter in her pretty mold and
then taking the care like squeezing the carrot juice out
to color the butter so it would.

Speaker 2 (56:59):
Be yeah, or because butter in the winter is white
because they're eating hay, not fresh grass, and so it's
not as pretty. And everything that mob puts on her
table is pretty, so.

Speaker 4 (57:09):
Yeah, so pretty and cozy and it is. I really
do think that that's the best evidence of her service
journalism roots is like she was preserving they're just their
way of life and the way because there had already been,
just from the eighteen seventies to the nineteen thirties, so
much modernization that I do think she was trying to
preserve what all of the customs were. And actually this

(57:32):
Little House cookbook, the author is a Barbara M. Walker,
and I'm fairly sure she's like she is a food historian.

Speaker 6 (57:38):
She has every recipe that are.

Speaker 4 (57:40):
In the books is in here, and it is historically
accurate to the way it would be made, and.

Speaker 6 (57:46):
Has some suggestions if you want to do it yourself.

Speaker 2 (57:48):
Yeah, like if you cannot find three pounds of lard,
then maybe get some canola oil, Like you should be fine,
but right, if.

Speaker 4 (57:53):
You're not if you're not near a pumpkin patch where
you can get an unripe pumpkin to make a green
pumpkin pot and.

Speaker 7 (58:03):
Shoot the blackbirds because that are eating the crops and
then turn them into a black a delicious blackbird pie.

Speaker 5 (58:09):
And when you really think about that, you're like, huh.

Speaker 7 (58:12):
But in the books you're like, oh, this sounds like
the best pie anyone's ever eaten in their life. And
they had grave er like her ability to make gravy
or the way like the coffee grounds, and that just
because there was so little didn't mean that it shouldn't
look beautiful. Like there's a deep, deep respect for quality

(58:32):
of life. Even if the quality is so minimal, it
does not release you from it's self respect. I think
at the core of that, right, is the life you
are leading should be as pleasant as you're capable of
making it.

Speaker 3 (58:50):
Yeah. Yeah, and it was.

Speaker 2 (58:53):
It was so striking to me kind of like like
doing reading for this because you know, like I said,
like the food was my favorite of these books growing up,
but as an adult reading this, like there's stories about hunger,
there's stories about uh, just basic substance, and it's there,
and I guess like kind of those parts were my
favorite parts too when I was a kid, Like like

(59:15):
The Long Winter was my favorite book because tiny goth
Lauren was like, oh yeah, yeah, yeah, really, time to
buckle down, like you know, in my flannel nightgown with
the heat on in my house and like a laborator
retriever in my lap.

Speaker 7 (59:26):
But do you remember when pau goes to almonzo and
royals and they're making flapjacks with all the butter and
the syrup and it it seemed like the most delicious
meal anyone has ever had. But then I and when
I went back to read that as a grown up,
I was like, paw, your whole family is starving, Like
can't you pack up to go bag of these flapjacks

(59:46):
and walking back on the block like what yeah, like like.

Speaker 2 (59:50):
I hop delivers, Like let's go, like we.

Speaker 6 (59:53):
Can make this up.

Speaker 7 (59:54):
It never occurred to me as a kid, but I
was like as a grown up, I'm like, wait a second,
all these women are down there grinding coffee and like
or grinding wheat and a coffee grinder, and you're eating
flap dups.

Speaker 5 (01:00:04):
Couldn't you just like bring a few with you anyway?

Speaker 2 (01:00:09):
But yeah, yeah, like I like, I just it makes
me wonder how much Laura, you know, really loved cooking,
or how much it was sheerly just right. It was
just a way of life. It was what you literally
had to do because you don't have a Walmart or
a steakhouse to go to. And so if you want
a nice thing like a pie, you figure out how

(01:00:30):
to make a heck and pie. You and you do it,
and you do it as nicely as possible. One of
the one things sticks with me, Oh go ahead.

Speaker 7 (01:00:37):
No, I was just when you said, like rereading them
and realizing how much they were starving, I think coming
I think it is a measure of her skill as
a writer that she made everything feel so safe and delicious,
and that when you come back to it with grown
up eyes, you're like, wait a second, they're really starving,
like for real starvation and terror and hunger to a

(01:01:01):
degree that must have been so that that so many
people experience, but also that you only get a sense
of as a kid, because the way she writes about it,
she's not lying, but it's it's wrapped up in so
many other things that you're like, I remember telling my
grandmother I wanted to live on the prairie in these times,
and she was like, no, you don't, let me tell

(01:01:25):
you something, kid like if she was so like so
scoffed at me that I remember being quite upset, And
in hindsight, I'm like, can you imagine growing up in
the depression and having your grandchild be like, I want
to live in the olden days And you're like you're
an idiot.

Speaker 2 (01:01:37):
Like no, that's cute, honey, because you're like pouring out
your candy and being like, I want to live in
the olden days. Yeah. One of the I was going
to say, one of the one of the food scenes
that stuck with me, that's always stuck with me was
when Laura, when she's an adult and she's making a

(01:01:59):
pie for some of the workers who come by the
farm maybe, and she makes it with it's a rhubarb pie,
and she makes it with salt instead of sugar, and
everyone is too heck and polite to like, they're all like, oh,
this is a really interesting pie, ma'am.

Speaker 3 (01:02:13):
Thank you for your.

Speaker 2 (01:02:16):
You're just thinking of like right, like you couldn't that
was just all you had, Like you if you suck
at making a pie, that's just what you're stuck with it.

Speaker 7 (01:02:24):
Also, I'm so sorry to say this, but it also
makes you realize why men were like, I want to
marry her.

Speaker 5 (01:02:32):
She's a good cook. I mean truly.

