The above are only a few examples of how "the actions of a few" made huge changes. "The actions of a few" can be a powerful thing!

I don't even BEGIN to include myself or my small actions in the grand scheme of history... but I like to think I've made a small difference. That I've given inspiration and confidence to a small group of people that helped them to become more self-sufficient, to take the power of feeding their families into their own hands, to learn a skill that will serve them well. I'd like to think I have played a small part in that.

Can on, my friends!

In a large bowl, mix flours, baking soda and salt. In a seperate bowl, mix eggs, molasses and buttermilk. Pour liquid ingredients into dry ingredients and stir until well mixed. Do not beat. Grease a 9x13" pan. Put mixture in pan. Fill another 9x13" pan with water and put on bottom rack of oven. Preheat oven to 200 degrees. Bake at 200 degrees for 3-4 hours. Cut into 16 pieces. Serve hot or cold. Great with butter and/or honey. Makes 16 servings. 

When I was growing up, my grandmothers, my Mama, and my aunts all gathered together to can... "many hands make light work." And it almost felt like a party, except for the hard work, but even stringing and breaking bushels of green beans or peeling peaches until the juice ran down and dripped off your elbows, became fun with all the talk and laughter around the table or sitting in the shade of my Nanny's apple tree. These times of hard work have become some of my most treasured memories.

Having family or neighbors to help with the "big work" was even more important in the "Little House" days...

From Little House in the Big Woods...

Uncle Henry came to help Pa butcher the hog. He brought Aunt Polly's sharpened knife.  They made a bonfire and heated a big kettle of  water over it.  The pig pen was nearby.  Laura plugged her ears with her fingers because she didn't want to hear the pig squeal as it was being killed. "After that, Butchering Time was great fun."

Uncle Henry and Pa were "jolly".  There was spare ribs for dinner. Pa promised the girls they could play with the bladder, which he blew up like a balloon. They played games like volley ball and kick ball with the blown-up bladder. He also gave the girls the pig's tail, which was roasted, sizzled, fried and sprinkled with salt. They ate all the meat off the bones, knowing there wouldn't be another pig's tail until next year.

The hog was scalded in hot water.  They laid it on a board.  Then it was scraped with knives until all the coarse bristles came off the skin.  Then the hog was hung in a tree.  The insides were taken out, and it was left hanging to cool.  Then it was taken down, and cut up.

From this hog came: hams, shoulders, side meat, spare-ribs, belly, heart, liver, tongue, and headcheese.  The dishpan that was full of bits and pieces would be made into sausage. The meat was laid on a board and sprinkled with salt. The hams and shoulders were pickled in brine, then smoked.

Pa said, "You can't beat hickory-cured ham."

Uncle Henry went back home after dinner.  Pa went into the Big Woods to do more work.  Laura and  Mary helped Ma with carrying wood and watching the fire. Ma put lard in big iron pots on the cookstove.  Ma skimmed out brown "cracklings"....she would use them to flavor "johnny-cake" later.

Ma made headcheese. She scraped and cleaned the head carefully.  She boiled it until all the meat  fell off the bones.  Then the meat was chopped into fine pieces and seasoned with pepper, salt and spices.  It was mixed with pot-liquor and cut into slices after it cooled.

The little pieces of lean and fat that  came off the larger pieces were made into sausage.  Sausage balls were put in a pan out in the shed to freeze.  These were good to eat all winter.

When Butchering Time was over there were:  sausages, headcheese, big jars of lard, a keg of white saltpork out in the shed, smoked ham and shoulders in the attic.

Preparing for winter was important in the "Little House" days... with the days of big supermarkets, truck deliveries every day, and greenhouse foods, we've moved away from the necessity of "putting up" for the winter... I think it's time we got back to those days... what a peaceful, comfortable, secure feeling it gives me when I know that if a winter storm or a hurricane hits, I've got plenty for us to eat without having to brave the elements to grab that last loaf of bread or gallon of milk everyone seems to rush out to get. I like to call it "food insurance!"

From Little House in the Big Woods

One morning Pa went away before daylight with the horses and wagon, and that night he came home with a wagonload of fish. The big wagon box was piled full, and some of the fish were as big as Laura. Pa had gone to Lake Pepin and caught them all with a net.

Ma a cut large slices of flaky white fish, without one bone, for Laura and Mary. They all feasted on the good, fresh fish. All they did not eat fresh was salted down in barrels for the winter.

Pa owned a pig. It ran wild in the Big Woods, living on acorns and nuts and roots. Now he caught it and put it in a pen made of logs, to fatten. He would butcher it as soon as the weather was cold enough to keep the pork frozen.

