Hog Jowls » Missouri

Little House

Skyring — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 05:04:40 +0000

The books

The first edition of Little House on the Prairie

The Little House on the Prairie books are well-beloved in America. And the world. Tales of family life and struggles on the frontier. Hazards of life and community that rarely touch the real lives of we children of later years, but were very real to the pioneers.

They were hardy folk, not because they wanted it that way, but because they had to be. They tamed the land, they built the towns, they made a nation.

In Australia it was much the same. Not so heavy on the snowstorms, but our pioneers had to cope with drought and bushfires. And locust swarms, eating all and breaking hearts. Two very different lands, but here the essential realities of family survival in a harsh but ultimately rewarding wilderness were the same. The land tested the occupants, and the hardy overcame the challenges, found love and began their own families in a slightly less forbidding environment. Ultimately, it is not the land that is the story, it is the people.

There were nine Little House books in the series:

Little House in the Big Woods: Laura’s early childhood in Wisconsin from about 1870.
Farmer Boy: The early life of Laura’s later husband, Almanzo Wilder, in New York State.
Little House on the Prairie: Laura’s childhood home in Kansas.
On the Banks of Plum Creek: The Ingalls family in Minnesota, about 1875.
By the Shores of Silver Lake: De Smet, South Dakota in 1879
The Long Winter: The severe winter of 1880/81 in South Dakota
Little Town on the Prairie: Laura’s adolescence in De Smet, 1881/82
These Happy Golden Years: Laura’s teens and courting with Almanzo.
The First Four Years: The first years of married life.

These books were written and published in Mansfield, Missouri between 1932 and 1943, and during this period Laura became famous as a beloved author.

A later generation rediscovered the stories when they were made into a television series later, which brought a new boost of life to the books. Safe to say that Laura Ingalls Wilder is a name beloved by people around the world. In America, she occupies a pedestal with Louisa May Alcott, Lucy Maud Montgomery and others.

The place

Skyring in Missouri

Driving a Dodge between Kansas City and Oklahoma City, a small part of the way on Route 66, we booklovers were drawn to the home of Laura Ingalls Wilder. I and a precocious lad of three in the third seat row were the only males in the vehicle, with three generations of women my passengers. I merely operated the steering and foot paddles – all of the direction came from beside and behind me. Not to mention the occasionally snarky voice of the GPS if I made a wrong turn.

Look, Wanda the GPS voice, it’s not as easy as you might think, driving an unfamiliar vehicle on the wrong side of the road. Every intersection, I had to think, “Left is loose, Right is tight.” And every now and then I’d get it wrong, usually when I was feeling confident and satisfied. Luckily my passengers were awake, and the shrieks of dismay and outrage would remind me that I wasn’t in Oz any more.

There was a little fiddly bit of country road before we got there. Themed motels popped up on hillsides. We rounded a bend, and there it was, historic house and farm on one side of the road, car park – and a thoughtful and very welcome amenities block – on the other.

We got out, stretched our legs, used the facilities – it had been a long drive from Kansas City – and posed for photographs beside the sign. I had lugged my taxidriver uniform to the far side of the road, and here I was driving a van load of lovely ladies, opening doors and tucking them into their seatbelts, doing my taxidriver thing, and I wasn’t going to let the occasion pass unrecorded.

This is Rocky Ridge Farm where Laura wrote her books, though it isn’t the subject of any of them. It’s now a shrine to her, her family, and her books. And to America.

If I edit this in visual, I’ll lose the map, but the link remains:

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The house

Rocky Ridge Farm

Having the carpark on the other side of the road leaves the farm looking much as it must have during the years that Laura and Almanzo worked the land, at least up until about 1960, by which time they had both departed. We walked up the drive, past old trees planted a century gone, Halloween decorations here and there. Left was the store, ahead the museum and reception, right the old farmhouse, looking as genuine an American residence as ever I’ve seen.

A little house in its own right, it has grown steadily larger. Originally little more than a kitchen and bedroom, it expanded with the increasing prosperity of the Wilder family, growing rooms and windows and levels.

The entry fee was modest, well worth admission to the museum, a treasure trove of Laura Ingalls Wilder and her books. Here was Pa’s fiddle, from the pages of the earliest book and the earliest years of Laura’s infancy. Still brought out and played every year.

A covered wagon, chairs, desks, craft, photographs, the family bible, a shelf of translated editions of the books. Honestly, I could have staid a week and not admired every item. The real Laura Ingalls Wilder fans must live in rapture here.