Speaker 7 (01:02:37):
Now, I mean as a grown up now, I'm like, yeah,
i'd want to marry someone who could cook too.

Speaker 1 (01:02:40):
Like it.

Speaker 5 (01:02:41):
As a kid, you're just like, it doesn't matter.

Speaker 7 (01:02:43):
But as an adult when Paus constantly complimenting Caroline on
her ability to make do, in her ability to make
everything delicious, and you think, oh, yeah, this is the
difference between everyone losing their mind and life having any
shred of joy or pleasantness to it. And remember when

(01:03:03):
Laura goes off to teach and the she's staying with
that awful couple and the woman's going mad. And as
a kid, you're like, she's an evil woman who wants
to kill everyone, And as a grown up you're like, no,
that would be me. I would also try to stab
my husband in the middle of the night for dragging. Yeah,
but yeah, I'm like, I too would want to marry
a good cook. I sort of get these terrible tropes

(01:03:24):
that we're still living with, but they kind of makes sense.

Speaker 4 (01:03:30):
Yeah, I also think she does the first especially the
first few books before Mary goes blind, Like there's so
much on how in terms of housework and chore and
you know, cooking and chores, like Mary is just so
much better than her and everything. And coming up with
these as a kid, I was like, Laura's not the
one who cooks, Like, Laura's the tomboy. She's running around,
she's riding horses. But also when you read them again,

(01:03:53):
it's like she wouldn't be able to write about this
so well if she wasn't forced to do that for survival,
like and you have, Yeah, you have to get good
at it if you're going to be a successful woman
and on the prairie, like that is one of the qualifications,
just that. And then there's so much Laura hates sewing
in the first few books and then works in a

(01:04:14):
dress shop or or works for a tailor and de
smet for like two full books and and just has
to do it to help her family get by and
obviously got very good at it.

Speaker 2 (01:04:27):
Yeah, I feel like that's not part of like all
of these survival adventure books that I was honed into
as a child. I was like, oh, yeah, Tom Boys rule,
let's go like yeah, and like just this stark actual
reality that she did write about was like like nope,
Like nah, I'm still running around in the creek, like
getting leeches, Like that's probably gonna be fine.

Speaker 7 (01:04:45):
And you realize that in By the Shorts of Silver Lake,
where her and her cousin Lena are out on the
prairie riding around on horseback, and it's such a magical
chapter and you think back on it, like as a kid,
you're like, I want that life, and you really realize
as a grown up it was one day in a
life of severe I mean drudgery. Laura worked from the

(01:05:06):
age of nine, so like that that day was not
reflective of her life. That day stood out to her
in that extraordinary detail because it was such a rarity
for her to have that kind of freedom, and I think.

Speaker 5 (01:05:21):
Putting you know.

Speaker 7 (01:05:22):
And later in that chapter, her and Lena go inside
and they have to wash like two hundred dishes. And
then you know when they spend the winter in the
surveyor's house and Ma opens up the ground floor to
take in all these travelers and lets these men sleep there,
and they're cooking for them morning till night and washing
dishes and they can't keep up. And what you take

(01:05:44):
from that is, oh, they might have some money now
that they can keep, but the reality of the physical
labor and how awful it must have been over and
over and over again is sort of lost in that
writing because of where she allows your focus to land.

Speaker 5 (01:06:01):
And again.

Speaker 7 (01:06:04):
There's a sort of a very subtle small line where
Ma says, go upstairs to the attic and lock the
door behind you, and you don't fully get as a
kid what Ma is terrified. They're in a house of
all of these men. Pa is not around, and she's
got four young girls, you know, and that where the
danger is coming from. In that moment, you're so like, well,

(01:06:26):
maybe they'll have some money for Mary to go to
school for the blind, not like, oh my god, Ma's
terrified they're going to be sexually assaulted. And also they've
been working eighteen hours a day for three weeks or
whatever it is. Yeah, it's intense to Yeah, it's really
intense to think about the degree and that she sat
down at sixty five to write about all this after

(01:06:46):
such a lifetime of hard work, Like it is intense
to think about the degree of work that went into
making a meal like you'd make a morning meal, you'd
turn around, you make midday meal, you turn around, you
make the evening meal, get up and do it all
over again.

Speaker 2 (01:07:02):
Yeah, there's a whole day of the week where you
just churn butter because that's because the cow is making milk.

Speaker 5 (01:07:08):
What else are you going to do with it?

Speaker 2 (01:07:09):
You need to preserve it somehow, So let's go, it's
time to churn the butter.

Speaker 3 (01:07:15):
Yeah, And I wonder how much.

Speaker 2 (01:07:17):
Of it is like it is like her sort of
golden lens of the past, or her own personal nostalgia
for it, or her wanting to write provide like a
nice story to people during this also very hard time
that a lot of Americans were going through.

Speaker 7 (01:07:35):
I think what comes through is she loves her family
so much. Yeah, Like, I think that's the thing that
that's not fiction, and that permeates a lot of the
terribleness and why she wrote I mean, there's a lot
of reasons why she wrote it, and how much her
daughter was involved in the writing and the structuring is
in two entire episodes of this podcast. Because her daughter

(01:07:55):
is like this crazy journalist who makes a lot of
things up and was one of the early founders of
the Libertarian Party. So there's a lot of narratives in
Little House that when you come to it through that lens,
you're like, wait a second, but yeah, I think her
love of her family it comes through in some of

(01:08:17):
the descriptions of the food is the truth, Like how
you're describing safety and comfort and joy and coziness, and
it's coming through in the food of which there was
very little.