Laura woke up and heard the pig squealing. Pa jumped out of bed, snatched his gun from the wall, and ran outdoors. Then Laura heard the gun go off, once, twice.

When Pa came back, he told what had happened. He had seen a big black bear standing beside the pigpen. The bear was reaching into the pen to grab the pig, and the pig was running and squealing. Pa saw this in the starlight and he fired quickly. But the light was dim and in his haste he missed the bear. The bear ran away into the woods, not hurt at all.

Laura was sorry Pa did not get the bear. She liked bear meat so much. Pa was sorry, too, but he said: "Anyway, I saved the bacon.”

The garden behind the little house had been growing all summer. It was so near the house that the deer did not jump the fence and eat the vegetables in the daytime, and at night Jack kept them away. Sometimes in the morning there were little hoof-prints among the carrots and the cabbages. But Jack's tracks were there, too, and the deer had jumped right out again.

Now the potatoes and carrots, the beets and turnips and cabbages were gathered and stored in the cellar, for freezing nights had come.

Onions were made into long ropes, braided together by their tops, and then were hung in the attic beside wreaths of red peppers strung on threads. The pumpkins and the squashes were piled in orange and yellow and green heaps in the attic's corners.

The barrels of salted fish were in the pantry, and yellow cheeses were stacked on the pantry shelves...

...The attic was a lovely place to play. The large, round, colored pumpkins made beautiful chairs and tables. The red peppers and the onions dangled overhead. The hams and the venison hung in their paper wrappings, and all the bunches of dried herbs, the spicy herbs for cooking and the bitter herbs for medicine, gave the place a dusty spicy smell.

Often the wind howled outside with a cold and lonesome sound. But in the attic Laura and Mary played house with the squashes and the pumpkins, and everything was snug and cosy.

When their children were growing up, the grew, raised, or made most of what they consumed. Granny milked the cows, everybody living in the valley around them could hear her singing old hymns as she went to milk early every morning and at sundown each evening. She pieced quilts by hand, and made everything, down to their underwear.

By the time I can remember, they had slowed down a little, but not by much... Granny had indoor plumbing and an automatic washing machine, but wouldn't wash the men's dungarees in it for fear of breaking it... as much as she did for herself and made do with so little, it always amazed me that she sent the denim work clothes out to be laundered... every week the laundry truck came by and picked up the work clothes and delivered them later on hangers, cleaned and pressed.

Until I was half grown I thought Granny Smith apples were the ones that grew in Granny's front yard. She taught us grandchildren a great game with those apples... she would sharpen a flexible stick for us to push into the apples that were laying on the ground in the yard, then like an old fashioned sling, we would sling those apples down through the pasture below. We thought it was a grand game and never realized until years later, that she was getting us to clear her yard of old apples (she wouldn't let us throw the ones still on the tree, sly woman that she was!)

Granny was as prepared for the future as anybody could be, it didn't matter when company arrived or how many dropped in for supper, there was always a jar of something to be opened, a pan of steaming fluffy biscuits quickly whipped up, some country ham or bacon fried up... we never went away hungry. I remember being sent down on many occasions to fetch something from the root cellar... this was a wondrous place for a child to explore... it was dark and cool and a welcome from the summer heat, it smelled of dampness and dirt and faintly of salt-cured ham, and I loved that place. There were wooden shelves all along the walls, lined with blue tinted mason jars filled with green beans, and corn, and pickles and tomatoes, and soup and fruit, jellies and jams, and all manner of food from the previous year's harvest. There were salted sides of pork-- bacon, ham and fatback, and rows of pottery crocks lined up on the packed dirt floor, each filled with pickled beans, pickled corn, sauerkraut, salt-pickled cucumbers, chow-chow and more.

I remember when I was 4 or 5 years old "helping" Granny make jelly from the blackberries that grew on the briar bushes along the fence behind Granny's enormous garden. There was no "Sure-Jell" in Granny's jelly. She cooked the fruit and strained it, then cooked the juice for hours and hours, steaming up her kitchen with the wonderful smell of blackberry juice. When the fruit juice had cooked down and thickened enough to suit her, she would pour the dark purple goodness into sterilized jars and top them with lids to seal up to enjoy the next winter with home churned butter on one of her delicious "cat-head" biscuits. When it got too hot in the kitchen, we were allowed to go out onto the screened back porch and get a drink of water from the bucket that had been drawn up from the well earlier that morning... we used an old tin ladle to drink from, all of us kids taking turns drinking from the same ladle... a coke couldn't have tasted any better than that cool fresh water out of a tin dipper. And later on that evening we would have a homemade blackberry cobbler made with what was left of the juicy berries we had helped Granny pick that morning.