Cooking History
Depression WWII Meals
Gardening
Canning
Water Supply
Refrigeration

Gma J's Cooking
"Dora Johnson"

Gma Haag's Cooking

Maude Rice Haag

jam or jelly from her cellar!

It was most fun when I visited her house, and we could  smell bread  baking  in her oven. The thought was we will soon enjoy a piece of fresh warm bread spread generously with fresh sweet butter.

Next best would be a day when Gma baked Ginger cookies .That was a sweet spicy smell I will never forget. Fresh cookies from the oven. It wouldn't be very many minutes before we might enjoy cookies and milk.

If grandma wasn't baking that day, she always had cookies stored in a gallon jar under the counter in the cupboard.
As children we were taught to never ask for anything, but I soon knew how to talk to Gma so her memory would be triggered to offer me a cookie and some milk.

I recall saying "What day do you bake cookies Gma?" Her response might be "Oh, not today honey, but would you like a cookie?"

What a treat! A very BIG sugar cookie! That was my favorite one because it was so big, and her sugar cookies were the best I ever tasted.

She even had her Old Fashioned Sugar Cookie recipe printed in the Eau Claire Newspaper. See an actual copy of it under desserts.

Gma was a wonderful cook. She was self taught. Many times I would ask for a recipe, and she would say "I don't have a recipe. I just put a bit of this and a pinch of that and a handful of something else and stir the batter or mix it until it is the proper consistency."

A picture of a couple index cards is found under desserts. (Click on picture to go there.)

When preparing bread to bake, she would say that "you must knead it until it squeaks." Her loaves were huge loaves!

Grandpa Ernie Johnson's occupation was a baker. He worked in the Buries' bakery everyday baking bread to sell to the stores, but never ate store bought bread at home. He like Gma's bread better than the commercially bread he baked.  

I liked to visit the bakery and remember the smell of baking bread all around. Before they baked it grandpa mixed it in extremely large vats or stainless steel mixers with very big blades. They made hundreds of loaves at a time.

A few months after grandpa retired from Buries' Bakery, he went back to work for them again.  This time he was the manager of the "Day Old Bread Store". That is the first "Day Old Bread" store I remember. We called it the "used bread store". Ha! His workplace was a small room in the back of the Big Buries' Bakery building. Everybody loved grandpa. He was so friendly and he loved to go to work and visit with all the people. He would even save certain bread items for special customers, like us!

One thing I do remember Gpa making was lefsa. Gpa Ben would make Lefsa, and we put lots of butter on it. Lefsa was quite bland, therefore, we enjoyed the butter flavor very much.

Gpa made pots of beans, too. We kids liked those beans. The Beans had Ham or Bacon in them and lots of molasses and brown sugar.

One summer when I was 7 years old, I stayed with Gma & Gpa at R#4 Delvu Place in Eau Claire. It was the year they built the kitchen on next to the living room. The living room was the first room built around the fireplace that Great grandpa Jacob Rice constructed.  Later a large bedroom was added. The bathroom was a small outhouse in the wooded area away from the bedroom to the South.

The summer of 1944 was one of my most memorable as a child. I visited with them for a few weeks. Grandpa built a summer kitchen outside.
This is where all the cooking was done.   

Gma was the assistant carpenter.

Picture: I was the cook. (I was 7.)

More on the following web page

Depression Meals and World War II foods.

Mother Jean Johnson Haag

Memories from "Judy" and brother Jon Haag

"I always felt my mother was the best cook ever. "She was of course!"
I remember us saying she knew more ways to fix hamburger than anyone we knew. She did.
Many Hamburger Casseroles of great variety.
Mother didn't bake like her Mother, "My Gma J", but she served us well.
We always had a balanced meal as they would say. Always something green, some starch, some protein in the form of meat or chicken or fish. A salad and a dessert at every meal. "Color had to be in one of the foods". mom told me. That made for a pretty appetizing table.
We children always had milk and mom and dad their coffee. Coffee was for adults only, we were never allowed any of that.

Christmas, My mother was a good sport and followed through with the Haag tradition of serving Oyster Stew on Christmas Eve. She never ate the oysters but would eat the broth. We learned to love the stew, and to this day our family (Del Carstens) follow that tradition on Christmas Eve.

Mother always made many different kinds of cookies and candies. A variety we didn't see the rest of the year. Hundreds of cookies. What a beautiful table they would make!

"Mother made Hors D'Voeuvres ; Fancy, time consuming and delicious. These were of course for the grown ups who came to parties at our home. I always seemed to sneak a few."