The house is accessible from the museum. Small groups under the direction of a guide tour regularly. We entered the oldest part of the house, shoulder to shoulder in the tiny rooms, looking at the original furnishings, listening to the guide talk of the history and people of the cosy home.

The rooms grew bigger with the decades, reflecting the success of the farm and the books. We looked at the places where Laura worked, setting her memories down on paper. Here, in the heart of America, she poured hers out, telling of dangers, romance, nostalgia and childhood dreams.

We finished our tour in a large room with a pleasant outlook. The culmination of a life of effort, Laura would have been at home here, answering her fan mail, writing further books, enjoying retirement.

We left the house for the visitor centre, sitting in on an audio visual narrative of Laura’s life, and then browsing through the shop, with sets of books, biographies, photographs, postcards, craft items and clothing.

The other house

Once the royalties began flowing in, Laura’s daughter Rose bought a house from the Sears catalogue and erected it for her parents over the other side of the hill. It’s within walking distance, but in a car it takes a few minutes to circle around, park and walk up the hill.

Here another guide led us through the house, which must have seemed ultra modern when it was built. Many of the features, such as built-in wardrobes, we take for granted now, but were the amazement of the country when new. Laura and Almanzo lived here for a while, but eventually returned to their homely house with its happy memories.

The key

Rocky Ridge scarecrows

There is no cafe or restaurant at Rockt Ridge Farm, but food is the link that binds America to the past and to each other. The Little House Cookbook: Frontier Foods from Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Classic Stories is on sale in the gift shop.

Cornmeal Mush, Bean Porridge (along with the famous rhyme) and Corn Dodgers. Potato Cakes, Creamed Carrots, Fried Parsnips and Succotash, Ma’s Green Tomato Pickles.

And a hundred more, each with a story or snippet of historical information and link to the books. This is a cookbook with depth and flavour, stick-to-your-ribs food to survive a long winter or spend a day on the farm, stick-to-your-brain facts of days long gone.

These are the foods that Laura ate and wrote about through her life. For modern America, long used to bland, processed food, this book is a refreshing taste, a flavour and savour of the real roots of the land.

–Skyring

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Looking for America

Skyring — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 11:48:16 +0000

The song

“Kathy, I’m lost,” I said, though I knew she was sleeping
I’m empty and aching and I don’t know why
Counting the cars on the New Jersey Turnpike
They’ve all gone to look for America
All gone to look for America
All gone to look for America

The quest

This song has always intrigued me. How do you look for America? How do you know when you’ve found it? Now, whenever I am planning an American trip, I put this song on the radio, open the door, lean over the roof of the cab and wonder what I will find. My eyes and dreams follow the airliners as they rise into the sky, little winking points of light over Mount Majura, and I sigh, dreaming of my next visit.

They’ve all gone to look for America…

I’ve looked for America out of the windows of countless planes. I remember my first excited glimpse of the dawning coastline north of Los Angeles, then the sprawl of the great city and a white Hollywood sign. Or, should I count my earlier midnight view of glowing lava far below as we passed over Hawai’i on the long hop from Sydney?

I’ve felt close to finding America in a dozen places. The original star-spangled banner in the Smithsonian. Columbia. The longhorns in Fort Worth. Driving a big Chrysler down Route 66. Looking into the empty, aching pit of Ground Zero. Lifting my gaze to meet that of Lady Liberty. Fort Sumter a low shape in Charleston Harbor. Little Round Top, Devils Den, Gettysburg. A dozen long and lonely interstates. Niagara Falls linking two nations. The Carnegie Deli. The Marina Safeway: Golden Gate on one side, Alcatraz on the other. Or Arizona, oil bubbles leaking to the surface seventy years on.

The place

Norm Lambert: rolls and jowls

I found America near Springfield, Missouri. We’d left Kansas City that morning, found the home of Laura Ingalls Wilder of Little House on the Prairie fame about lunch time, we’d driven another hour since and we was famished.

Middle of Missouri, middle of America, our van one of dozens in the parking lot, our restaurant a metal shed.

Inside, there were walls lined with numberplates from every State in the Union, and many from overseas – the first one I spotted was from the Northern Territory, its markings the ochre dust of outback Australia.

In this place, just another restaurant out of millions, I was able to convince myself that I had found America. In essence, in microcosm. The real thing is out there,too vast and too complex to take in all at once. You could spend a lifetime looking for America and never satisfy yourself that you were there. In Lambert’s Cafe, I knew I was right in the heartland. In the guts of it.

