Appalachia Project: The Egg and I, 1945

The Egg and I, by Betty MacDonald

The big surprise of this book was that it is not set in Appalachia. My memories have it set in Arkansas, but they lied. I was enjoying reading it so much, however, that I decided to review it anyway.

The Egg and I is the semi-autobiographical tale of MacDonald's life as a young wife, mother, and farmer on the Olympic Peninsula of Washington. She starts with some very funny chapters on her childhood to put her reactions to chicken farming into some perspective. These chapters were so funny that they gave me aggressive attacks of hilarity. I feel tickled inside just thinking about some of the incidents, but more so of the specific language MacDonald used, the turn of a phrase. Wonderful.

MacDonald came to hate the chicks
she was supposed to nurture,
unlike the beaming Claudette
Colbert in the movie of the book.

The stories are not solidly set in time, but based on MacDonald's biography on that bastion of authority Wikipedia, they must have taken place in the 1920s, which fits the consumerist aspects of the book. (She divorced the husband in this book in 1931.) MacDonald and her husband were gourmets, well read and educated, used to a high standard of living. This makes it especially funny to see how they adjust to a move to a rundown farm lacking plumbing, electricity, running water, and even at the beginning lacking windows.


I wish MacDonald had written about Appalachia, because her descriptions of the scenery are superbly detailed. I could feel the moisture, the creeping cold, the eerie feeling that I was being stalked by a large animal. I could feel the fatigue, the frustration, and the loneliness, too. I could see the amazing array of greens--old growth, second growth, fruit trees, ferns, moss; and the stark and menacing mountains with their stoles of white ermine that lengthened and shortened with the seasons but never really went away.

MacDonald marvels at the easy availability of food. Clams, crabs, oysters, fish, salmon, venison, duck. Every kind of vegetable, herb, and tuber bursting out of the fertile soil. Berries and fruit dangling heavy and free for the picking. Chicken, of course. And eggs. MacDonald reveled in the eggs. In one passage, she discusses her ability to make the richest of recipes with no guilt whatsoever and as often as she wished:

The astonishing fact that there was always on my pantry shelf a water bucket of double-yoked and checked eggs to do with as I would was a source of constant delight and lured me into trying many of the rich, eggy old-fashioned recipes in Mrs. Lincoln's cookbook. In town, where I would have had to buy my groceries and balance a food budget, I wouldn't have put up with Mrs. Lincoln and her "beat the whites of sixteen large eggs with a fork on a platter..." I would have loved to visit Mrs. Lincoln, but she was hell to cook for unless you lived on a chicken ranch, and then you and Mrs. Lincoln could see eye to eye about a lot of things....The [cream puff] recipe called for "eight eggs to be broken one by one and beaten into the mixture with the bare right hand." I used sixteen.

The Mrs. Lincoln cookbook was Mrs. Lincoln's Boston Cook Book: What to Do and What Not to Do in Cooking, published in 1884. It was akin to today's Joy of Cooking or a very fancy Betty Crocker.

Keeping the huge wood stove
going and boiling and heating
water was an all-day-
 every-day chore

After the idyllic portrayal of housework from A Parchment of Leaves, I appreciated MacDonald's more acerbic descriptions of the 4 a.m. to 9 p.m. never ending labor of farming. She writes, "...my enthusiasm was at a low ebb. I was overtired by the fire and insufficient sleep...My life on the ranch had reached some sort of climax and it was the aftermath which worried me. We were just about to go into another long, dreary winter and I felt harried and uncertain as though I were boarding a steamer with no passport and no luggage. I was leaning on the drainboard of the sink, staring moodily out of the window at the driving rain."

In The Egg and I, MacDonald introduces a family that became famous in its own Hollywood way, the Kettles, as in Ma and Pa Kettle. The Kettles were the ultimate in slovenly slackers, always trying to get something for nothing, begging, unwashed. In the movie of The Egg and I, the Kettles were so funny that they went on to star in many films on their own. I think they may have influenced the creation of "The Beverly Hillbillies," also.

Ma and Pa Kettle

The Kettles were the grossest stereotype of hillbilly and I think it is from them that I developed the feeling that this book was about Appalachia. MacDonald is not unsympathetic and comes to love this family, but she also doesn't pull any punches about their laziness and squalor. And, this book is about life in remote mountains where life is shaped by the landscape. That's somewhat Appalachian also.

That justifies me including this book. It is a picture of a time and place that holds up well, even with the stereotypical and ugly portrayal of the native peoples MacDonald comes in contact with.