I've heard that a recipe for a good speech should contain plenty of shortening, so I'll try to incorporate lots of that here!

A large percentage of European American Mennonite families in the Shenandoah Valley migrated to America from Germany and Switzerland. Most came first to Pennsylvania, but since available land was becoming more scarce, a number of them headed south to Virginia-the earliest around 1728. Our cooking in the Valley was influenced by our roots. Many families were large, and children were considered a financial asset on the farm; their help with chores and household tasks was greatly needed.

I grew up on a dairy farm in a family of twelve children. My father was a Mennonite minister so there was a continual flow of guests in our home for meals. Ministers were not salaried in those days, so we children all took over major domestic responsibilities at a very young age. Farmers banded together to help each other during harvest seasons. When threshing grain or filling silo, there would be a dozen to twenty men at the table. At our house, usually Grandmother and maybe one or two of my aunts would come to help us with the food preparation. A typical meal would consist of meat, mashed potatoes and gravy. (You wouldn't think of not having gravy!) The meal included homemade breads, biscuits or corn bread, apple butter and jellies, a couple of vegetable dishes, salads, pickles and relishes, maybe pickled eggs or salad eggs. Then there may be cracker pudding, or tapioca or vanilla pudding layered with sliced bananas, and real whipped cream, with graham cracker crumbs. And, of course, there would be pies, maybe with homemade ice cream, or maybe gingerbread with whipped cream. The men always looked forward to the good country meals. They worked hard and appetites were hearty, so food was in generous supply. With the intense amount of physical exertion, foods that would "stick to your ribs" were considered a necessity.

People were very frugal in those days. The depression years of the early 30s and a severe drought made times hard for many people. But farm folks were used to raising most of their food and learned to be self-sufficient.

When I was a child, my parents went to the store only occasionally, to buy just the basic necessities such as sugar, flour, dried beans, crackers, and maybe coffee and cocoa powder. Because of the large family, they would buy 100 pounds of all-purpose flour and 100 pounds of bread flour and a large sack of sugar. We stored the flour and sugar in large metal cans. We usually baked at least eight loaves of bread at a time. Yeast for the bread was made from a starter passed down from generation to generation. We always cooked potatoes, mashed them and added them to the starter, along with sugar, flour, and salt, to increase the quantity. After the starter would rise properly we would make up the bread dough, saving a portion of the new yeast mixture to use the next time we baked bread. If your starter or a neighbor's yeast happened to go bad, you shared a start with each other to keep the process going.

I also remember the war years when things like sugar and gasoline were rationed. Rationing changed our lifestyles. In recipes for cakes, cookies, and the like, we learned to substitute corn syrup, honey, or molasses for sugar, adjusting the amount of flour and liquid to compensate. Saccharin was used in beverages. Farm folks always seemed to have an extra special knack of improvising when necessary-or just doing without!

At my parents' home, we grew our own cane to make molasses. We harvested the cane in the fall of the year and took it to the molasses mill near Dayton, Virginia, where it was processed into thick old-fashioned molasses.

Gardening was as important for food for the family as the farm crops were for the animals. We always had a large garden plus a truck patch for growing large quantities of potatoes and corn. We always planted corn beans in the corn. There is nothing quite like the old-fashioned corn beans. My husband's mother gave me seed for a good variety, which I save each year. We saved seed from many of our vegetables so we didn't need to buy seed. The hybrid seeds of today will not reproduce properly, so saving them is not useful. Here is a little tip: if you don't use a whole package of seed, it can be kept in the freezer indefinitely.

If you don't have a garden, a few tomato plants, peppers, herbs, and the like, can be planted in flower beds around the house. Some folks plant them in large patio planters. The new bush varieties of squash, cucumbers, and tomatoes are great for this. I tell people that my garden is my wellness center. I get lots of exercise and have good healthy food to show for it as well! Exercise is certainly one of the important keys to good health, along with healthy food.

