Carla Emery: Author of the Old Fashioned Recipe Book
(Page 2 of 17)
May/June 1975
By the Mother Earth News editors
PLOWBOY: Were you born and raised in Idaho?
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EMERY: Oh no, I'm a Montana girl . . . but I was born in Los Angeles, which is curious.
What happened is my mother married my daddy, who was a farmer, and promptly nine months later she was pregnant with me and he went broke. He was farming with a team of horses and, almost overnight, everything went wrong. The potato bugs got the potatoes, something else got all the other crops and all they had left were the horses and some tools and the chickens. So my folks had an auction and loaded up an old jalopy and went to California . . . just like something out of Grapes of Wrath.
So I was born in California while my daddy was going from door. to door looking for a job . . . and afterwards they had a woman keep me while daddy and mother worked as butler and cook for Dorothy Lamour. Eventually my parents saved a little money and we all started back north.
Once we got to Oregon, daddy worked in the woods until a tree fell on him and broke his ribs. Well, he couldn't work anymore that winter . . . so the other fellows in the logging camp took up a collection of about twenty dollars to buy milk for the baby—that was me—and my parents lived on venison that daddy shot in the woods. That was all they had—milk for the baby and venison for themselves—and it was a time of terror for them.
After a while, when defense work began to pick up, we moved on to Seattle and daddy got a job in the shipyards. My folks were country people, though, and as soon as they could they got a stake together and we went back to Montana. Daddy bought another ranch, with a tractor this time instead of horses, and he really made that farm go. And that's where I grew up.
PLOWBOY: So you still think of yourself as a farmer's daughter from Montana.
EMERY: Yes. I'm a farmer's daughter from Montana. I was raised on a cattle ranch—cattle and sheep—high up in the mountains. I rode two miles every day on horseback to a little country school . . . eight grades and eight kids. My childhood memories are of what you call "deep country", and I have a love to this day for that kind of rural life.
PLOWBOY: A love, I might add, that shines through every page of the Old Fashioned Recipe Book.
EMERY: Oh, there's a lot of me in that book. A lot of me and the people I come from. My relatives on my father's side, you know, are Pennsylvania Dutch. My maiden name was Carlotta Louise Harshbarger and my daddy's people were Brethren . . . Quakers. They were good farmers because they loved the land and they farmed with their hearts. There's a lot of that in me and some of it spilled over into the book.
The stories that my mother and daddy told me about their Depression days helped make the book possible too. They made me value self-sufficiency and contributed, I think, to my ethics.
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