Memories from Jon:
Brother Jon Dean Haag has a few memories I would add here:

He said, "I loved it when we would get treated to 5¢ Cracker Jacks. The most fun was getting the surprise prizes inside the box. My fondest memory is a little plastic serrated knife that came in my box.

"I, also, remember mom making hot chocolate on the back burner from scratch. And Fudge."

"Popcorn popped in bacon grease was soooo goood for us! "

"And a great flavor, too! "(That's what Mom and Dad taught us. Of course what they said was true!)

Personal Note: "Today we don't even buy bacon or other processed foods. We don't think they are very good for us at all! How times have changed!"

The next memory doesn't have to do with bacon, but pigs from where
the bristles came. Del talks about headcheese and other foods from the hogs.

This doesn't have to do with cooking, but Judy remembers this little verse which was sung when parents were working for SHP. It sticks as she learned every Nursery Rhyme in The Mother Goose Book. ( 9 years old when she learned this one. Mom wrote it as mother wrote many other little jingles that were sung at their weekly business meetings for Stanley Home Products.

"Twas only a little bristle growing on a little pig,
Twas only a little bristle growing stiff and growing big,
At last it was uprooted by a feller strong and stout.
Now it's a Stanley bristle where it can't come out!

Every bristle wants to be one.
Every bristle wants to be one.
Every bristle wants to be one.
Wants to be a Stanley Brush."

Ella Waltke Carstens

Memories from "Delmar"

"My mother was a good German cook. She was married during the depression and money was scarce.
Mother would buy 100# of flour and 100# of buckwheat flour. She had a big bin for the flour under the counter in the kitchen as a part of the cupboard. Every week she would bake huge loaves of bread. Daddy wouldn't eat anything but Mama's home baked bread even when we could buy store bought bread in later years.

We ate pancakes most every morning before going off to school. When we would come home from school we could always have the left over pancakes from morning. Mother would butter and sugar them and roll them up for us to eat with milk.

Once a week in later years mother would go to Sunshine (grocery store) and get the weeks supply of groceries.
She would often bring us a Milky Way candy bar which we liked to freeze or put into the snow bank in the winter and get it very cold before we would eat it.

Sundays, were special days. Mother served us with a roast and mashed potatoes & gravy, creamed peas, a salad which usually had raisins or bananas in it with lettuce & mayonnaise, and home baked bread and butter.

For dessert we would have a banana cream or cherry pie.

Oh, what a special day and would eat on the dining room table with special dishes and silverware!

Mother was a plain German cook and she would make us some good meals."

Blåut Wurst (Blood Sausage) German (couldn't find mama's recipe so will include the following which Del says sounds like it.)
Pålt (Swedish) Recipe from Bergstrom Cookbook
1976 Aunt Videe (Violet Lindeen)

She writes, " Surely no one will dare try this recipe, but because it is a part of our Swedish heritage, and because Vincent and I still make it; I'm going to tell you about it. Marc has decided he must learn to make it so this year (1976) he got his first lesson. I'm sure Patty would not eat it now but when she was 3 years old, she eagerly asked for "more Chickee".

Each year the week before Christmas Vincent goes to the locker plant and catches the blood from a hog being slaughtered. (Don't gasp - it isn't any different than a rare steak). After the Pålt is made, we give it as our gourmet gift to those of our relatives and friends whom enjoy it. None is wasted on those who don't appreciate it.
Here it is:
Put into a large kettle:
3 cups rye flour & 3 cups white flour
In this kettle place the blood from one hog, and stir vigorously. (Amount of blood is left to you). Add 2 or 3 cups of water. This is done in the morning and after lunch I go to work:
ADD:
4 cups of milk
5 # of graham flour
2 Tbsp. salt, 2 tsp. baking powder, ½ cup sorghum

Then add enough rye, graham, whole wheat, or white flour to make the contents like a thick batter.

Let stand for awhile. Then with wet hands mold a big ball around a little piece of fat and drop into boiling water and boil ½ hour. Remove and cool.

Mom (Lillie Bergstrom) used to bake hers in a pan in the oven, and it resembled a chocolate cake. To serve she would break it in pieces in a skillet and make a think white sauce in the skillet. But because Vincent likes his sliced and browned, I boil our. Then we eat fresh port gravy over it. To you doubters it is really good. Try it!" So sayeth,  Aunt Videe

Del remembers "head cheese" Kopfsê in German. It was made from the insides of the head of the hog. Gruêt was another memory of something they ate made from the hog. (These words are remembered as a low German word which is unwritten.) No part of the animal was left unused except maybe the 'bristles'? See bristles on Judy's side, even today she sings this little ditty when she hears the word 'bristle'.