When I think back to the hundreds of jars of food my mother used to can for the winter, I'm sure young cooks of today would think it was enough to open a country store! She had a large copper boiler that held about fourteen quart jars at one time. It was oval-shaped and fit over two burners on the gas stove. When peaches were ripened just right, my parents would go to a relative's orchard early in the morning and come back with at least seven bushels of peaches. They would call my grandparents to come to help peel peaches. Of course, we children all pitched in, some washing cans or peaches, others packing them in the cans and making the sugar syrup. Only the older children were allowed to help peel the peaches, because it was of utmost importance to be able to peel razor thin so you would not waste any of the peach. By evening we would have more than 100 quarts of peaches. In addition to canning, we also dried fruit, such as apple slices, to preserve them for the winter.

When we had several bushels of green beans to can at one time, or at butchering time when there was a lot of meat to can, we would make a fire under the big iron kettle in the washhouse. My father made a wooden rack to fit in the rounded bottom of the kettle to set the jars on. This rack held about twenty-five quart jars at one time. We kept the water boiling for three or four hours, depending on what we were canning.

We would also make sauerkraut in large ten-gallon stone crocks, letting it ferment to just the right stage before canning it. Sauerkraut and dumplings with small sausage balls was an old-time favorite. When I made it for my family, my daughters preferred hot-dog rings for the meat instead of the sausage.

Meat was always an important part of most meals on the farm. Even breakfast usually included meat-bacon, ham, or pudding meat and ponhoss. An old-time breakfast favorite was hominy and puddings. We also ate pancakes with pudding or with sausage gravy. The ponhoss was sliced and fried in a skillet and served with homemade molasses, or with apple butter, which we also made in our big iron kettles each year. We cooked cornmeal mush to eat warm with milk. Whatever was left over, we sliced like the ponhoss, fried it in a skillet and served it for supper with apple butter or molasses. Homemade bread, still warm out of the oven, spread generously with butter and apple butter, was a favorite after-school treat. And, of course, we churned the butter using cream from our dairy.

Each year my parents butchered a beef or two, five or six hogs, a sheep, numerous chickens, and some turkeys. In the winter they always purchased a keg of salt fish to be fried for breakfast. The small fish were preserved in salt brine. Then we would clean them, remove the scales, and soak them overnight in vinegar water to remove the salt taste. This was a little like the country hams we cured with our own sugar-cure mixture, with the basic ingredient of salt. The hams were hung in the meat house to "cure out," and when we needed one, we trimmed the rind off and soaked it overnight to help remove some of the salt before cooking it.

We also kept a flock of chickens to provide fresh eggs, as well as meat. If we wanted to roast a hen or two for a meal or for making chicken noodle soup, we went to the chicken house, caught several chickens to butcher. The directions for butchering poultry are given in my cookbook beginning on page 349. This information is still relevant for today!

Meat was considered very important, because it would "stick to your ribs" until the next meal. Meat, and even the fat on the meat, was considered necessary for the strenuous fieldwork and the cold weather. I remember my father making a remark about needing some grease inside you to keep things running smoothly. He was so accustomed to faithfully greasing the farm equipment, so it would run properly, that he was convinced it was the same with the human body! My parents also believed it was sinful to waste food, and that included the fat on the meat. So we were required to eat the fat whether we liked it or not!

I talked to my husband's ninety-three-year-old Aunt Grace this week about how it used to be when she was growing up. She said that it seemed to take more fat in those days because of being out in the cold so much. Bedrooms were usually not heated in the wintertime. Children walked long distances to school in the cold and snow. There does seem to be some scientific evidence to support the perception that they needed more fat in their diets to contend with these conditions. Aunt Grace said there wasn't much heat in the homes, and no buttons to push. She also told me her mother-in-law made such good bread dressing. Then she found out that Grandma rendered the fat they obtained from chickens they butchered and used some of that in her dressing. Many farmwomen used the chicken fat-rendered into a solid fat similar to rich lard-in things like biscuits. There were no flakier biscuits around than those made with chicken fat!

Aunt Grace's Aunt Emma made the best dressing balls in the Shenandoah Valley. Aunt Grace asked for the secret, not wanting the recipe to go with Aunt Emma to her grave. But she was not prepared for the answer. Aunt Emma said after she roasted a turkey or chicken, she would skin it, grind up the skin in a food grinder, and use the product in the dressing balls! The little particles of rich fat throughout made the balls so tender they melted in your mouth. After the secret was out, Aunt Emma's dressing balls didn't taste quite so good! Back then we had no idea what cholesterol was, and sometimes I almost wish we still didn't know!

