Confidence in the Kitchen: Sharing Cooking Experiences with Your Preschool Child

If you’ve read any of the Little House books, you know that Wilder is a descriptive writer. She gives some idea of how things were cooked in frontier times. What Walker does is to expound further and give enough details that you can replicate closely what Laura, Mary and their mother did.

Though I have not queried my four-year-old protégée on the matter, I suspect that my interest in this book is stronger than hers. I loved Wilder’s writing as a child and recall that in the third grade our teacher read aloud Little House in the Big Woods. I have the whole set and am saving them for when my protégée’s interest may meet with mine. I still feel nostalgic about those stories and even translated a couple dozen pages into French for a translation project in graduate school.

This cookbook brings back fond memories as it is filled with illustrations by Garth Williams who illustrated the editions of the Wilder writings being saved on my bookshelf. The departure point for each of the recipes is a quotation from one of the books. This is the third edition of the book which has been in print since 1979. It has won many awards including New York Times Book Review Outstanding Book of the Year.

Walker divides the book thus, Food in the Little Houses; The Cook’s Domain; Staples from the Country Store; Foods from the Woods; Wilds and Waters; Foods from Tilled Fields; Foods from Gardens and Orchards; Foods from the Barnyard; and Thirst Quenchers and Treats.

For each recipe, she lists the general ingredient first and then her precise measurement for the same. Some of my favorites are Molasses-on-Snow Candy, Hard Cheese, Lard and Cracklings, Dried Apple and Raisin Pie, Graham Bread and Crab-Apple Jelly.

The one I found really interesting was for lemonade. It is made by slicing the lemons thinly, and layering with sugar. Next, let stand for 30 minutes and then combine with water and ice. This is something I want to try this summer! I can see my protégée really getting into the sugar sprinkling.

Knowing how many of these recipes were prepared is enough. It would be fun to do a theme dinner with frontier foods sometime, but even if you never actually prepare a thing from the book, looking at it is definitely a culinary escape.

Walker, Barbara. The Little House Cookbook: Frontier Foods from Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Classic Stories. New York: Harper Collins, 1979.

ISBN: 0-06-446090-8

Scale 1-10 (1 too boring for words – 10 could see and taste as I read it) 

Overall Ratings: Culinary Escapism:8   Recipe Quality: 8