Indiana...

Well, food peeps, I'm going on a trip. To Indiana. & I'm sorry if any of you out there are from Indiana, but I have lived there before, and let's just say, the food leaves a lot to be desired. Or, perhaps, I only think it does. My days in Indiana were not the best of my life, so perhaps the my food experiences were a bit tainted by that. The task I have set for my time away is to chronicle my food adventures in Indiana -- and along the way. My primary question: Is there good food in Indiana? I think not. I'm out to prove myself wrong.


This should be an adventure...

Production & Preservation

Baking Powder Biscuits

2 cups Flour

4 teaspoons Baking Powder

1 teaspoon Salt

3 tablespoons Lard

¾ cup Milk

End. 

I come from farmers. My maternal grandparents and great-grandparents were farmers, dairy farmers who dabbled in raising beef cattle, chickens, and pigs. Though my great-grandparents, Roland and Reatha McLaughlin, I mainly remember by the large portraits my mother has hanging on her living room wall, I remember dearly my grandparents, Virgil and Violet (Baker) McLaughlin, who carefully lived off the land. They tilled the soil of their Western Pennsylvania farm, planted corn, soybeans, wheat and hay on the plots of land that surrounded the dairy farm, enough to feed their livestock and sell the excess. My grandfather’s garden, neatly planted along the stretched out strings he’d use to outline the pattern of his summer garden was situated conveniently behind the white clapboard farmhouse. If the land and weather cooperated, that summer garden would feed his family of ten easily, for in my grandparent’s house, there was a sharp division of labor along gender lines where he and his sons would work the land, and my grandmother and her daughters would cook and can, preserving the summer labor, making it last the entire year. 

            My mother continued this legacy, much as she could being married to a “city-slicker” who knew nothing about farming or gardening. She planted and harvested her own large summer garden, and organically raised 200 chickens annually to share with her family and friends, long before organic was “en vogue.” She contributed to a long legacy of living off the land, and though the division of labor was not nearly as stark in my family, my father was supportive and willing to learn about the construction of chicken coops, farming, and gardening. Every summer of my younger years was spent planting potatoes, picking beans, husking corn, and canning tomatoes, beans, corn, peas; those lessons learned are invaluable.

My family lived simply, ate simply, exemplifying tenets of preservation and conservation.  My grandmother, Violet, always kept a bowl of dry ingredients for homemade biscuits on her kitchen countertop.  I never saw that bowl empty. One had to be prepared for hunger or visitors, she’d say. Biscuits were a staple food for the McLaughlin clan. The practice never waivered, though; she kept that bowl on the countertop long after her sons and daughters had married and had families of their own. My grandmother’s hobby was food—baking and cooking meals for her family were part of her identity. Most of her ingredients came either fresh from my grandfather’s garden or from the canned goods she had preserved. Along with her covered bowl of biscuit ingredients, she’d also keep a mixing bowl of sugar and butter covered overnight, for those special times she’d make her white coconut cake for dessert. Letting the sugar and butter blend together overnight proved to be the “secret ingredient” of future generations getting her white coconut cake recipe just right. She was frugal. I’d often seen her take a hunk of cheddar cheese and peel away any mold that had surfaced, using the “good parts” in squash or broccoli casseroles. Cheese was expensive and already aged, she’d say, and I admit, mixed altogether in a squash casserole, it didn’t seem matter. Nothing ever tasted so good, then or now.