Farm Girl Read Online Free PDF

have toasters in those days, but she could toast bread in the oven. Sometimes she bought Karo syrup for pancakes, or she’d make her own syrup with sugar and water.
    She used to make cottage cheese. We always milked two cows, and there was a separator by the milk house. She would separate the cream and feed the skim milk to the hogs or chickens. She’d set some whole milk back on the cookstove, where it would get firm. Uncle Anton called that clabber, he ate that and thought it was so good. Mother liked the clabber, too, but I didn’t care for it. She used the clabber to make cottage cheese.
    We made our own ice cream using milk that still had the cream. Mother baked cookies, cakes, pies, and we’d also have canned fruit for dessert. She kept Nestle’s cocoa powder to mix with milk, because that’s the only way I’d drink milk except for when Dad milked the cows.
    I had a big tin cup that I took out at milking time, and Dad would squirt the milk right into my cup. I always wanted to be around when my Dad milked. I’d take what we called “the dish,” a pan with a lid and sides, and I’d fill it with milk to set by the barn for the cats. We had thirteen cats, and they’d meow and meow when they saw me coming with the dish.
    At the house we’d throw stuff out back for the cats, and they’d sit on the back step meowing, waiting for us to throw something out. Mother never let the cats in. A time or two I’d sneak a kitten in, but she always found out and made me take it right back out.
    Once there was a mouse in the kitchen, and Mother caught it with its tail under a board.
    She said, “Go get a cat.”
    I brought one in, but it was so scared to be in the house, in unfamiliar territory, he didn’t pay any attention to the mouse. Mother picked the mouse up by its tail and threw it out back so the cats could get it.
    We always had a big garden and raised tomatoes, onions, carrots, green beans, corn and potatoes. The onions, carrots and potatoes went into bins in the cave and we’d eat them all winter. By spring we were eating pretty shriveled little potatoes.
    We always raised watermelons, too. One year we had such a good crop, Dad put them in the wagon insulated by hay, and we ate watermelon until Thanksgiving.
    In the cave would be big round crocks of sauerkraut Mother made during the summer, and dill pickles, sometimes ham or salt pork. There were shelves full of quart and half gallon jars with corn, beans, tomatoes, cherries, peaches.
    To make sauerkraut, she had this long board about eight inches wide and 2 ½ feet across with two metal pieces that she’d slide the cabbage across and slice it, sliding it again and again until the cabbage was all sliced up. She put the sliced, raw cabbage in a twenty gallon crock jar, poured water over it and set the crock down the basement, weighting the top of the sauerkraut with a plate and a rock on top, then another plate or lid on the top of the crock so bugs wouldn’t get in. You didn’t add vinegar because it made its own as it fermented.
    It stayed down there all winter, and it would be at least a month before it was ready. The cabbage would be limp and fermented, and Mother would heat it up to serve as a side dish with our canned meat.
    Mother would cook the meat from butchering and put it in jars, processing it in the boiler for about an hour. We ate a lot of canned meat. When we went to town, our treat was bologna in a ring and crackers. Coming home from town, Mother sliced the bologna to eat with crackers. I thought bologna was so good and such a treat.
    One time when I was living in Lincoln, a friend from high school came home with me and tried our canned meat.
    She said, “How can you think bologna is good when you have this delicious canned meat?”
    Dad and Uncle Ford kept hogs and always butchered a hog in the fall. I couldn’t stand to see the killing but I liked to be there afterward. They had a barrel full of hot water, and they’d stick that hog into