HOLIDAY FOOD HISTORY cont.

Holiday food was a strong focal point for communities in the late 1800's as a way to identify their heritage. This was often difficult in many parts of America where the nationalities rapidly mixed and heritage was often lost. In Hayward this was very obvious because of the small local population.

In my last column I talked about some holiday foods. Ameilia Olson Bralick called to remind me that it was her mother-in-law who made lefse for the lumberjacks in her boarding house. Naomi Weingarten got right to work and found several different old cookbooks with recipes for plum pudding which did not tell us how it was actually cooked. I found another cookbook with a traditional plum pudding recipe and found that the authors claimed plum pudding was an English tradition.

This weekend I watched a short program on Victorian dinners and table settings. Although the area they were discussing was in New England, the information would be apropos here in the Sawyer County area..

The Christmas dinner consisted of goose stuffed with sage dressing. The hostess explained that the stuffing would have dried fruits in it as well. My father-in-law Fritz Wittwer always made oyster stew for Christmas dinner which the host mentioned as a favorite Victorian holiday delicacy.

Vegetables would have been pickled, canned or root cellar fresh winter vegetables like cabbage, beets or brussel sprouts. They often had a white milk sauce for the goose with onions and cloves in it. Cheese was an important part of the dinner, especially if fancy cheeses could be shipped from the east.

Dessert would have been the various breads and confections I mentioned last week along with as many cookies that sugar supplies would allow. Yorkshire pudding made out of beef drippings, eggs and flour was served like popovers. Plum pudding was boiled weeks ahead of time, soaked in brandy for several weeks and was served burning bright and beautiful. The narrator explained that "plums" are any dried fruit in England.