Kewaunee County & Dandelions: Salads, Hot Bacon Dressing, Wine & More

Homeowners and landscape services alike are busy eradicating what the southern cousins call “little yellow flowers.” It isn’t the yellow flowering dandelions that are so bad, it’s when they go to seed. The whitish puffs make lawns look unkept and unruly, which means extra mowing. And when the seeds blow hither and yon, the process repeats itself.

Dandelions are pesky, right? Well, our grandparents and great-grandparents didn’t think so. As the snow melted to show signs of dandelions, Grandma began to salivate. Things are far different today and with all the chemical sprays, eating dandelions would be foolhardy.

Before - and for a long time after - 1900, there was no central heating as we know today. Cast iron wood stoves kept homes heated in winter. In an effort to insulate and keep floors warmer, our ancestors banked hay along the home’s foundation and then held the hay in place with boards. At winter’s end, the most tender dandelion shoots began  poking out from beneath the boards. Rather than deep green, the leaves were pale, often bordering on white. Grandma’s family eagerly awaited the delicious spring salads, wilted with scrumptious hot bacon dressing.

Kewaunee County seniors remember the old Machuts’, which became Gib’s on the Lake south of Kewaunee, Happy’s, which became The Cork in Kewaunee, the Stebbins’ Hotel, Alaska Golf Course dining room and Northbrook as a few of the restaurants serving the popular home-made hot bacon dressing. Although the ingredients were about the same, that dressing was different than Great-grandma’s. Her bacon came from a real pig, a fat porker – an old-fashioned pig. Today’s pigs are bred to be taller, slimmer, and leaner, without the high fat content of 100 years ago. Today’s pork is far healthier than pigs Great-grandpa raised, but Grandpa always remembered eating pork when “pork was pork.”

Tender dandelion greens were saved for salad, while the less tender were used for healthful spring teas. Even the roots were roasted and used for body-cleansing teas. Roasted root teas were “coffeeish” in color and sometimes used as coffee substitutes.

Then there was Great-grandpa’s dandelion wine. It took about a gallon of big, beautiful dandelion flowers to make about a gallon of wine, which had little alcohol in it. The sweet wine was much like today’s white wines and quite popular with women, many of whom thought the wine had its own properties as a tonic.

It wasn’t only dandelions that brought a gleam to our ancestors’ eyes. So did wild caraway later in the summer. Caraway was a basis for kimmel/kummel, something kids were not allowed to taste even though it looked like fun. We knew kimmel made Grandpa and the uncles move around like they were playing too much Ring-Around-the Rosie, a children’s game that actually  was a reference to the black plague.

Dandelion wine must have been in short supply when Algoma Record editor Elliott wrote in October 1907  that his paper could not survive on “wind, pudding and dandelion wine.” At issue was advertising that had seemingly dropped off. Elliott felt that a city of about 2,500 should not have to look elsewhere to fill its ad space. A few years later Algoma Record Herald suggested dandelion wine and kimmel as Christmas gifts, and in December 1957, Algoma Public Library was touting Ray Bradbury’s new book, Dandelion Wine, a novel set in the summer of 1928 and based on Bradbury’s youth in Waukegan, Illinois

Kewaunee County Agent Maurice Hoveland had a little fun in June 1954 when he wrote a Letter to the Editor to Harry Heidmann of Algoma Record Herald. Hoveland wrote following Heidmann’s editorial concerning dandelions, which, Hoveland felt, Heidmann failed to appreciate. Hoveland said the little yellow flowers were spring’s first. He said dandelions’ color beautifies the lawn while delaying the grass, thus putting off mowing for a few weeks. He went on to say that children had such fun pulling out matured dandelion heads and blowing seeds to the winds, thus ensuring more dandelions in years to come. Hoveland said he felt Heidmann never experienced the mellow flavor of dandelion wine and that he should remember such points in 1954 when he began to blame dandelions for coming on to the lawns.

A few years later, the Record Herald’s humorist harkened back to the days when those little yellow flowers were not looked at as pesky, but rather the most important ingredient in a keg of dandelion wine. By 1959, it was only the elders who longed for the first greens of the season dressed with real hot bacon dressing that came from pigs that were real pigs!

Homeowners and lawn services continue to get rid of those pesky little yellow flowers just in time for Mother’s Day, a day when so many moms remember the joy in the faces of the little ones giving her a dandelion bouquet, smiling and happily saying, “Happy Mother’s Day.”

Sources: Algoma Record, Algoma Record Herald.