Wini Moranville - The Little Women Cookbook: Tempting Recipes from the March Sisters and Their Friends and Family

Food is a kind of love you can see.

In the beloved novel Little Women, when food is shared among the March family and their friends and neighbors, its often a way of showing care and affection. One of the first things we see Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy do is to give away their Christmas Day breakfast feast to a family of poor German immigrants; afterward, the girls come home for a simple meal of bread and milk for themselves. Early in their friendship, Jo visits Laurie while hes suffering from a cold; she brings him some blanc-mange that Meg has made. Being soft, it will slip down without hurting your sore throat, says Jo.

Every day, no matter how busy or grumpy she is, Hannah, the familys cook, makes hot turnovers for the girls to keep their hands warm on their way to work and school on cold mornings. When Beth first takes ill, Meg cheerfully blackened and burned her white hands cooking delicate messes for the dear (messes were a kind of mixed cooked dish).

Mr. Bhaer, soon to be leaving to take a position in the American West, insists on splurging on expensive fruits and nuts to bring to his final meal with the March family. (Fortunately, a few pages later, we all shed a happy tear when we learn that he will one day come back to Jo.)

And, perhaps most touching of all, Jo strives to earn money as a writer so that she can spend it on those whom she loved more than life. She dreams of earning enough to give Beth everything she wanted, from strawberries in winter to an organ in her bedroom. Megs husband, John, quietly set apart a little sum, that he might enjoy the pleasure of keeping the invalid supplied with the fruit she loved.

Lessons are learned through food, too. Assuming that a cooks job is easy-peasy, the girls try to make their mother breakfast. When the tea is bitter, the omelet scorched, and the biscuits ruined, they come to learn, as Hannah says, Housekeeping aint no joke. At different times in the book, Jo and Amy each try to entertain friends, with less-than-perfect results; yet both glean a few lessons about life in the process. Meg and her husband, John, have a ferocious argument after Megs jelly-making disasteryet in later years, they would deem the jelly as the sweetest jelly ever made, because the clash helped them grow closer.

Food also plays a role in parties and social situations throughout the novel. At a dance, Meg and Laurie share laughs over bonbons and mottoescandies wrapped with clever sayings; of course, Meg and Jo are sure to bring a few bonbons home to their younger sisters, whove stayed up late in anticipation of hearing every detail of the party. Laurie gathers his English friends and the March sisters for a boating party capped off with a fine, leisurely picnic. Amy insists on sharing pickled limesa schoolgirl food fad of the timewith the classmates as a part of maintaining her social status. Sadly, her efforts dont go so well.

Most notably, the book ends with a picnic. The family gathers for a day of apple picking at Plumfield, the house and grounds that Jo inherits from Aunt March. At the end of the day, Jo and Meg set forth the supper on the grass, for an out-of-door tea was always the crowning joy of the day. For the remaining pages, the land flows with milk and honey, with children playing leapfrog and eating pie and singing from the branches of the trees, with cookies and turnovers strewn about the orchard, and with a babys fist playfully churning milk in a pitcher.

The picnic is the crowning joy of the book as the sisters and Marmee reflect on the harvest of the day and on their lives, leading Marmee to exclaim, in the very last line of the book, Oh, my girls, however long you may live, I never can wish you a greater happiness than this.

The fifty recipes that follow will help you capture the spirit and joy of the food of Little Women. Many of the recipes are inspired by specific dishes mentioned among the pages; these include griddle cakes, buckwheat pancakes, pounded potatoes, blanc-mange, corned beef, asparagus, bonbons and mottoes, currant jelly sauce, gingerbread, and other dishes that the Marches make or enjoy with family, friends, and neighbors.

Other dishes are inspired by events in the book. Meg, Jo, Beth, Amy and their friends often gather around food, but sometimes the specific dishes they eat are not mentioned in the text. In such cases, I offer recipes for the types of dishes that might be enjoyed at such occasions. These include simple foods that Hannah might cook for the familys tea or supperterms that are used interchangeably for the evening meal. Other dishes are for grander gatherings, such as the party Amy plans for her art school friends and Lauries boating picnic. I also include a couple of French recipes that Amy surely would have discoveredand lovedduring her trip abroad.

To come up with the recipes in this book, I started by looking extensively through American cookbooks published from about 1850 to around 1880. From there, I chose recipes while keeping these questions in mind: Given what we know the Marches ate and where they lived, what other foods might have fit in with their style of dining? What recipes were particularly popular during this time period? For example, nearly every cookbook I looked at had a recipe for macaroni and cheese, so of course youll find one here.

And finally, I asked myself: Which of these historical recipes would translate to dishes wed truly want to cook and eat today? You will note that I did not include an exact recipe for pickled limes, the treat that Amy shares with her classmates. Made by pickling whole limes in salt, garlic, cloves, vinegar, pepper, and mustard, the concoction might appeal to some culinary adventurers today as a relish of some sort, but as a treat to share among classmates? Not so much. Instead, I came up with a way that we can playfully tip our hat to Amys pickled limes: , which are topped with lime frosting and a little wedge of lime jelly candy.

Likewise, to honor Mr. Bhaers generous gift of fruits and nuts for the March family, I turn these into a lovely triflea treat everyone will adore as much as Jos family adored Mr. Bhaers gifts.

So, are the recipes made exactly the way the March gang would have made them? Heavens no! If that were the case, wed be starting with calves feet to make blanc-mange and wed brown the top of the macaroni and cheese by heating a shovel in a fire and holding the red-hot spade over the dish. My recipes call on todays methods and make use of modern products and appliances, not to mention electricity, of course. Youll even spot a baking mix here and there, though in most cases, Ive tried to stick with scratch cooking. Yet no matter how the recipe is made, each is designed to tap into the spirit of a dish the March family might have enjoyed together.

I first became enchanted with Little Women when I read it as a teenager. I revisited the book now and then over the years, especially after seeing the immensely charming 1994 movie starring Winona Ryder as a thoroughly lovable Jo and Gabriel Byrne as an utterly irresistible Mr. Bhaer. As a food writer and editor, Ive long been fascinated by heirloom recipes, and dreamed of writing a cookbook that explored the dishes that long-ago cooks lovingly made for their families. When the opportunity for me to write a cookbook based on