Gardening
Grandma Buchholz Johnson

"Grandma J", as she became to us, was born Dora (Dorthea Augusta Buchholz August 27,1887 in Fall Creek, Wisconsin to Gottlieb Buchholz and Wilhelmina Carolina Frase.
A Little History of Grandma Dorthea Johnson

Her mother died at age 32 years in 1899, when Dorthea was 11 years old.
She the oldest in the family and a girl stopped her schooling in the fourth grade. After her mother died, Dorthea was responsible for the needs of the family while her father worked on the farm.
She became a super cook, seamstress, and homemaker.
Her youngest brother, Lawrence Buchholz, just a baby became like one of her own children, and when she married Ernest Melvin Johnson in 1906,
brother Lawrence moved in to their home with them, & lived there until he married Doris.
A few years after Dorthea and Ernest Johnson were married, Father Gottlieb Buchholz, also moved into their family home in Eau Claire, Wisconsin on 710 Menomine Street. This was the family home for their remaining years.

Being a farm girl, Dorthea enjoyed the outdoors and her gardening as much as she did her baking and sewing.
In Eau Claire they lived at 710 Menomine Street for over 50 years.
An area of Her backyard was approximately 20' X 60'. White and mostly two story houses lined Menomine Street on the south side.  The Johnson house was paid in full by my grandparents in the early 1920's. The price of the completed sale was $1500.  It was half of another house which was on the corner two houses to the east. Mr. and Mrs. Ott owned the other house.
At 710 Menomine St. grandma planted and raised  green beans, lettuce, radishes, green onions, turnips, rutabagas, onions, squash, cauliflower, broccoli, corn, spinach, cucumbers, melons and flowers of every variety imaginable. 
Around her house were flowers and bushes everywhere.
All available space was filled with beauty of healthy vegetables and flowers.

I remember coffee grounds were always saved and planted into the garden area.
Many times coffee grounds were put around the roses, but grandma had a special area  next to the house and under the kitchen window where she grew worms for their weekly fishing trips. I loved to help put the coffee grounds outside.
Grub worms and angle worms were precious commodities in her garden, and she knew how to multiply them.

Her garden was large enough to supply the needs of her family for the season as well as the winter months.  Canning vegetables was part of her annual duties

Canning season was, whenever she had enough to fill her jars to put away in the root cellar beneath the kitchen of her house.
There in that cellar we observed hundreds of jars of beautifully canned vegetables and fruits, jams and jellies.
(There were no freezers in those days.)
Gma J. (as we referred to her in later years) had beautiful jars of green beans, spinach, beets, corn, apples,
peaches, plums, pears, pickles of every kind
(Bread & Butter Pickles were my favorites) Dills were my dads favorites.
Watermelon pickles were always on her shelf as she never threw any part of her fruits for vegetables away.
Pickled beets and crab apples were so good, too.
Fall of every year was consumed with canning and putting away food for the winter.
All family members living at home got in on the work.
In the cellar
grandma stored bags of potatoes and onions, apples and other produce to keep them through the winter.
This is when my mother Jean Janett Johnson Haag first learned how to can and later was such a great cook. My mother canned not because she had a garden but, because she had a family. She purchased our vegetables and fruits at good produce sales and spent hours putting them into the canning jars. She then stored them in the fruit cellar in the basement where we kept our winter supplies.

Flowers were Grandma's Joy.
She enjoyed the intricate beauty of each blossom and bloom.
Her roses and chrysanthemums stand out in my mind as being the finest around.
When my grandmother died, I found the following poem by an unknown author in with her keepsakes. This speaks of her.
It reads as follows:

We all need the smile of a friend, and the caring of our family as long as we live upon this earth.

Jean Johnson Haag
1930-50's

1930-50's Jean Johnson Haag

Judy remembers Mom canning every year.
Because I helped her, I learned how to save money and food for the winter months.

1947-50 Mom and her sister Beverly canned together. Their hard work was accomplished in fewer hours at the Vocational School in Eau Claire, Wisconsin.  People could use their pressure cookers which saved much time. Especially when canning corn, green beans, and meats. It was a safer way to be assured you preserved foods in jars.
My parents rented a space in a local locker to keep some frozen foods.
No home freezers in those days.
Dad purchased beef and pork and chickens from farmers he became acquainted with while out in the field on business. All stored in our locker. 

This was how my parents preserved their foods.

The other side of the basement held the furnace and the coal bin and an area with clothes lines. The Washer was bolted to the floor in there.
Another small room with shelves held all of Mom's canned goods. Our supply for the winter.
Long stairway let up to the kitchen.

