When I was about my daughter’s age, I devoured the Laura Ingalls Wilder series. Most people think of
Little House on the Prairie when they think of the Wilder series—but I always remember the first book:
Little House in the Big Woods.
Ma and Pa Wilder, with their three tiny daughters, hacking a living out of the wilderness with their own two hands, ingenuity, and a counterintuitive sense of abundance.
Pa spends all day in the Big Woods trapping, hunting, and fishing, while Ma and the girls keep their tiny log cabin sparkling and full of fresh churned butter, fresh baked bread, sausage, smoked pork, dried garlic, squash, head cheese, salted fish, and smoked venison and bear meat. The girls, despite the fact that they are only three and five years old, are active participants in food preservation and household chores. There is no television; there are no screens; there’s no cell phone reception. The sudden appearance of baby Carrie makes the reader question whether or not Ma was even attended by a midwife during her births, or simply took care of business by herself at home.
Laura, being the youngest, doesn’t have a proper doll, like her older sister Mary. She has a corncob wrapped in a blanket named “Susan.” It’s not Susan’s fault that she’s only a corncob, Laura observes empathetically.
Their best entertainment comes in the form of the stories of the Big Woods Pa tells at night—and the fiddle he plays each evening in their cozy, snug cabin.
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To our modern sensibilities, this existence probably sounds quite dire indeed. A desperate young family living completely isolated in the wild, one bear attack or house fire away from violent disaster, with nothing to eat but what they’ve prepared themselves and nothing to do but listen to one another’s stories.
But to Laura and her sister Mary, this existence is sublime. Every day is full of excitement, and every evening laced with the anticipation of Pa’s stories and music. The pig’s tail is a divine annual treat, and springtime maple candy satisfies their sweet tooth for the entire year.
They have everything they need. And they’re supremely happy.
It’s a striking lesson on the subjective nature of abundance.
Anthropologists who research native cultures have
some fascinating commentary to offer on the relationship between so-called “primitive” subsistence lifestyles and cultural attitudes of abundance. But that’s another thread for another time.
Today, as I read through
Little House in the Big Woods with my daughter, these lessons are as fresh as ever. My daughter and I have our own robust ancestry of homesteading and subsistence living. Our ancestors homesteaded, on both my mom and dad’s sides—Irish and English Canadian immigrants, respectively.
My grandmother (and eponym), Marjorie, grew up farming near Howell through the Great Depression, selling their huckleberries and such at Detroit’s famous Eastern Market every month. Ironically, it was farming and subsistence living which kept Marjorie and her family largely insulated from the devastating effects of the Great Depression.
They grew all their own food, traded locally in their community, and sold enough produce at the market to cover their costs. They didn’t live off meager rations because they grew their own.
My own mom and dad homesteaded on 40 acres here in Michigan four decades ago, sugar shack and maple syrup production included. Like Laura and Mary, I grew up playing in the woods, eating wild game, and helping make maple syrup. Unlike Laura and Mary, though, the natural diversity of the Little Wood around us is nothing compared to the Big Wood of old.
There are no minx or stoats. Bear meat is a fantasy—and an illegal one at that. Scientists deny that black panthers even existed in this landscape, let alone that they hunted people. One cannot return home from a day of fishing at an inland lake with a literal cart full of fish, like Pa did. I can’t get lost in our woods, let alone walk for months without finding the edge.
Our relationship with this Little Wood is not the same as Ma and Pa’s was with the Big Wood. Rather than being the recipients of unending abundance in a ferocious landscape, we’re guardians of a fragile fragment of a precious ecosystem. An ecosystem which still gives in abundance—but which also requires protection.
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As my own three-generation family settles into quarantine in our Little Woods, these themes of family and co-operative subsistence rise to the surface like rendered oil.
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Marjorie SteeleAlthough the diversity of the landscape around us may have changed, the internet has radically changed our media and entertainment options, and electronic appliances make for far less labor, the nature of families preparing meals and caring for one another hasn’t much changed.
