Beyond the Plain and Simple by Pauline Stevick

Author:Pauline Stevick
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Kent State University Press

Emma likes to cook. With a husband and seven children, she has good reason to cook often and the motivation to cook well. Her kitchen is much plainer than those I have visited in Lancaster County and contains more primitive equipment. She uses a wood stove, telling us that yes, it took a while to learn how to gauge the heat, but that now she prefers it to the gas stoves she used while growing up. Her kitchen has no running water, only two sinks with drains, one for washing food and dishes and the other for washing hands. A water pump is in an adjoining room down a short flight of stairs. She keeps the food cold in an icebox located in a large walk-in closet inside the pump room, which means that she must purchase a twenty-five-pound block of ice every week in the summer. If that melts before the iceman returns, someone drives over in the buggy to a local store and purchases additional ice, she tells me.

On the day of our visit—a warm day in July—her kitchen is a veritable bakery; the large table is brimming with plump loaves of bread, two kinds of cookies, fruit and meringue pies, rolls, and frosted tea rings, most of which she has prepared for the school sale on the following day. Despite this busyness, she invites us to supper, the warmth of her words assuring us of her genuineness. We accept.

She prepares one of the most delicious meals I have ever eaten—Amish or otherwise. Both she and her two daughters bustle barefoot around the pump room, which apparently serves as a summer kitchen, putting the finishing touches on the meal consisting of oven-fried chicken and lettuce, carrot, and cheese salad, noodles, Jell-O, cherries, several kinds of homemade rolls, home-canned apple juice, and two kinds of pie for dessert. We learn that she has gleaned some of the recipes for the meal from magazines she has read.

Later we gather by lamplight on the large front porch, sitting on chairs, steps, railing, swing, and glider. We eat and talk, enjoying the cool, clear evening. Always, it seems, there is enough time in Amish society to get to know each other better, and, of course, there is no television to compete with human communication. The parents reminisce about their early days on the property when they lived in the basement before they could build the spacious two stories they now enjoy. We watch the purple martins alight on the perches in front of their hollowed-out gourd bird-houses. I admire the begonias lining the porch, flowers I usually manage to kill in my house or garden, but Emma laughs and modestly declares that hers must be so beautiful because the location suits them.

By English standards Emma is deprived and overworked. Apparently no one has told her that, so she exudes an enviable contentment in caring for her home and family and in helping in her husband’s shop.

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