Sing and clap ‘Pease Porridge Hot’ with your child as a clapping game or ask your child to ‘partner’ with the wall, a chair, or another household member. Teach your child a clapping game that you remember from when you were a child such as the one below or use the ‘Patty Cake’ rhyme video to help. Try a few different rhythms.Īsk your child to stir an imaginary bowl of ‘porridge’ and listen to the song ‘Pease Pudding Hot’. Explain to your child that musicians call this ‘call and response’. Using a kitchen item like a wooden spoon and saucepan, clap some rhythms and ask your child to play some back to you on their ‘instrument’. Paper, pencil, or pictures of foods (such as from a magazine), glue, scissorsĭo you have a saucepan and wooden spoon or something else in your kitchen that makes a sound that your child could use?ĭo you remember any clapping games you could share with your child? ‘London Bridge is Falling Down’ song video Lincoln’s Boston Cook Book (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1884), 287.Have these things available so your child can complete this task. The meat should be cooked till it falls apart. The meal should thicken the porridge to about the consistency of a thick soup. Half an hour before serving stir in the meal, first wetting it in cold water to a smooth paste. Put the meat and beans into the meat liquor, and simmer very slowly three or four hours, or till most of the beans are broken. Take out and cut into two-inch pieces, and remove the bone and gristle also the fat from the liquor. Put the beef and pork in cold water, skim carefully, and simmer four or five hours, or until tender. In the morning parboil in fresh water with a pinch of soda till soft. Four pounds of beef and one of salt pork one pint of dry white beans, four tablespoonfuls of corn meal, pepper and salt to taste.
Nathaniel Bouton, The History of Concord (Concord: Benning W. Take out the meat and thicken the liquid with Indian meal, and you have porridge. Add two or three pounds of beef or pork, put them into an iron pot or kettle and boil them together until the meat is thoroughly cooked. Take one quart of dried beans or peas and add to four gallons of water. Any dried legume may be used, but as Caroline Ingalls typically made bean soup from white navy beans, these were probably what she used to make bean porridge, a bean soup thickened with corn meal and flavored with meat.īEAN PORRIDGE. You just measure them by the cupful or handful or scoop full. Pease is the mass plural of pea, meaning uncounted. There were many variations to the rhyme: bean porridge, pease porridge, or pease pudding, although there are botanical differences between peas and beans. Notice that in On the Banks of Plum Creek (see Chapter 37, “The Long Blizzard”), young Carrie Ingalls merely holds up her hands for Ma to clap against she is perhaps too young to remember what to do. The quick movements were exercise, and by using different clapping sequences, the game could become quite difficult and also served as memory work. Little House on the Prairie, Chapter 20, “A Scream in the Night”Īn early clapping game, “Bean Porridge Hot” is played in the Little House books by the children as a way to keep warm and pass the time, clapping hands and legs in time with the chanted rhyme, faster and faster. No supper was so good as the thick bean porridge, flavored with a small bit of salt pork, that Ma dipped onto the tin plates when Pa had come home cold and tired from his hunting.