Thanksgiving grew out of the celebration of the harvest, and that’s essentially what it was on farms in the 1940s. We grew most of the food that covered the Thanksgiving table.
We didn’t raise turkeys, but we had plenty of chickens. My mother chose a fat laying hen or an aging rooster to be the center of the meal. The chicken meat wasn’t the important part. What we loved were the noodles she made from eggs and flour and cooked in chicken broth.
Before we got electricity, much of the rest of the meal came from the cave, the storm cellar in which we stored the vegetables from our garden that we had cooked and placed in Mason jars. Our favorite vegetable was green beans, but we also had peas and corn and maybe pickled beets and bread-and-butter pickles. We always had a heap of mashed potatoes, made from potatoes we grew, cream from our cows, and butter we had churned. My mother used the leftover mashed potatoes to make potato salad.
We didn’t have much luck raising pumpkins, so the pumpkin for the pie usually came from cans, but my mother made the flaky crust from scratch and used elbow grease to create the whipped cream. Often we’d have apple pie or chocolate cake, too.
If the weather was cold enough to freeze the ice in the ditches, we’d harvest that and make ice cream (mostly milk, eggs, and sugar) in a freezer churn. That was a great treat, and we had to eat the whole batch that day or it would melt.
A lot of work into that Thanksgiving meal, work that began in the spring when we bought baby chickens and planted a big garden.
We enjoyed every calorie.
—Carolyn Mulford