There’s a rhythm that we fall into. A rhythm which, frankly, is quite natural to us—us being rather hermit-like in nature, and always quite content to entertain ourselves. Not unlike the Wilders.
It always sounds very idyllic in books, but we all know that being isolated with one’s family can come with its fair share of challenges. We bicker over messes and topics which pose inter-generational language barriers. My daughter must occasionally be weaned off her devices like a deviant crack addict. My mother has a never ending list of important household details for me to attend to, on which I’m always behind.
My bestie reported that when her 18-year-old son returned from college a few weeks ago, he proclaimed that he wasn’t “back in that way,” in response to being asked to put away his things. “Not like your son; just like, a roommate.”
Oooooooooooh, the young adults, they will be the end of us. Fortunately, he’s a good kid and got his head on straight after just a few days. Now he’s tidying after himself and binge-watching
Chuck with his two little siblings, like a good son.
Just like that—when we surrender and cease to try to regulate our lives under quarantine, the rhythm comes.
And, as is the case with nearly all human cultures, that daily rhythm revolves mostly around food.
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My mother and I are rather culinarily privileged, in that we have extensive training and experience in preserving and making food. We rarely follow recipes. We make a lot of simple, what one might call “hearty” food. Lots of stews, roasts, boiled dinners, casseroles, bakes, etc. But we also usually only eat one large meal a day, and make snacks as needed throughout the day.
Just because we’re privileged with knowledge doesn’t mean that what we do is particularly difficult or complicated, though. It’s not. Not at all. It’s just a few basic techniques repeated over and over again.
One of my mom and my favorite culinary games to play is “let’s make food out of random ingredients that need to be used up”—aka “mustgoes.” That food is usually some form of soup, as soup is a beautiful, brilliant medium for turning a bunch of random and unwanted ingredients into something tasty and nutritious. It doesn’t have to be soup—you can add a roux to it to thicken it, if you’d prefer to have a stew; or you could add a cream sauce made from milk to make a chowder. You could keep it quite thin, and add aromatic herbs like turmeric or bay leaves to give it an edge. You could also throw beets and onions in it and call it borscht. You could keep the meat and vegetable chunks really large, and call it a “deconstructed” stew. You can use up the dried legumes, beans, barley, mushrooms, and onions you never know what to do with.
The variations are nearly endless.
The name for this type of cooking is “stone soup,” according to oral North American folklore. A million different versions of the tale exist in children’s storybooks, but the gist is the same: an out-of-town guest visits a stingy old coot who doesn’t want to share his food stores. So the guest offers to make their own soup from nothing but stones, and in the process goads the penny-pinching host to offer up ingredients from his larders to “make the stone soup better.”
Many random ingredients later, there’s enough soup to share with the local community, and the host leaves behind his attitude of scarcity for a reformed sense of abundance and generosity.
It’s essentially the same game that mom and I play, but without the premise of stinginess.
“Here,” mom will say, “I boiled this beef bone and put some beans in it. Finish it into soup for dinner. I’m going to go knit.”
I like it when she does that.
So I sautée diced onions and garlic, chop up some carrots, and toss in a pint of canned tomatoes. Maybe I throw some kale in, if I feel like taking flak from my children. Or maybe I fry up and throw in the box of fresh mushrooms in the fridge before they go bad.
Or I bake a stuffed chicken, and give mom the carcass to process into chicken soup for the next day.
It’s a game that just about anybody can play, with just about any combination of both fresh and nonperishable ingredients. It’s a game that lends itself to creativity, to experimentation (a good cook always tastes their work!), and to collaboration.
You chop the vegetables; I’ll sear the mushrooms / meat. You stir the pot while I prepare the roux.
Here—I soaked beans overnight. You make whatever chili you want.
Got a jar of dried split peas, and some bacon in your freezer? You’ve got split pea soup. Toss it into some broth and let it simmer, baby.