Speaker 2 (01:08:27):
Yeah, oh and yeah, it's really it is really weird
to me how recent I did not understand as a
child growing up, how recent this really was. Like it's
putting into perspective that she was alive when my parents
were born. What like that, Like, because this, you know,

(01:08:48):
reading it, it reads like another planet.

Speaker 4 (01:08:52):
My favorite line in our first episode is that she
was born in a covered wagon and by the end
of her life she had flown on an airplane, so
she like she is so so recent, like she probably
knew who Elvis was, you know, right.

Speaker 7 (01:09:07):
I used to get mad at my mother that she
hadn't driven to meet Laura Ingles because they lived at
the same time.

Speaker 5 (01:09:11):
When I was a.

Speaker 7 (01:09:12):
Kid, I could not conceive of being live at the
same time as Laura Ingles and not. My mother grew
up in a tiny town in northern Ontario with more
resources than Laura Ingles had, but like, relatively.

Speaker 5 (01:09:22):
Speaking, not a ton. And I was like, I don't understand.

Speaker 7 (01:09:26):
Why didn't you drive down to Missouri in nineteen fifty
six when you.

Speaker 5 (01:09:30):
Were twelve years old and meet Laura Ingles? And my
mother was like.

Speaker 7 (01:09:34):
Why don't we pin some braids onto your hat today? Okay, like,
you know, dial it down a little bit, kid.

Speaker 2 (01:09:44):
You know.

Speaker 7 (01:09:44):
Alison Arngrim, who played Nellie Olsen on the show, we
interviewed her for the podcast and she made a point
that we think about a lot, which is one of
the reasons these books continued to appeal is that they
are describing the way a lot of people on Earth
continue to live.

Speaker 5 (01:09:59):
Right.

Speaker 7 (01:10:00):
Degree of limited resources and poverty is not the way
we live now, but it is the way a lot
of people on Earth live, and these books have a
global appeal for better and worse. There's a lot wrong
in these books, a lot of you know, racist, violent,
troubling things. And also they're speaking to a way of

(01:10:23):
life that is still being experienced in a lot of places.
So it isn't that long ago. Yeah, it's now for
a lot of people.

Speaker 3 (01:10:32):
Absolutely.

Speaker 2 (01:10:34):
Can Can we talk a little bit about some of
the racist, troubling, terrible violent things that happened in these
books because we we and we touched on this earlier
when when we were talking about the just the sheer
like manifest destiny colonization aspect of everything that was going on.
But uh, but right, you know, like like like the
reason that I didn't that that we didn't want to

(01:10:54):
do this episode earlier on Sabor was just there was
the whole situation where one of the children's book awards
that had previously been named after.

Speaker 7 (01:11:06):
Laura Ingles, it's the most prestige, it was the most
prestigious children's book award had been named the Laura Ingles
Children's Book Award, and now it's changed.

Speaker 6 (01:11:14):
It's the Children's Literature Legacy Award.

Speaker 7 (01:11:17):
Yeah, and when it changed, I think you don't We
talked about this in the podcast and certainly was part
of the motivation for this podcast, is like, you don't
really love anything quite the way you love it when
you're a kid. And the extra layer of Little House
is that she was a real person, right like Anne
of Green Gables, I also loved, and she's not a

(01:11:38):
real person, and so there is a degree of there's
an extra layer of this that comes from her being
an actual person in the world where you can say, well,
she did this, I could do it, or she actually
did this. This is in a novel, I'm you know,
there's a whole conversation of why it's filed in fiction
not nonfiction, And so when that award was changed, I

(01:12:00):
think there was a really intense reaction that was coming
from a place of feeling like almost part of your identity,
like this thing that you loved so and conditionally as
a kid is being called into question whether or not
you're a person who had actually re read the book
since you were a kid or fully grasped what the

(01:12:21):
issues were.

Speaker 5 (01:12:24):
That you know, visceral.

Speaker 7 (01:12:25):
Response to it is coming from such a deep place
that I think, you know, getting into kids heads and
hearts is you know, as we all know, pretty intense.
I mean, we're watching it play out in different ways
with Harry Potter and watch it play out with in
different ways with a lot of other things.

Speaker 4 (01:12:42):
But I think we interviewed the president of the American
Library Association who spoke to us about the decision to
change the name of the award and pointed out like
they like so it was named the lor Ingleswilder Award
because she was the first recipient of it, and they
haven't taken no way that award. She is still the
first recipient of that award, and which is a testament

(01:13:05):
to how influential she was for children's book writing at
her time. But you know, taking the name off of
that award, I think rightly so just makes room for
being able to recognize the new strides that are being
made in that genre with much much more inclusive stories.

Speaker 7 (01:13:26):
If you come out of reading Little House as a kid,
that should hopefully influence you to be a person who
wants to look at these things honestly. I think, like
it's not good enough to say I love this and
subsequently it's good it's I think part of what motivated
this podcast was this sense of like, if I love

(01:13:47):
it this much, I have to be honest about the
thing that I'm loving, and like, what is actually here?
Let's go take a look at this, this idea, this person,
who was she really what was actually happening here?

Speaker 5 (01:13:58):
And like the answer to that is so complicated and.

Speaker 7 (01:14:01):
So it is such a rabbit hole to go down
and so fascinating, but like you should be required to
interrogate these things that are so formative to you because
everything is a problem, literally everything, everything is a problem.

(01:14:22):
America is the problem. I mean, it's amazing thing there's
America is a problem too. And when that award was changed,
I mean, I understand where that response is coming to you,
because to some degree I had to, although I had not.
I think for a lot of people in my age, Uh,
you grew up on the books in the TV show
and maybe you didn't come back to them until you
had kids and you're reading them to your kids. And
you got to Little House in the Prairie the book,

(01:14:43):
which is where much of I mean, there's problems in
all of the books, but that is significant problems. And
you got to the chapter and where Ma is extremely racist,
and you're like, wait a second, is.