My parents first refrigerator purchased in 1942 was an original electric Coldspot .
(I grew up with it. I remember it being so tall, way over my head. Then I graduated from high school and it was so small, I towered over it.)
Our family still had this refrigerator when I was married in 1956.

My parents kept it when they moved back to Wisconsin. It became the pop and beer cooler.

When Aunt Beverly and Mother went to the Vocational School to can they used pressure cookers
similar to what is shown here. This allowed them to put up large quantities of food in a day.

In 1941,at the start of WWII, smaller, cast aluminum pressure cookers enjoyed widespread popularity in most American homes. The production of pressure cookers by eleven major manufacturers was tightly regulated during World War II, as aluminum was needed for the war effort, and it wasn't long before the manufacturing of aluminum pressure cookers came to a halt. Cooks held onto their prewar pressure cookers and often several families shared a single cooker. In a time when fuel and food were rationed and shortages were commonplace, the pressure cooker was fast becoming a necessity rather than a mere convenience.

During the war years larger canners made of steel (not the stainless kind) continued to manufactured under approval of the War Production Board for the extremely important victory gardens. Food and fuel shortages forced a return to home canning, and several government programs supported the home front. Read more about vintage and used pressure cookers and safety.

In 1945, with the war ending, the pent-up demand for pressure cookers was tremendous and soon there were 85 US manufacturers. Competition was steep and manufacturers tried to cut costs by producing cheaper, poor quality pressure cookers. Production methods favored quantity rather than quality and these inferior products flooded the market from the late 40's through 50's.

Busy cooks who had replied on their pre-war cookers rushed to buy new ones. New families were in the making and the newly married wives bought pressure cookers so they could cook the same recipes that mom made. Cooks suddenly found exploding pressure bombs in their kitchens and as the word spread about these flawed pressure cooker, people became reluctant to use them. The frequency of pressure cooker accidents founded the familiar expression of "...in a pressure cooker", implying disaster was imminent.

The old horror stories still abound, just as those aged, antique, and vintage pressure cookers still do. A great many of those dangerous old pressure cookers are still around, and are often sold at places such as EBAY, garage sales, and estate sales, as well as passed on from generation to generation as family keepsakes. Unfortunately the problems also persist to this day, as people find these poorly manufactured pressure cookers in the attics and basements of their grandmothers and great aunts and still try to use them.

From http://missvickie.com/library/history.html

Go there for additional information on pressure cookers and that era of canning in the home.

Walled off to the side of the basement was a large room which had a light fixture and many shelves along the wall for canned goods. It was also cooler so we kept apples, and potatoes down there, too. PICTURE

1857-1959

We often ate Duck for thanksgiving as Grandpa raised ducks and chickens in his side yard.

Raised chickens had eggs. Had cow and milked it for milk, cream and cheese.

Clara kept house for Grandpa after his wife died, and she was the one who canned and cooked all the food which Grandpa raised.
Corn and beans, potatoes and lettuce would always be served, and they were all from Grandpa's garden.

Gma Maude Rice Haag was raised in Cadott.
My father Waldro spent many of his growing years in Cadott with Gpa.

Benjamin Maude Haag
1878-1972

Benjamin or Haag Family
Raised on Farm in rural Wisconsin.
Raised own food and had cows and chickens so milk products and eggs were always available.
Canning was common with everyone in those days to save for the winter and most homes had root cellars to keep other foods like potatoes, apples, squash, et.
After marriage Gpa would sell eggs, milk and cream & vegetables to people in town.

Butter and a dozen eggs sold for 5¢. Milk and cream were like 10 & 15¢. A bushel of tomatoes or potatoes for a quarter. I found that hard to believe but now we can tell you some stories of what it cost us when we first were married and that was only 47 years ago in 2003.

Ella John Carstens Family Gardening, Canning

Del, talks about life with his family on the farm and in the city.
Beatrice, Nebraska was the beginning of his memories.

My parents, John and Ella Waltke Carstens lived on the farm when I was young near Beatrice, Nebraska.

Mother always had a garden and canned all of our food for winter. I remember her fixing sauerkraut in large crocks and letting it sit there for many days. The crocks were very large earthenware tubs which would be covered to keep the bugs out but let the sauerkraut ferment.

She also made pickles that way.

Her dill pickles were the best! They were large and sour. "I loved those!"

We ate her green beans, corn, tomatoes, meat, chicken.

Anything she could preserve in jars.

