6 Foods Families Really Ate in the Times of 'Little House on the Prairie'

Aside from the occasional fever or deep freeze, life on the prairie seems pretty peaceful compared to today. At least, if you can live without conveniences like takeout, fast food, and even grocery stores. If whipping up dinner after a long day of work sounds like a daunting task now, imagine how much harder it was back then: hunting for your food rather than shopping for it, then cooking it over a Dutch oven (a heavy, cast-iron pot over hot coals; not the ceramic Le Creusets of today) to feed your entire family.

When they weren't traversing the country in covered wagons or subsisting off provisions like hardtack, crackers, dried fruit, and coffee, frontier families actually knew how to throw it down in the kitchen.

The typical frontier-era plate included staple foods like salt pork, beans, cornbread, and maybe even a slice of vinegar pie if you were lucky. It could also look like a bowl of stew or fried chicken, as the original Little House on the Prairie series portrayed in many a supper scene.

While the cast later revealed they were noshing on canned Dinty Moore Beef Stew and KFC on set, the real-life Ingalls family followed a from-scratch formula when it came to cooking. Here are six real foods that sustained 19th-century pioneers on the frontier.

Johnny Cakes

From "vanity cakes" to "Johnny cakes," the Ingalls had a number of names for the different baked goods they made. Similar to cornbread, Johnny cakes were made from a basic cornmeal batter, then cooked over the fire into round, individual "cakes." The simple flatbread was typically topped with syrup, molasses, gravy, and a pat of butter—yet another frontier staple made from scratch.

If you're still wondering why Johnny cakes are named so, you aren't alone. An excerpt from Little House in the Big Woods reads, "Laura always wondered why bread made of corn meal was called johnny-cake. It wasn’t cake."

One explanation for the name is that it came from a mishearing of "journey cake," as their simple recipe made them an easy meal for travelers and settlers to prepare whenever they paused for food or settled in for the day.

Wild Game Meat

Forget perfect cuts of steak from the butcher or even chicken breasts from the freezer. Back in the late 19th century, settlers got their protein from pretty much any beast they crossed paths with on the prairie. In summer and fall, that was typically buffalo, venison, elk, antelope, or Laura Ingalls' favorite: bear meat.

By winter, frontier families would preserve some of that meat by smoking, salting, or drying it into jerky. Freezing temperatures also served as a natural refrigerator during the winter months. Of course, when times got tough—typically during the colder months—and fresh game meat was scarce, frontier families resorted to their salt pork stashes, as well as smaller animals like rabbits, squirrels, and even snakes.

Hard Candy

Pioneer children didn’t need a candy store to satisfy their sweet tooth. Families could make a simple hard candy by boiling molasses and sugar, then pouring the sticky syrup over fresh snow until it cooled into a treat.

In regions with many maple trees, like Wisconsin, where Little House in the Big Woods is set, maple syrup was a key component of homemade candy. The local sugar maples were tapped to make things like maple sugar and taffy candy devoured by the kids in the books.

Pies

Snow candy wasn’t the only sweet treat on the frontier. As Caroline "Ma" Ingalls often showed in the series, baking pies with seasonal produce was a comforting slice of pioneer life. Both practical and portable, pies could almost always be found at frontier celebrations and social events.

From savory chicken to classic apple, just about anything could be baked into the simple pie crust made of flour, lard, and a little salt.

In The Long Winter, Ma even makes a green pumpkin pie out of unripe pumpkins following a premature cold snap, seasoning the fruit chunks just like she would an apple filling. The settlers’ use of unexpected ingredients like green pumpkins, snow, and even snake meat was simply an extension of the ingenuity required to make it on the frontier.

Stew

Modern home cooks have long turned to the Crockpot for hands-off dinners made by tossing in whatever ingredients they have on hand and letting them simmer. Frontier families had something similar: stew.

Unlike the canned concoction that stood in for the Ingalls’ stew on the show, frontier-era stew was typically a homemade mixture of leftover meat bits, root vegetables, and even stale bread. Sometimes that meant beef stew; other times it meant muskrat stew, but much of the time, it meant "Never-Go-Bad Perpetual Soup," a recipe described in Horace Kephart’s 1910 cookbook, The Book of Camping and Woodcraft: A Guidebook for Those Who Travel in the Wilderness.

Much like it sounds, it contained pretty much everything but the kitchen sink simmered in a pot that was "always kept hot" and with "forever changing" flavors.

Perpetual or not, stew was typically eaten with fresh bread—like the sourdough biscuits and salt-rising bread Ma makes throughout the series—to soak up the hot broth and add some more sustenance to the meal.

Popcorn

The Little House crew may have been born a few decades before the movie theater boom, but what they did have was popcorn. An Indigenous invention passed down to European settlers, the simple snack was made by popping corn kernels in metal cylinders that spun on an axle over the fire.

Many colonial families even ate the crunchy food with cream and sugar for breakfast, akin to an early version of the dry cereal we eat with milk today.

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