Speaker 5 (01:14:56):
This always here? Like, oh my god, what's going going
on here?

Speaker 7 (01:15:00):
I had I knew what was in the book, so
I think there was less of a shock to me.
But I had plenty of people come to me when
their kids were that age, being like, wait a second,
what's going on here? Yeah, but then I think that
opens the door to like, why didn't that stand out
when we were reading it when we were kids in
the seventies and eighties, And then why didn't it stand out?
Even bigger question is why didn't it stand out in

(01:15:22):
the thirties when it was being public Like, you know, like.

Speaker 5 (01:15:24):
There's a lot of there's a lot of questions here.

Speaker 2 (01:15:28):
Yeah, well, I mean, you know, it's it's like like
we were saying, like like you were saying, with with
the level of basic subsistence that a lot of people
are living with day to day. You know, we can
look at these books and go like, oh man, those
attitudes were super racist and uh and there's oh man,

(01:15:48):
I mean they see a minstrel show at one point,
like you know, there's there's a.

Speaker 7 (01:15:51):
Lot of that didn't actually happen in real life. By
the way, Rose inserted that scene in the book.

Speaker 5 (01:15:57):
That is not yeah, which makes it which makes it
even better.

Speaker 7 (01:16:02):
No, No, that's that's worse. And you know, Mansfield, where
they lived, was a sundown town. There's a you know,
there is there's a lot of both things happening in
these books that minstrel show. As a kid, I didn't
know what black face was. I was like, oh, it's
so cold, they're painting their faces.

Speaker 5 (01:16:17):
And as a grown up, it was like, ah ooh yeah,
and there's an illustration.

Speaker 4 (01:16:22):
The illustration is now horrifying, and that even Garth Williams
did those illustrations in the fifties, those were not the
original illustrations, which no, no, no, no, yeah, But that's
even more you know, we talk of people who defend
Laura for writing these things, you know, the classic she
was a woman of her time, all these things, there's

(01:16:42):
evidence that she knew what was going on, and and.

Speaker 6 (01:16:46):
In the fifties even more so.

Speaker 4 (01:16:48):
Other people should have known that that was not okay
to depict in that way.

Speaker 7 (01:16:53):
And when in the Little House on the Prairie the
book on the opening pages, the original line when they
moved to Indian Territory, it was the Osage Diminished Reserve.
The line was there were no people there, just Indians.
That was the original line. And it was a decade
until a reader wrote in and said their child was
upset by that line because it suggested Indians weren't people.

(01:17:15):
And Laura's editor wrote to her to tell her this,
and Laura's immediate responses, that's a horrible mistake. I never
meant to insinuate Indians weren't people. They changed the line
subsequently to read there was no settlers, there only Indians,
which is somewhat which is true, although there's no more

(01:17:35):
explanation beyond that. But her editor, who's this legendary editor,
wrote back to the woman who wrote in and said,
I astounded that no one has spotted this in the
nearly twenty years that this book, and that to me
is the bigger problem than what Laura is writing is.
And this is often this is still very true when
you open the New York Times or you open a

(01:17:57):
major magazine and you're like, how did this get to print?
How to make it through all of these reads? And
then how did it last for two decades? And we
know the answer to that because it's a culture that
accepts this narrative very easily, and that this is one,
you know, version of it.

Speaker 2 (01:18:14):
But and especially like, oh, it's a sweet old white woman,
so like we can give her a pass because she's
a she's a product of her time, So we should
just print this without any kind of questioning, because it's
giving an honest look about how racist we were very recently.

Speaker 6 (01:18:30):
Or still are.

Speaker 5 (01:18:31):
And also I would say like.

Speaker 2 (01:18:33):
Again, this is now, like this is now now for
a lot of people.

Speaker 7 (01:18:37):
So and yes, And also you know there's a number
of people said to us. He said to me, like
we're coming from this sometimes from a respect of like
everything we're writing now is going to hold up to
interrogation fifty years from now.

Speaker 5 (01:18:49):
Which is not to.

Speaker 7 (01:18:50):
Say we shouldn't be in derogating little house, But there
is a puritanical element to some of this criticism where
I'm like, sure, I don't know, Like it's not she's
not the old only problem, it's just that there's why
why is she still around?

Speaker 5 (01:19:04):
It's like, yeah, it's.

Speaker 7 (01:19:07):
What is it about her that continues to appeal to
a degree that we have allowed these other things to
bother us less? And that is a question we could
be asking of, like oh, most of American culture, to
be quite honest, And so I find her farm with
that that she's a doorway into that question more than
like was Laura Ingalls wild or a racist? Is like

(01:19:30):
why is she still here? Like what is it about
her that wraps up all of these things in a
way that wants makes us want to hold them so
dear and and not question them to the degree we
should be because she's also it's very safe and cozy.

(01:19:51):
I mean, there's a lot of these things are wrapped
up in stuff that we like very much, and we
like it enough to take it with the terrible parts.

Speaker 1 (01:20:06):
We have even more of this interview for you, but
first we have another quick break for word from our sponsor,
and we're back. Thank you sponsor. Let's get back into it.

Speaker 7 (01:20:26):
It's very complicated in a in a way that I
find like invites discussion, Like I don't I don't feel
scared to have the discussion.

Speaker 5 (01:20:37):
I find it really necessary.

Speaker 2 (01:20:39):
Oh yeah, yeah, I mean I don't know, like I
don't I don't have kids, I don't plan on having kids,
but the idea of giving a kid it's something that
I loved so much as a child. But also being
willing to have that discussion with them of like why
is this in here? Like why did I give you
this book? Like what's what's this all? Can we talk about?