What couldn't go into jars was kept in a cool area in the basement of the house. 100# bags of potatoes, bushels of apples. 100# bags of buckwheat flour for baking pancakes.

Sauerkraut was one of the favorite things mother made, said Delmar. We would look forward to the day it was ready to eat. We would then have it with mashed potatoes. Oh that was so good!

Mother also used crocks like this for her pickles.

Gma Waltke made cheese. It was the smoothest and had caraway seeds in it.

The cheese was kept in a big barrel in the milk house. A windmill energized a pump which was close to their back door of the house. The pump brought up water which was pumped into a pipe which took the water into the milk house where there it filled a 50 gallon barrel. Food was put into jars with a string attached and hung into this water which was very cold. ( Nebraska.)
Overflow water from this barrel was piped into a horse tank behind the barn where the livestock (horses, cattle, pigs) were able to drink.

Gma cooked and canned on an old cook stove heated with wood.

The kitchen was very small with a stove in the center of the wall. Gpa's old chair sat next to the stove. He chewed Horseshoe tobacco and supervised. The Horseshoe tobacco came in little bars and had a metal horseshoe attached to it. Not too appetizing but Grandpa would sit in his chair and spit his wad toward the bucket which he often missed. The wad would sizzle all the way down their hot cook stove.

Things were not as clean as we think it should be today. I remember a very distinct aroma when entering that house. My mother was very clean, but her parents never had modern facilities anything like we know today.

I don't think Grandpa got the weekly bath that we received. His pants would get so stiff they would stand in the corner and would be like leather. I guess when they got too bad they threw them away.

Each year he would get new pants and wear them for church only or a community outing. He would roll up the trousers. The also wore white shirts to church. That was their Sunday Best.

Remember how difficult it was to keep clean in those days.

More on

Water Supplies and Usage.
Click to go to that sight.

Judy & Del Carstens
1956-Present 2003

It was also less expensive to can our food than to purchase it already canned.

We didn't have much of a garden at first but we were able to buy apples and tomatoes by the bushel when in season for about $1 a bushel, sometimes 50¢ a bushel.

I would put them up in jars, and it was so much fun to look into our closet on the shelf and see all the canned goods. We had a very high shelf in the Quonset Hut so I could stand on a ladder and store our food up high and out of the way. No basements here.

In later years, we rented a locker after purchasing a quarter of beef. When chickens were on sale we would freeze several of them at a time.

We could buy hamburger and hot dogs in those days 3# for a $1 bill.

(No taxes in Nebraska.)

Del remembers receiving lots of rhubarb from some gracious person. The problem was that Judy had to use everything and sometimes all at once. He never complained about what food he was fed.

He always remembered the days in the fox hole eating canned rations day after day. He also saw many poor people without enough food to eat and felt we needed to be thankful for what we have.

One day we had rhubarb for sauce at breakfast, and then again at lunch, and then again for supper. Del said, "Can't we save this and have it some other time?" That was one of the few times that he said, "This is enough for a while."

He has joked about this many times through the years, however, I never again fed him rhubarb three times a day!

Our First Home

Many times farmers would give us produce and especially, I remember sweet corn which had to be "put up" for the winter.
By now we had a freezer. I was then able to freeze corn which was much easier and less time consuming. Also, the corn tasted like fresh corn when eaten rather than overcooked as it tasted when coming from a can.
Green beans were also a must to freeze. Safer and better we think. Just like fresh, if prepared properly, never overdone like canned. I did borrow a pressure  canner to safely cook green beans and corn as well as meat products. It took much less time and was safer for us to eat.

We received beef, pork, chickens, eggs, milk, butter from the farmers in our parish and those meat products went into the freezer.

Here everyone preserved their foods from their gardens and from their hogs and chickens. It was very easy to get the needed foods to can or freeze just as it is in any rural setting. We had a small garden patch again where we raised some of our vegetables.

The cellar in the basement was once the coal bin and made a perfect place to put shelving and keep the canned goods. I put hundreds of quarts of vegetables and fruits up for the winter months.

The freezer would be full of frozen vegetables as well. Corn was one of the largest supplies that was put away. Anywhere from 40 to 100 packages every year. It was a favorite of the children and tasted like fresh corn off the cob.

We lived in Verdon, Nebraska at St. Mark's Lutheran Church during the summer while in Seminary. We worked the following years as Interim Pastor and confirmed a class during that  time.
Interim at Malcolm, Iowa for three parishes in One Pastorate in the '80's

First Lutheran in Gothenburg, Nebraska for a year in 1985. before retiring to Arizona.

This was our second Parsonage.

Depression World War II Meals

updated October 30, 2008