Thanksgiving with Laura Ingalls Wilder

In Valerie Stivers’s Eat Your Words series, she cooks up recipes drawn from the works of various writers.

Everyone who grew up on the Little House books has their own particular treasured food memory from the books. How Pa butchered the pig, smoked the meat, and used every bit of it, down to inflating the empty bladder for the girls to play with as a balloon. The spring on Plum Creek when they ran out of food and ate only fried fish and “crisp, juicy” turnips. Ma frying “vanity cake” doughnuts, so named because they’re “all puffed up, like vanity, with nothing solid inside.” Almanzo stuffing himself from the following spread at the county fair: pumpkin pie, custard pie, vinegar pie, mince pie, berry pies, cream pies, raisin pies …

Reading these books—or rereading them as an adult, which is arguably an even better experience—makes me want to cook, eat, wear calico dresses, sleep on a straw-tick mattress, and plant seeds in the freshly tilled earth. With their lengthy descriptions of cooking and other homesteading processes, they’re the perfect inspiration for a from-scratch Thanksgiving meal; they’re all the more seasonally appropriate because the holiday’s roots lie in scarcity, the way the Ingallses’ lives did. Thanksgiving also presents an opportunity for reckoning with Wilder, whose work has been criticized in recent years for its cultural insensitivity toward Native Americans.

Such reckoning might feel unwelcome to anyone who treasures their Little House dreams the way I do, but reading , Caroline Fraser’s extraordinary Pulitzer Prize–winning biography of Wilder, I found the truth behind the books to be even more rewarding than the fiction. We need to know that Laura Ingalls Wilder (1867–1957) grew up to own a Ford Model T and eventually left De Smet, Nebraska, in her last covered wagon, bound for the more forgiving Missouri Ozarks, because farming was a bust. She raised chickens