(01:21:00):
Maybe you should be a better human than what's portrayed
on this page kind of situation.

Speaker 7 (01:21:04):
And also, I mean we're just working on this episode now,
but like also what is happening outside the scope of
what it's being written, Like what the way that? And
this is Rose A lot of Rose too, you realize
that this. I think Laura wrote the books, but they
were very much a collaboration with.

Speaker 5 (01:21:17):
Her daughter, who is really a lot. Rose is a lot.
She's just I mean, we had to split her into
two episodes. She's there's so much happening with Rose.

Speaker 7 (01:21:29):
She was one of the most successful freelance writers in
the country in the twenties.

Speaker 5 (01:21:34):
She made She once sold.

Speaker 7 (01:21:36):
A short story Cereal, to the Saturday Evening Post for
thirty thousand dollars in nineteen twenty five, Like.

Speaker 2 (01:21:43):
She really in that times money?

Speaker 5 (01:21:46):
No, in that time's money.

Speaker 7 (01:21:47):
I was like I was in nineteenth Yeah, yes, it
was like half a million in today's money.

Speaker 5 (01:21:51):
She built her parents a different house.

Speaker 7 (01:21:53):
They didn't actually want to live there, but she built
it for them and then paid to have this is
in the Ozarks in the nineteen twenties, paid to have
plumbing and electricity installed.

Speaker 5 (01:22:02):
Like she really.

Speaker 7 (01:22:03):
Her daughter was so successful and also a hack. As
somebody pointed out to us, She's like, she's like a
successful yellow journalist hack. So these books are very much
a results of their involvement.

Speaker 5 (01:22:16):
They're very codependent, dysfunctional involvement with each other. But we
was just going off tracks. See this is what happens
when you talk about the.

Speaker 4 (01:22:29):
Air out of the room and your spirit is liberty.

Speaker 2 (01:22:38):
Annie and I are just going like, give us more tea.

Speaker 6 (01:22:40):
This is.

Speaker 7 (01:22:43):
Here's the best. It's not the best, but there's a lot.
I mean, she really funded a school that educated the
Koch brothers. Like she's very tied into. She left the
entire Little House copyright to a man. She didn't have
any children, so she like adult adopted this guy who
got all of the Little House copyright and then ran
for president unto the Libertarian ticket in nineteen seventy six

(01:23:05):
on essentially little House money.

Speaker 5 (01:23:07):
There's a lot, like you really cannot not peel back
the layers on this. But Rose.

Speaker 7 (01:23:13):
When Laura sold Little House in the Big Woods, which
Rose helped her with, behind Laura's back, Rose took Laura's
story and secretly turned it into a novel for grown ups,
which she sold to The Saturday Evening Post without telling Laura,
which published it almost the same time as Little House
in the Big Woods, which Laura discovered when someone brought

(01:23:33):
over the illustrations for it as it was publishing, Like
that's the degree of crazy that is happening behind the
scenes in Little House.

Speaker 5 (01:23:43):
Wow, yeah, it is right.

Speaker 7 (01:23:45):
It's which again I think emphasizes like Laura's ability to
turn this into a cozy, magical story when behind the
scenes it was just Rose invested all of their money
in the stock market and when it crashed, they lost
all of it. That's one of the reasons Laura sat
down to write what became Little House in the Big Woods,
because then Rose had a mental breakdown and was like

(01:24:07):
Rose was also though in the twenties in Paris with
all the you know that that whole movement of writers,
and like as Joe and I like to say, she
once attended an orgy and were like, I hope she
participated in this orgy. Like let's hope that Rose was
happening some sun, but like there's a whole bunch of
crazy that's happening, and.

Speaker 6 (01:24:27):
Like true mental illness.

Speaker 4 (01:24:28):
Like truly, the records of her journals is she was
definitely somehow some form of manage.

Speaker 7 (01:24:34):
She really benefited from therapy to a degree that is
like hard to quantify, but I bring that up because
when we talk about the racism that's happening in Little
House in the Prairie and in any number of the
books those books, the Ingles family is situated in those
books as being like completely alone in this vast landscape

(01:24:56):
with no one around them, which is very far from
the truth.

Speaker 5 (01:24:59):
There was a lot of people there.

Speaker 7 (01:25:01):
There was a lot of African American farmers, African American
doctor who's in the book but was actually hugely successful.
They were on the Osage Diminished Reserve. And that last
seen a Little House in the Prairie where the trail
of Native Americans are leaving, and Laura's like coveting a
baby Native Americans.

Speaker 5 (01:25:16):
She's like, I want a papoose.

Speaker 7 (01:25:18):
That those are the Osage Indian tribe who were going
to Oklahoma, who get the land that they get in
Oklahoma the reservation, and they owned the land rights and
they hit oil.

Speaker 5 (01:25:31):
Which is the new Scorsese movie that's.

Speaker 7 (01:25:33):
Coming out about the Osage Murders is that these Native America,
the Osage tribe then becomes some of the wealthiest people
in America, and then the white population tries to marry
in and starts murdering them to get land rights, and
some major ranches in Oklahoma.

Speaker 5 (01:25:47):
Are the direct results of this. So there's a lot
of There's also Laura never writes about the Dakota US War,
which happened in eighteen sixty two or three.

Speaker 6 (01:25:57):
Right before she was born.

Speaker 7 (01:25:58):
Right before she was born, resulted in the largest mass
hanging in American history, and had provided America with the
narrative of bloodthirsty Indian and vulnerable white settler, which is
not borne out in any real reality, but was very
much how the media capitalized on it.