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The plate

Outside, there was a sign saying “Enjoy Norm’s Hog Jowl”. I was sold, from the moment I saw it. I’d heard of hog jowls as a dish, I wasn’t sure what exactly to expect, but I knew that I wanted to try them, even if it involved slabs of pig’s face on my plate, looking up at me.

First, there were rolls being throwed. A voice on the far side of the hall sang out, “Hot rolls!”, and all around, hands rose in the air. Suddenly there were bread rolls whizzing past. They must employ off-season baseball pitchers or something. I tentatively waved my hand, wondering if maybe I should have brought along a catcher’s mitt, but before I knew it, my grasp was wrapped around the hottest, sweetest, softest bun in the world. Being beaned by these buns would be no hardship.

Oh Sweet Lord, this bun – and the several that followed it – were pure glory! Break them open, smear them with butter or sorghum, or just eat them as they come. It’s all good.

Then a cheerful young lady about a hundred kilos or so stopt by. “Okra?” she asked, and while the golden balls in the huge basin she carried looked appetising, we said that we had no plates yet.

“There’s your paper plates!” she said, pointing out a roll of brown kitchen paper with a jut of her chest.

We ript off a napkin each, and she ladled a golden mound on each. Okra, when battered and deepfried just right, is delicious.

And free. Okra balls, black-eyed peas, the rolls, the red beans, a few other “pass-around” dishes: all free, as much as you want, as long as you want. Seriously, so long as you are not a carnivore, you can stuff yourself full of wholesome, delicious food for nothing.

But you want to save a little room for the main. All right, a lot of room. These serving sizes are huge. The hamburgers aren’t your quarter-pounders, hell no, you get a full pound of prime meat in each pattie, and they are served on skillets.

That’s my order of hog jowls. Not what I was expecting. The jowls had been sliced up into what looked like small bacon rashers, and there was about a week’s worth in the bowl. Sides of red beans and peaches, a few salad items, cornbread and pass-around fried potato. Flooded down with a bucket of root beer. This was heaven, right here.

My companions ordered chicken-fried steak and ham. Ham like you’ve never seen it: thick slabs about the size of the plate. And these were not dainty little plates. These were platters and skillets loaded down with tucker.

My hog jowls were loaded down with strips of fat, but the meat of the cheek was lighter than bacon. Lush and succulent, my sides of peaches and red beans complemented the meat well. The fried potato and onions were simply awesome. A free side dish, I could have cheerfully munched on them for a light lunch all by themselves. The square of cornbread was a little dry, but honestly, it would have to be God’s own cornbread to compete with those sweet rolls that kept flying around the room.

I tasted my companions’ chicken-fried steak and ham. They begged me to eat more, in fact, but I was hard-pressed to polish off my bowl of jowls. Their meals were every bit as good as mine. This was good food, well-cooked, served with flair. No wonder some days there is a two hour wait to be seated.

Dessert was on offer afterwards, but we looked around, each of us strained to finish what we’d ordered for the main course, and we declined. We past on coffee as well. If we tried to fit anything else in, we’d waddle and slosh on our way back to the van.

The key

There is a lot to love and hate about America. For every grand and noble place or concept or act of glory, there is something low and abhorrent. A nation founded on liberty – and slavery. The best medical science in the world, but many citizens cannot afford basic health care. Grand buildings a few blocks away from mean hovels. A great gap between rich and poor.

Lambert’s Cafe is a temple to greed and waste. The Travel Channel officially named it as “World’s Best Place to Pig Out”. Giving people ridiculous amounts of greasy food to stuff into their ample bellies. How many are thinking of starving children in Africa as they cram in the last crumb of corn bread?

The walls are covered in Americana. License plates, old adverts, hokey pictures. It is a microcosm of the nation, in time and space.

The atmosphere is fun and exciting. Rolls hurtling through the air, servers ladling out helpings of American staples, colourful and huge beverage containers. Everyone is happy.

This is a place of dreams and greed and commercial enterprise, corn and hokum, pride and size. It’s just a big tin shed with a homely front. It’s a legend, a family tradition, a local showpiece.

And it is America. Every little bit of it. It is the Stars and Stripes waving outside, it is the South reborn, it is coffee triumphing over tea, right down to the very name of the thing.

You want America, it is here, fat and happy. I love it.

–Skyring

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