When Meals Nourish a Plot

The meals in Laura Ingalls Wilder’s series sounded, at times, sumptuous despite their plainness. In Laura’s fictionalized account of the childhood of her husband, Almanzo Wilder—one such dinner included “a plate of quivering head cheese, glass dishes of jams and jellies and preserves, and a tall pitcher of milk, and a steaming pan of baked beans with a crisp bit of fat pork in the crumbling brown crust.” Yet after the author Wendy McClure began cooking the on her family’s hardships: She wrote these things “about her husband after they had so many hard years together, trying to make a living off the land, and not very well sometimes.”