Speaker 5 (01:26:18):
And so some of Maa's.

Speaker 7 (01:26:20):
Behavior of vulnerability in these places is coming from the
narrative that's been fed to them. And then also there's
that chapter in Little House in the Prairie of called Indians.
In the house where the Osage Indians come in and
start taking food, but of course they've made treaties, the
treaties haven't been fulfilled.

Speaker 5 (01:26:40):
They're starving.

Speaker 7 (01:26:41):
They see people on their land as having taken their
resources that belonged to them. None of this is at
all even insinuated in the books. And so I think
one of the things we try and do in the
podcast is pull back the lens and say what else
was happening outside of this story that you're seeing the

(01:27:03):
result of without any explanation.

Speaker 2 (01:27:06):
Yeah, without any further context, outside no context is eleven
year old girl and her very personal take on it.

Speaker 7 (01:27:12):
Yeah, yeah, which it doesn't necessarily undermine her take.

Speaker 2 (01:27:18):
You know.

Speaker 7 (01:27:18):
I think something that a lot of people point out,
and it's a valid point, is Laura's not saying Laura's
reflecting what she's hearing. She's not saying these things she's
And as a kid, I recognized, like Ma has problematic
views and of course paused the white magical, possibly manic
mentally just her around, but like she's like you can

(01:27:40):
love a parent who has problematic views, which like welcome
to everyone's Thanksgiving table. But left out of that is
any context. And I think as a kid, you recognize
that she's repeating stuff she's heard.

Speaker 5 (01:27:53):
But at the same time.

Speaker 7 (01:27:55):
A scholar, doctor Debi Reese, who has written about this extensively, says,
you know, should these books be being taught? Should a
Native American child in a classroom have to listen to
this language? And I think she's right and that they
shouldn't in the manner in which these books are introduced.
Is something we is really the conversation like, how do
you hand them to children? Would you give them to

(01:28:16):
children in your life? And if so, because I've given
them to plenty of children, Like in what context and
with what sort of support system do they now come with?

Speaker 2 (01:28:26):
Yeah?

Speaker 4 (01:28:27):
Yeah, And if you so decide to not give your
kids these these books or any kids these books. DeBie
Reese also has a blog called American Indians and Children's
Literature where she basically rates all these different books and
Little House you might expect scores some of the lowest
of whether the depictions of Native Americans in those books

(01:28:48):
are are appropriate or just positive depictions at all, and
will recommend the books coming out now that do have
really great depictions of Native life. And so if you're
looking for alternative books to give kids, that's a really
good resource.

Speaker 3 (01:29:04):
That's super cool.

Speaker 2 (01:29:06):
The food topic, Oh no, it's I mean, it genuinely
is all tied in. I mean, you know, like like
when you're when you're talking, I mean, because all all
of these issues were tied into food ways and so
and and and into the food ways that would come
out of the of this time when you were talking
about the dust ball and all of that so yeah,
I mean the fact that they gave away the stewardship

(01:29:29):
of the land from people who cared about it to
people who just wanted their heck in sixty acres, you know, like,
of course you're gonna of course you're gonna get a
dust bawl like that.

Speaker 7 (01:29:39):
One of the smartest things that was said to us
was by an environmental historian who said, we're talking about white, violent,
white supremacist systems and people with very few resources trying
to survive within them, and that both of these things
are true at the same time that you had the

(01:30:00):
the people to whom Freeland was sold to, not in literal.

Speaker 5 (01:30:04):
Fact, but as like as.

Speaker 7 (01:30:07):
Like a marketing campaign, were extremely poor, had very few options,
and this was their option. And it is also, of
course obviously true that the system that they are being
invited into is a white supremacist, violent system that has

(01:30:28):
eradicated an entire population of people in order to make
this possible. And so understanding both those things at the
same time, I think is not to put it mildly
how we're taught American history, but is also true, you know,
like that's it's not everyone was starving. Well, people who

(01:30:51):
on the railroad weren't, the government wasn't. But and this
idea too of I mean, we talked about this. I'm
losing track of what's our actual podcast now. This whole
idea of like the self I think little house, and
so much of this ties into the food and the
food descriptions is the angles are self sufficient and they
live off the land and they get no support, And

(01:31:12):
in reality, they got plenty of government support everyone needed.
There was huge grasshopper plagus for the entire seventies that
wiped out like whatever the measurements was like, it wiped
out entire states, like you can't even conceive of these
weaves clouds of grasshoppers that were about hundreds of thousands
of miles wide that wiped everything out. But more than that,
the biggest government support they got was the absolute eradication

(01:31:35):
of Native Americans. That is a government support, that's support
to your.

Speaker 5 (01:31:39):
Lifestyle to make this land available to you.

Speaker 7 (01:31:42):
And understanding the connection of those two things I think
is incredible. It was very powerful to me and I
think really necessary when you're coming to these stories that
to understand the framework of what's actually happening.

Speaker 2 (01:31:59):
Yeah, yeah, right, And I mean and those histories haven't
been told for most for I mean, I feel like
it's really recent that we're starting to hear anything approaching
the actual truth to these stories, to how many times

(01:32:21):
the o sage we're kicked out of different territories whenever
anyone realized that the land they were on was something
that they wanted again.

Speaker 7 (01:32:28):
I mean, I think we don't realize how much little
House sucks up the history, Like because she decided to
sit down and write her life story in a very
like we need money, and I loved my father and
I want to have some record of my childhood, and
that could have been Like how much we're asking lor
Angles Wilder to shoulder in terms of our historical understanding
of an entire country feels a bit outsized. But also

(01:32:51):
why are we allowing her to shoulder so much? Right,
there's an appeal to the story she's giving us that
is obliterating all these other narratives because this is a
nicer story and it has like pig splatters and like
maple candy in the snow, and like that's a nice story.

