Speaking of multiple generations, it was nice to see Laura Ingalls Wilder getting some props for seducing yet another age. I grew up loving those books partly because they made my family’s situation seem so privileged by comparison (we had wood stoves for both heat and cooking for a good chunk of my childhood, and what fresh meat we ever saw came off the deer my dad would shoot and butcher). When I was fixing to drop out of college in Arizona, I actually had such a romantic image of the good life in the Midwest that I bought a Continental Trailways ticket to Lincoln, Nebraska, to start over. Fast-forward, as the cliché scripters say, and I’m a new food writer scrambling around for projects in the early Eighties, mining my childhood for material, thinking gauzily about the food described so powerfully in those stories, and I hit on the best idea ever: A “Little House” cookbook. And that, I’m afraid, was my first hard lesson in how competitive this business would be. Barbara Walker had been there and done that. Think it’s too late to prairie-blog my way through all the recipes?