In my own experience, we rendered any fat or tallow from meat and accumulated it. We used rendered fat, ham rinds or skins, and any lard that was too old to use in cooking, to make soap. We made the soap in our big iron kettle in the washhouse. (You will also find the recipe for homemade soap in my cookbook.) Even the underlie that separated from the soap in a layer in the bottom of the kettle as it cooled, was used with hot water to scrub the porch, the washhouse floor, and cement walks. It was a powerful cleaner for greasy surfaces, such as the washhouse floor after butchering day. Nothing was wasted!

I am thankful that our parents were concerned about the starving people in the world. They taught us to be thrifty and economical so we could help meet the needs of others. Not liking a food was no excuse for wasting it. My parents didn't have much tolerance for our likes and dislikes. If we didn't care for something, they thought we were just being "snousy" or persnickety! We were required to eat small amounts of food we didn't like, and almost always learned to enjoy that food eventually. The old-time proverb, "Waste not, want not" was, not only a good survival technique, but also gave a us a sense of being good stewards. There was an old Amish proverb that was similar: "Eat it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without."

Leftovers should be preserved in the refrigerator instead of leaving them at room temperature or dumping them out. I still remember the old icebox we used on the farm. This old icebox consisted of two galvanized chests-a smaller box inside a larger box, with a layer of sawdust packed between them. A drain spout at the bottom drained the melted ice. My father would go to the Cassco Ice substation in Bridgewater to get a huge 300-pound block of ice, which he placed in the bottom of the icebox. If we wanted to make ice cream, we raided the icebox! Some farmers had their own icehouses, where big blocks of ice, cut from the frozen river in the wintertime, were stored for use during the summer months.

I am reminded of the food traditions among the Amish. A meal for guests was not complete without seven sweets and seven sours. This meant they would have at least seven dishes in the meat/potato/vegetable category-or in-between dishes such as salad eggs, vegetable salads, coleslaw, or hot slaw, applesauce, soda cheese or homemade cottage cheese. The seven sweets consisted of fruit salads, melons, custards, puddings, cakes, pies, homemade ice cream and candies.

My mother's entertaining was very generous, but not quite to that extreme. To feed our large family, we always baked on Saturday-several pies, a couple of cakes, custards, and fruit desserts. We often we had Sunday dinner guests, and you would be surprised how fast the food disappeared! When we baked bread, we often made big batches of cinnamon rolls, or sticky buns, or large numbers of doughnuts. We even made our own potato chips in the big iron kettle, deep fried in lard obtained from the hogs we had butchered. Lard was our basic shortening and made the flakiest piecrusts around. Would you believe, with this kind of food, my great-grandmother lived to be ninety-eight years old! They reported that she always used plenty of butter and cream, cheese, and nuts-all the things that make food extra special.

So, with all the changes in foods and food preparation, lifestyles, and demands on time, is it any wonder that many young people of today decide they do not like cooking? And here is where my cookbook came into being.

I did not intend to prepare a cookbook for publication when I started with the project. I was only doing something for my three daughters. We lived on a dairy farm and had no sons, so the girls helped with the milkings on the weekends. They had helped in the kitchen as youngsters; but soon other things crowded out time in the kitchen. I thought I would give them extra training in their later teen years. I did not want them to leave home without being accomplished in cooking and baking-making things from scratch, as all farm girls should. That would have been considered a terrible disgrace! But with school, music, and many other activities, plus some farm chores, there was no time for cooking. So, I decided to write things down for them, reorganizing my recipe collection as well. Often I made things without a recipe, just adding ingredients until it looked right, but they wanted precise amounts. They couldn't decide when it "looked right." I included tips and other helpful information not included in most cookbook, which are basically recipe collections rather than how-to books. I also wanted to teach them to can and freeze foods.

To make a long story short, other friends and church family began asking if I would make copies of my collection for them, too. Some of our daughters' friends were calling me for cooking information, because their mothers were away at work. So I began to see the need to help young people who were leaving the farm with very little experience in the kitchen. It seemed that cooking skills had disappeared with the family farms. Many new brides were overwhelmed with the thought of taking on the responsibilities of meal preparation and homemaking. The many compliments I have received since the book was published have confirmed my observations.