(01:33:16):
And also grass You imagine clouds of grasshoppers descending for
months at a time and literally eating everything like you
lose your mind. I can't even handle a cockroach in
the apartment. I just think like.

Speaker 2 (01:33:27):
Oh yeah, yeah, if Netflix is down, I'm real upset.

Speaker 6 (01:33:30):
So like, yeah, well that's the thing. They there's there.

Speaker 4 (01:33:35):
The poverty does definitely comes through in the books, but
you also realize again as an adult, that she was
downplaying that she was upping the food and like the
small moments in her life where they were able to
have this delicious meal and downplaying the months and months
that they were starving.

Speaker 6 (01:33:50):
And yeah, there's uh it.

Speaker 4 (01:33:53):
Just speaks to her like her sense, her sensory details
are just like doing so much of the lift, heavy
lifting and the entire series again to just wrap it
all in a pretty bow.

Speaker 5 (01:34:03):
Yeah yeah, her sensory details. That's a great way to
put it.

Speaker 3 (01:34:08):
Uh Annie, do you do you?

Speaker 2 (01:34:11):
How?

Speaker 5 (01:34:11):
How this amazing?

Speaker 7 (01:34:14):
I wish that we could have like an audio of
your face, because every once in a while you're like,
oh my.

Speaker 5 (01:34:19):
God, what are we talking about? This is crazy?

Speaker 1 (01:34:26):
It's been a lot. Wait, I love it.

Speaker 5 (01:34:35):
Uh.

Speaker 1 (01:34:36):
I feel I feel like we're going long, But I
did have I was formulating questions as again someone who
has like no experience with this. I've had experience with
similar things. When I was trying to sleep last night,
and as I've been listening, I feel like I'm picking
up threads on it. But it was it's a vague

(01:34:59):
and messy question, so please bear with me. But I
feel like a lot of things like this, because we've
talked about things like this, Lauren, and other fictional pieces
where there's this description of food and the food is
so in heavy quotes, basic like but it sounds like
the best thing you've ever had, and it usually is

(01:35:22):
in these times of deprivation or you can't get a
hold on this food you're so it tastes like the
best thing you've ever had. But as we've been talking
through this, and what I was thinking about last night
was sort of how much of how much of this
particular story feels like either and the like kind of

(01:35:48):
manifest usty of America, like pull yourself up by your
own bootstops. You should be proud, like you can survive
off this little good for you.

Speaker 3 (01:35:56):
Plus like.

Speaker 1 (01:35:59):
The idea that we've gotten away from in our modern sense.
This is a very modern take, but we've gotten away
from these quote simple foods again, like it so this
is sort of. One of the reasons it resonates is that, Oh,
I go to the grocery store and I get this

(01:36:20):
thing and I have no connection to it. There's no
connection to me, and I eat it and I don't
really care about it, and I don't really think about it.
Do you think those things are at play at all?
Am I just like reaching wildly for something?

Speaker 3 (01:36:30):
No, there definitely.

Speaker 7 (01:36:32):
I think the reason we all talk about the pigs
Blatter is because right before she gets the pigs Blatter,
she has to listen to the pig squeal as it's
being slaughtered. Like this is there's a very real direct
thread in Little House between the source of the food.
Like one of the biggest fights she and Mary has
is when Paul goes out hunting and they're fighting over

(01:36:52):
what dressing the goose will get when he returns. Like
there's a very clear line between their survey and pausibility
to hunt, really and and a lot of salting of
venison happens in the Little House, which always sounds delicious

(01:37:12):
to me.

Speaker 5 (01:37:13):
They're always salting the venison.

Speaker 7 (01:37:14):
They're like she describes it, they're so I think I
think there's an appeal to that and I think, I mean,
I'm not the cook here, but at all, but the
amount of people who said to us that they had
learned to can, or to preserve, or they wanted to
know how all these things. And I think even this

(01:37:35):
sort of live from the land through line, there's a simplicity,
simplicity to it that is appealing, Like there's a purity
to it, which I don't actually think it is necessarily
true in their real lived existence. And I don't know
how if it was, if anybody could really survive individually

(01:37:58):
off the land in real life. But there's a real
appeal to the idea that you could that you know,
where everything that you've done. This the self sufficiency, like
this American idea of self sufficiency that I don't think
really exists in other narratives of countries of themselves, right,
like in America really loves.

Speaker 4 (01:38:18):
The idea of like, yeah, and doing so much with
so little. You know, to the extent of your a homesteader,
you're going out where there's absolutely nothing, and that's and
that means everything to you. That piece of land means
everything to you, and you're going to get everything you.

Speaker 6 (01:38:31):
Can out of it.

Speaker 4 (01:38:32):
And even that again that opening scene of slaughtering the
pig and getting the pigs bladder and the tail and
almost bragging about how they were able to use every
part and have so much fun and chalking that up
to their pioneer ways, where back to Native American traditions
like that is all like that when you learn about yeah,

(01:38:54):
Native American customs and the traditions around the buffalo hunt,
like they are not praise in the same way that
this little pioneer family is for like slaughtering their one
pig a year. So yeah, it's definitely it's was practical.
Obviously they had to do that to cert They had
to use everything that they had to survive and make
it last as long as they could. But I definitely

(01:39:16):
agree that it is in these books depicted as a
very American like new way of life.

Speaker 5 (01:39:22):
It's romanticized too. It's really like the.

