In Winter's Kitchen. Beth Dooley
it fail and leave the family without sustenance. It’s something we need to remember and to practice,” Jaradat said. “Relying on one variety of any plant is dangerous. It leaves the farmer vulnerable if the crop is struck with a blight, or pests, or foul weather.” He related how, in the US, a few early colonists tried to grow wheat on the East Coast. But it wasn’t until the mid-1800s that European settlers really planted wheat crops. The German Mennonites brought the best variety, Turkey red, to Kansas. It’s a high-gluten grain that makes beautiful flour and wonderful bread.
These German Mennonites were conscientious objectors, and they’d sought refuge from serving in their country’s army. Russia’s Catherine the Great had offered them asylum in return for growing wheat for her own soldiers. She provided them with large tracts of fertile land. But by the mid-1800s, the Russian government had begun meddling in the Mennonites’ affairs and pressuring them to turn their fertile parcels over to the rebellious, landless peasants.
A close-knit society, the Mennonites decided collectively to leave Russia to create a settlement in America. They were enticed by homesteading opportunities in the Midwest and encouraged by railroad companies seeking farmers to grow wheat for transport to the markets back east. To avoid having their precious wheat seeds confiscated at the Russian border, the women sewed them into their undergarments and planted them as soon as the immigrants had settled.
Within the next fifty years, Turkey red displaced corn as the Midwest’s primary crop, changing the region’s farm economy and landscape. Turkey red was well suited to its new home. Planted in the fall, it became dormant through the harsh winters and so was resistant to disease and fungus. When the weather warmed in the spring the wheat sprouted and grew into lush crops to harvest before the freeze.
Farm journals of that era detail the beauty of Turkey red’s burnished brown stalks, shimmering in the sun, rippling in the winds, and growing so tall a man could hide deep in the wheat fields. But the wheat’s majestic height, as well as its bounty, presented a challenge at harvest. Until the 1840s, crews of men used long-handled sickles to cut down the wheat, and with their neighbors, bundled and brought in the harvest. Then the mechanical combine or harvester, invented in Scotland, made its way across the ocean to Midwest farms. Though clunky and slow-moving, this machine helped to ease physical labor and expedite the harvest. These machines were expensive to buy and difficult to maintain, so neighboring farmers shared the combines and worked together to bring in everyone’s harvest as a yearly community event.
“Bringing in the sheaves” was sweaty, backbreaking work. Harvesters toiled in the hot, dusty fields as their combine’s loud, grinding gears screeched in their ears. To incent workers through their arduous, twelve- to fifteen-hour shifts, women cooked and presented the men with huge, bountiful meals and snacks.
“We often competed to serve the best spreads,” wrote prairie-life authors Carrie and Felicia Adele Young of their childhoods in North Dakota. The sisters cooked all day for three or four dozen men—breakfast, forenoon or mid-morning lunch, dinner at noon, afternoon lunch, and supper at the end of the workday. Roasts, stews, breads, pies, cookies, cakes: the list of food seemed endless. Girls stayed home from school to help. Usually it took a week to complete. “We knew that a well-fed worker was a hard worker, and the better the food, the more quickly the crew would finish the job.”
Feeding so many helpful neighbors and hired hands was the cost of bringing in the crops. Soon as every farm’s crop was in, the whole community danced. “Not a simple, Saturday-night dance, but a big hoedown where the whole community joined in and danced to the fiddlers late into the night under the huge harvest moon.”
It took those crews several days to cover about 160 acres of wheat, which yielded fifty bushels. As they went from farm to farm, the men worked together and reaped, threshed, and winnowed the grain. By the 1920s, as the fields expanded and demand for wheat continued to grow, migrant workers traveled by train from Oklahoma, through the Dakotas, Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Canada. Newspapers from that era reported boxcars packed so tightly men stood shoulder to shoulder en route to the wheat fields. By the early 1930s, American radicalism, in the form of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), spread rapidly so that it became unsafe to ride the freights without a “red card.” Soon laborers began striking for better wages and living conditions. But the farmers responded with vigilante mobs that drove the agitators from the fields at gunpoint. Class warfare broke out in the most “American” regions of rural America.
Following World War II machines became increasingly efficient and eventually evolved to replace human labor. Today, one person, driving an enormous combine that cuts and processes the grain at once, covers fifteen hundred acres in two to three days. Older farmers remember the hoedown dances and community celebrations with fondness, but very few of them miss the much harder, grueling fieldwork.
Bread brings us together—to break bread is to commune—and ties us to centuries of ritual. One summer, when our boys were toddlers, a neighbor and intrepid baker stopped by with a jar of five-year-old sourdough starter. While I’d been reading about how to make sourdough for years, I’d been too chicken-livered to try it on my own. After all, I just squeaked by with a C–in high-school chemistry.
I packed the starter in the coolest spot in our car the afternoon we headed to a rental cottage on Madeline Island for a week’s vacation. The broad expanse of Lake Superior, with its dunes and grass, was the closest thing in Minnesota to the Atlantic beaches where both Kevin and I had spent childhood summers. I wanted a place within driving distance where our children could build sandy memories of their own.
In the cottage’s narrow, dim galley kitchen, while the boys napped, I followed our neighbor’s copious instructions, typed out double spaced. I patiently fed the starter for three days and then created the dough. The loaf it yielded was not the most perfect, with one side heavy and a little too moist, but it was good enough to slice and toast, with a distinct sour tang and toothy tug. And I saved a little of the starter, feeding it at the same time every morning through the week, in a ritual that followed breakfast. Indeed the starter seemed alive, and I named it Maddy. On the kitchen’s cracked linoleum counters I kneaded dough, as the late-afternoon sun glanced off the lake and waves lapped the dock in rhythm with the boys’ easy breathing, and realized moments of stunning grace.
The word focaccia, the Italian flatbread, is derived from the Latin word focus, meaning hearth or fireside, the focus of the family and home. That summer my bread-making brought a focus to our week, during which I also breathed, and rose, and felt myself come more alive. A simple mixture of water and flour fed the bacteria, which became the agent for leavening bread, which then tasted better every time I baked. I reveled in the ancient practice, and was humbled by the realization that we need so little to eat well. Even when fields lie fallow and the snow knee deep, with the larder plundered and just flour and water left, anyone can still make good bread.
That summer, our oldest son, Matt, learned to jump off the dock into Kevin’s arms and relax into a dead man’s float. We caught enough fireflies to light a full mason jar, and dug to China on the beach. But once we’d come back home, in a mad flurry of reentry, I neglected to feed the starter. Within two days it flattened out, and I grieved the end of the season and another of our boys’ summers crossed off the calendar.
My generous neighbor shared another batch of her starter, and so I tried to make bread once more. But those loaves were not nearly as successful, missing the summer sourdough’s distinctly tart taste and chewy crust. Perhaps they needed the sun-kissed magic of the cottage kitchen, the cold and flinty lake, those pink streaks of sunset, the music of the loons, and the nearby sailboat’s clanging halyards that sent us to sleep each starry night.
In our region’s first cookbook, Buckeye Cookery and Practical Housekeeping, published in Minneapolis in 1877, author Estelle Woods Wilcox advised her readers to be choosy when selecting flour. “The quality of the flour will determine the quality of your bread,” she wrote. Back then flour was sold in bulk or directly from the mill in large sacks. Wilcox instructed home