The Food That Gets Us Through

windfall apples, Necessity Mess, and Slumgullion

In my first book, Lilac Girls, Caroline Ferriday’s family, wealthy Manhattanites, ate three meals a day loaded with quality protein and a wide variety of fresh vegetables, which their private chef prepared. In her archives, Caroline left recipes for Chateaubriand and her great aunts' Civil War-era pies made with the grocer’s best heirloom fruits, the crusts brushed with imported Irish butter. But when I wrote my new book inspired by my own family, who settled on Martha's Vineyard in 1891, I knew it would be a very different culinary situation for my fictional characters, since my grandmother had probably never heard of Chateaubriand.

My mother’s family, the Smiths, owned a flower farm on Martha's Vineyard, where they settled in 1891. My grandmother Emma Smith went off to teacher’s college and came home via steamship to what was then Gay Head (now Aquinnah) and hitched a ride on Bart Mayhew’s oxcart to her parents’ house on State Road in West Tisbury.

Emma Smith

She is pictured above in her waitress uniform on the Vineyard (not sure how she’d feel about me posting her to the world in a dirty apron but I love this picture). Emma married Christopher Finnegan, a grocer from New Hampshire, but he died at a young age and she was left to raise four children on her own.

It was hard for Emma to put decent meals together on a budget on the Island. Though there were four grocery stores in the closest town, Vineyard Haven, it was an all day trip on foot and they had little money for groceries. The way my mother told it, my grandmother showed incredible ingenuity in meal prep, stretching what she had. With a bit of cinnamon, the windfall apples (apples that have detached from the tree due to wind, gravity or disease) that my mother and her siblings gathered would become apple compote.

In the woods surrounding the farm, they foraged fiddlehead ferns and blueberries. And often they would harvest a few pecks of oysters, nestle them in sawdust, keep them near-frozen and eat them for weeks. And if my uncle Sonny was lucky enough to bag a coot, there was always Coot Stew, named after the American Coot, a bird native to the island.

It was especially difficult during harsh New England winters. They always seemed to have salt pork, potatoes, and onions, from which Emma often made Potato Bargain, also known as Necessity Mess, simply potatoes, onions and water boiled down in a cast iron pan. I live by Michael Pollan's quote, "Eat food, not much, mostly vegetables," but I don't think he was thinking about a steady diet of Potato Bargain when he said that. But often that was all my grandmother had to serve. And there was always Field Mouse Pie, which was not made out of actual mice, but potatoes and inexpensive Portuguese linguica sausage.

To this day, Emma’s Slumgullion, a tasty if oddly-named one-pot meal, is an occasional dinner feature in our house. The first known use of the word slumgullion occurred in 1849, by miners in the California gold rush, to describe the muddy slurry left behind after washing gold through a sluice. They used the word to describe a tasteless stew.

But Emma’s slumgullion is anything but tasteless. It’s made from onions, sauteed ground beef, shell macaroni, and tomato soup and there’s something about that combination that just works. Though my husband doesn’t consider it an actual entree, it reminds me of my mother’s cooking growing up and I’m always happy when my three grown children request it when they visit.

My family also makes some weird, old-fashioned cookies, which my sister Polly found in my grandmother's church cookbook put together by her friends at the Vineyard Haven Baptist Church.

Emma and her friends at the Vineyard Haven Baptist Church

Emma’s recipe for Grandma's Rocks is inexpensive to make and does not disappoint, despite the name and the limited baking instructions.

Grandma’s Rocks

1 1/2 cups brown sugar
1 cup shortening
3 eggs
1 cup raisins
1 cup nut meats
2 1/2 cups flour
1 tsp soda
1 tsp cinnamon
salt

Directions: Drop from spoon.

We like Surprise Cookies, too, which are wafer cookies baked into a bigger cookie. The surprise is the crunchy wafer cookie inside.

Surprise Cookies (recipe by Effie Littlefield)

3 cups sifted flour
1 tsp soda
1/2 tsp salt
1 cup sugar
1/2 cup brown sugar firmly packed
1 cup butter, 1/2 other shortening
2 eggs
2 tbs water
1 nine ounce package chocolate wafers
1 tsp vanilla

Directions: Cream the butter with the sugar. Blend in the unbeaten eggs, water and vanilla and beat well. Sift the dry ingredients together and add. Mix thoroughly. Cover and refrigerate for at least 2 hours. Open package of wafers and enclose each wafer in about 1 tbs. of dough. Place on greased cookie sheet about 2” apart and bake at 375 degrees for 10 to 12 minutes. Each may be topped with a walnut half if desired.

Props to my husband Michael and assistant Oliver for doing all the baking. Now we have cookies for the next three years!

Today, living in Litchfield, Connecticut, I’m lucky I have access to meat and vegetables year round. But when I’m looking to economize (more often in these uncertain economic times), or just feeling nostalgic, there’s nothing like sizzling up a pot of slumgullion on a winter afternoon and thinking of my grandmother and how it got her through the day.

Do you have a treasured family recipe? I’d love to know in the comments!

Preorder a signed copy of The Martha’s Vineyard Beach and Book Club

My grandmother Emma inspired the character of Gram in my new book: “Gram was the backbone of the community. Happy to help those who needed it and ever vigilant for those too pround to ask. As long as she was doing for others, Ginny smith didn’t feel so poor.” You can preorder a signed copy of The Martha’s Vineyard Beach and Book Club through my local bookstore Hickory Stick Bookshop, by clicking here!

I’m doing events this summer in Connecticut, Rhode Island, Martha’s Vineyard, Maryland, Missouri, and Tennessee. Click here for details on all my tour stops! I love meeting readers in person.

So excited to see The Martha’s Vineyard Beach and Book Club made the LibraryReads Hall of Fame, a designation that honors authors who have had multiple titles on the list since 2013. These titles are all chosen by public library staff. Libraries were my salvation growing up and have been so incredibly supportive of my books since I started with Lilac Girls. If you’re a librarian reading this, THANK YOU!

If you love nostalgic recipes

I recommend checking out

Jolene Handy

who writes a newsletter called Time Travel Kitchen. She’s written about icebox cake, the comfort of Pastina, and the iconic frilly toothpicks that make a club sandwich.

If you love thrillers

While I was in NYC for my daughter’s baby shower, I had the opportunity to get matcha with novelist

Andrea Bartz

who writes a very helpful newsletter for writers called Get It Write. Andrea and I share a publisher and her new thriller, The Last Ferry Out, comes out in May!