Speaker 7 (01:39:26):
It's in Little House some big wits particularly, but it's
really framed as a bit of a fairy tale and
there's a romance to it. And I can't emphasize strongly
enough that Rose Go Back to Rose has been she,
along with Ain Rand, called the mother of the Libertarian Party,
and that these books are fused with Rose's libertarian fantasy,

(01:39:47):
which the only reason it didn't go completely off the
rails is because Laura was like, I'm not putting that
in this book about the long Winter which we barely survived.
Rose wanted to include a serial killer, like a fictional
serial killer in in Little House in the Pair, Like really, So,
once you really understand the source of some of this,
I think it mitigates a bit of that self sufficient fantasy.

(01:40:12):
At the same time, it does sound appealing because so
much of our food is disconnected from are from life,
Like some of our food is disconnected from its source.
It's disconnected from life, it's disconnected from and we're seeing that.
I mean, we're living in New York three days ago
we couldn't see the skyline because of the smoke, Like

(01:40:33):
we're really, we are living in real ramifications of all
these decisions, and there is something deeply appealing about this
fantasy of sustainability and pure living. And of course the
truth at the time was they were in an environmental
crisis too. You know, those droughts were not mystical, they
were man made in some cases.

Speaker 2 (01:40:54):
And so.

Speaker 7 (01:40:56):
Again there's a reason we're still talking about these books
because we're reliving versions of them in some degree or other. Uh,
But yeah, I don't know, it seems nice. My father
worked in it. My father was in the management side
of Canada's largest meat packing company when I was a kid,
and I used to beg him to come in and
see the animals get.

Speaker 5 (01:41:15):
Slaughtered because I was so consumed with Little House.

Speaker 7 (01:41:18):
And he was like, yeah, and you say you didn't
like the food in these books, I know, it's so funny.
I was like, well, they're slaughter how do you slaughter
the pigs? Dad like, what's happening in this meat? And
he was like, you have to be thirteen. Like he
didn't even.

Speaker 5 (01:41:30):
Say, wow, it's weird that my eight year.

Speaker 7 (01:41:32):
Old daughter wants to come see a metal bolt put
through this animal's head.

Speaker 5 (01:41:36):
It was just like, you're not allowed in here.

Speaker 6 (01:41:38):
He never brought you back a pigs bladder.

Speaker 5 (01:41:40):
He never brought me back a pigs flatter. But man,
I'm a waiter, So.

Speaker 7 (01:41:46):
I mean, guys, thank you for this. I know this
conversation is long and windy, but I do think it
is reflective of the subject matter, which is like it
is like you really pull one thread and next thing
you know you're in like the nineteen seventy six libertarian
ticket for president.

Speaker 8 (01:42:01):
Like it's just, it's just it's so all over the place,
and the fact that so much chaos and mental illness
and violence and racism and poverty has resulted in these books, which.

Speaker 7 (01:42:17):
On the one hand, I hand think have some truth
of familial love and on the other hand are just
you know, this very comforting tale is fascinating.

Speaker 1 (01:42:28):
Yeah, Like we always say, you never know where the
research will take you.

Speaker 5 (01:42:31):
You never know.

Speaker 7 (01:42:32):
It's like Laura's decision to sit down and write about
the meals her family had together because so much of
it is about food is like resulted in in this
It's it's really intense to think about.

Speaker 5 (01:42:50):
And it's making me hungry.

Speaker 4 (01:42:51):
Yeah, it's about that time.

Speaker 3 (01:42:55):
Yeah.

Speaker 7 (01:42:55):
Weirdly, it's making me hungry for sushi though, which Laura
never had.

Speaker 6 (01:43:01):
She knew Elvis, but she didn't eat sushi.

Speaker 5 (01:43:04):
She had a big fat Japanese fan base.

Speaker 7 (01:43:06):
But uh, yeah, because of propaganda, because Arthur we put
that in the first episode, Right, I've.

Speaker 5 (01:43:13):
Lost track, so I did Uh maybe Laura had sushi?

Speaker 7 (01:43:22):
Maybe Washes were unable to answer in the podcast.

Speaker 5 (01:43:27):
Did Laura ingles eat sushi.

Speaker 1 (01:43:30):
You'll get to the bottom of it.

Speaker 5 (01:43:34):
History.

Speaker 1 (01:43:41):
That brings us to the end of this semi fictional
foods about Little House and our our wonderful interview that
we got to do. I learned so.

Speaker 5 (01:43:50):
Much, Lauren.

Speaker 1 (01:43:53):
Changed, we we all did.

Speaker 2 (01:43:55):
I this was Oh heck, I I love I love
how angry I am right now. It's really and I
just just how fascinating.

Speaker 3 (01:44:07):
How weird.

Speaker 2 (01:44:08):
That's something that I just had this really innate love
for as a child. Is so much deeper, so much
goes so much deeper than I ever imagined it could.

Speaker 1 (01:44:18):
Yes, it really, really really does. But it was really fun.
It was fun to learn about. I'm excited to share
this with everyone. And yeah, you can check out Wilder. Yeah,
we find podcasts for way more. Oh yes, yes, yes,

(01:44:43):
and you should. In the meantime, no listener mail on
this one, because it was quite a long interview, a
wonderful one. But yeah, this episode could get two hours
long easily, so we are. We'll be back with it
in our next episode. But if you do, do you
have anything you want to send us? You can our
emails Hello at savorpod dot com.

Speaker 2 (01:45:05):
We are also on social media You can find us
on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram at Saver pod and we
do hope to hear from you. Save is production of iHeartRadio.
For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, you can visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Thanks as always to our super producers Dylan Fagan and
Andrew Howard, with special thanks today to Charles de Montebello
for recording up in New York. Thanks to you for listening,

(01:45:28):
and we hope that lots of work at things are
coming your way