I taught a cooking and homemaking class in the Continuing Education Department at Eastern Mennonite University from 1992 to1996, until the department was phased out. It was enlightening to see, not only the eagerness of students to learn, but also the lack of basic knowledge in these areas. These were college students who had learned almost everything except how to be efficient in the basic skills of daily living!

You wouldn't believe the calls I receive from young people asking for help with their cooking, since my cookbook has been published. With today's women away from home much more, many are not learning homemaking skills. The more you practice, of course, the more skillful you become. When you do things only occasionally, it's easy to forget how to do them.

That was the focus of my book, to give additional information, along with the recipes. Our older Mennonite cookbooks did not include canning and freezing information, because everyone knew by experience just how to do it. And in my mother's generation the recipes didn't even include amounts of many of the ingredients. Recipes in her generation called for flour enough to make a stiff dough, or butter the size of an egg, a pinch of this or a pinch of that. They didn't even give pan sizes, baking times or temperatures. Everyone just knew those things.

I've received some interesting calls from young cooks. Here are some of them. "What is baking soda? Is it club soda or something else?" "What is wrong? I've cooked this corn on the cob for three hours and it's still tough!" "I just ruined my rocky road candy. I don't want to waste all those good ingredients, so what can I do to salvage it?" Someone else received a call saying, "I won't be able to double the recipe as was directed, because my stove does not heat up to 850 degrees!"

We are becoming adept in technology. But it seems the basic knowledge for everyday living is so lacking that many times people don't know how to cope. I wonder sometimes what would happen if suddenly all our technology was eradicated and we had no buttons to push. If we had to go back to the simple ways of yesterday and do everything from scratch, what would become of this generation? Would persons have a clue how to manage? When I was preparing the text for my book, I called various companies to verify information. One company told me that they had explicit directions on their soup cans: open the can, empty the contents into a saucepan, place on the burner and heat. They decided this was too obvious and unnecessary and may even insult a person's intelligence. But after omitting the directions, their hotline was flooded with calls asking for help on how to prepare the soup! So they decided to put the directions back on the cans!

My, haven't times changed! What will the next generation be doing? Will the pendulum swing the other way? Will they want to go back to the land and to the "good old days"?

There are lots of other things I would like to have elaborated on. Many farms had all their own fruit trees; there were cherries, apples, and pears to harvest. Harvest times were almost always social events as well. Just imagine the good times and socializing that went on as groups of people shelled bushels of peas, seeded cherries, prepared apples for apple butter or cracked walnuts and picked out the nut meats.

And, by the way, we had all those old-time remedies for your physical ailments as well, such as mustard plasters or poultices (for wounds) out of mustard leaves or dry mustard. There were certain teas that relieved all kinds of ailments. There is a recipe in my cookbook for an excellent gargle for sore throat. (In those days, you didn't think of going to the doctor unless you thought maybe someone might die if you didn't!) And as I said before, the physical activity was valuable. As teenagers, we got up before 5:00 a.m. and milked fifty cows before we went to school. Then we hurried home in the evening and did it again. By the time we did our schoolwork, we needed to get to bed so we could get up early the next morning and do it all over again. There was no time to get into much mischief. Today, that may be considered child abuse! But, believe me, we learned to work and to manage a household well! And I think we appreciated what we had more than most youngsters do today. Now, it seems so many persons just expect things to be handed out to them, and do not think of ways that they could be a blessing to others. I think I have run out of shortening, so I must close! We've journeyed from the history of our forefathers up to more recent history. It's hard to comprehend how much things really have changed! My father-in-law lived to be ninety years of age. Can you imagine the changes in his lifetime, and the adjustments he had to make in a ninety-year span? We have so much to be thankful for with all our modern conveniences. But the strange thing is that it seems the more buttons there are to push, the busier one becomes, and the less time there is for family and friends. On the other hand, when people talk about the "good old days," I'm not sure they realize how much hard work there was. I haven't found any older persons whom I've asked whether they would like to go back to their younger years, who have responded with a "yes."

So I guess our challenge is to try to hang on to the best of each generation, to be very thankful for the blessings we have, and to be good stewards of these blessings and opportunities so we can pass a good heritage on to the next generation! Thank you, and may God bless each of you!