the little house on the prairie book set

In summertime or fall, pioneers might feast on bear meat (Laura’s favorite), buffalo, venison, elk, and antelope, unconstrained by the big game laws of the Old World. While Laura’s family is concerned throughout the book with packing away stores to make it through harsh winters, Wilder tends to gloss over the risk of famine or even death. Pioneer food was often stodgy, plain, or altogether absent. “I haven’t read these books in more than a decade, but the memories are so vivid to me.” Yet modern reconstructions suggest that these treats, no more than unsweetened scraps of fried dough, are bland and unappealing. This proto-donut still lingers in her imagination and, as a child, seemed to her “the most delicious thing in the world,” she says. Food writer and Atlas Obscura contributor Anne Ewbank remembers an account of homemade vanity cakes particularly acutely. Instead, with the possible exception of The Long Winter, the books err towards what Grady characterizes as “an almost pornographic pleasure in describing butter churning and hog slaughtering and corn harvesting.”Įven the individual dishes, however lovingly described, may not stand up to scrutiny.

But “self-sufficiency” often actually meant periods of hardship and famine, with families struggling to survive long, difficult winters. “ are designed to codify the myth of the self-sufficient pioneers, pulling themselves up by their bootstraps and living off the fat of the land,” writes Constance Grady for Vox.

An 1873 poster shows an idealized portrait of the pioneer farmer on his land. For the generations of readers who grew up with these stories, these romanticized accounts sometimes leave readers with a false impression of how good the Ingalls family had it. It was too pretty to eat.”īut even those celebrations of food show why these books need reconsideration. Hard candy, made with boiled molasses and sugar, is made by drizzling the dark syrup “in little streams” onto “clean, white snow from outdoors.” A candy heart, printed with red letters, is “wrapped carefully in her handkerchief until got home and could put it away to keep always. A salted pig’s tail, sizzling over the flames, is so good that the main character, Laura, scarcely minds that she’s burnt her finger. Mealtime scenes are some of the most memorable in the books, laid out meticulously in calm, deliberate prose. Yet there are still those who love the books, celebrating them in memoirs, blogs and listicles alike-often with a particular focus on the novels’ food.

In June 2018, in fact, the American Library Association excised Wilder’s name from the Children’s Literature Legacy Award book prize due to these concerns. Many readers see them as a racist relic worth removing from the children’s literature canon altogether. Nowadays, however, the books are divisive.

The little house on the prairie book set