All soup, in my humble opinion, is some form of stone soup, which is why I’m of the opinion that recipes should never be considered more than guidelines, when it comes to soup. The chemical precision that’s required for baking is absent here; all you have to worry about is flavor profile and texture. Texture is usually resolved simply by adding cook time.
In layman's terms: soup is really, really hard to mess up. As long as you work with flavors you’re familiar with and taste after each addition, soup is pretty much fool-proof.
Lumps can happen, sometimes, when you’re thickening with flour, or if you get overly eager with the thickness of your roux. But who cares. Is the Pope coming to dinner? Probably not.
(Beginner’s tip: a “roux” is a fancy french word for simply browning flour and an oil, such as butter, together into a paste over a saucepan, then adding that paste to a liquid to thicken it. Three tablespoons of flour to equal amounts of butter is usually the right amount for your average pot of stew—but your roux can be as thick or as thin as you’d like. To make a cream sauce, simply pour milk and/or cream into your roux and whisk it until it’s smooth.)
What I love the most about stone soup is that it forces you to rely on your own resourcefulness, and to look around your environment for ingredients. That includes your natural environment—even in the city, and even in off-growing seasons.
Many herbs grow into the winter and start early in the spring; wild leeks and garlic are popping right about now, for example. Indoor herb gardens lend themselves beautifully to stone soup. Even the mushrooms growing on the tree stump in your backyard could be a great soup stock—if it’s chicken of the woods, hen of the woods, dryad’s saddle or lion’s mane. Even morels can often be found in the city. Morels are popping right about now. They love wood chips.
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Of course, identifying edible herbs and mushrooms in the wild must be done with great care. But you can learn everything you need to know about safely identifying these mushrooms in about 20 minutes through mushroom guides and reliable resources like Adam Hariton’s YouTube channel,
Learn Your Land. It’s easy to learn to check for gills, stems, and spore prints. Again: it simply requires paying careful attention to what’s around you.
From more closely inspecting your pantry stores to scouring the neighborhood for edible herbs and mushrooms, the stone soup approach helps us pay attention to and appreciate the stores of abundance around us. It helps us exercise creativity and innovation. It helps us see the world through the lens of abundance, rather than scarcity.
And, perhaps most important of all: it’s a collaborative creation we make with our families.
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I think we can learn from our ancestors’ primitive lifestyles of abundance without romanticizing and idealizing the past. Many aspects of life were far from perfect; and many were rooted in a chain reaction of exploitation. But there were also aspects of humanity’s pre-industrial, subsistence-based lives which were deeply satisfying and resonant with our spiritual, physical, and emotional identity.
It’s a funny thing about us human creatures: scarcity increases desirability. When the material goods around you are limited and life itself is balanced delicately on the edge of death, everything is brighter. Everything tastes better, sounds better, exhilarates more.
Abundance can breed apathy. In economic terms, this is defined as the second law of demand: diminishing marginal utility. The more of a thing people have, the more of that thing is required to achieve satisfaction. I like to tell my students it’s like the difference between your first shot of tequila and your sixth. The first one hits you hard. The sixth, you may not even notice.
But as we face our own period of intense scarcity, I think it’s a poignant time to watch what rises to the surface in terms of importance. What TRULY matters to us, and makes us happy?
Being with our families. Cooking with them, bickering with them, laughing, sharing stories together. Surviving—together.
There’s a purifying effect that happens in our lives, when the business and commotion of the built society around us ceases. The things which remain—which rise to the top—are the things that are core to our humanity.
Photos courtesy the author.
West Michigan-based writer Marjorie Steele is an independent journalist, publisher, and educator. When not teaching adjunct at Kendall College of Art and Design, Marjorie is working on bringing her digital nerd literary magazine COSGRRRL to life in an illustrated five-issue print series, writing poetry and essays on her private social network, the @creativeonion network, or reporting on cannabis and other issues for national and local publications. Marjorie is currently developing her own proprietary blend of wildcrafted medicinal salves under the brand “Marjorie’s Garden.” Connect with her on Instagram and Twitter @creativeonion.