Life on the Estate: Gendered Work and the Weekly Menu (ca. 1910)

Only a very small percentage of Mennonites were estate owners, and each employed a small team of male and female servants, "German" and "Russian." The following comes from the memoir by Gerhard Wiens, who grew up on his maternal Schroeder family estate some 20 miles west of the Molotschna Colony. Wiens was born in 1900 and died in Minnesota on his 100th birthday. His detailed reflections (note 1) are of a boy coming of age in the decade before World War I:

“My mother presided over the household chores. She had a Mennonite cook and housemaid Marie Derksen who was employed with us as long as I can remember. She was assisted by two German girls either from the Molotschna Mennonite villages or from Lutheran villages some 20 miles from us. We also had two Russian girls who weeded the vegetables, washed the dishes and did some other work. The German girls did the dusting, cleaning and bed-making. They also had to do the washing with a hand-operated washing machine. All had to do the milking (a woman's job in Russia) and help with the vegetable garden. Marie Derksen did most of the baking except fancy cookies which my mother did.” (Note 2)

Wiens noted that they “had no refrigerators of course, but we had a deep cellar, one end of which was the ice cellar. It was filled every winter with loads of ice from the pond which kept part of the cellar very cold so meat and butter kept very well for a few days. The ice cellar contained enough ice to last through the summer. It was covered on the top with straw to keep from melting too fast. There was a well in the cellar where the water from the melting ice collected and had to be carried out with buckets periodically.” (Note 3)

This was the weekly menu prepared by Marie Derksen and her assistants.

"The main meal was taken at noon:

Sunday: In the winter baked stuffed ducks and potatoes and gravy, and in the summer spring lamb. Very light on desserts
Monday: kilky (noodles) and fried ham
Tuesday: Borscht often cooked with goose
Wednesday: Waffles or Vareneki and sausage
Thursday: A soup of some kind
Friday: often fish, sometimes big pancakes
Saturday: in the winter Sauerkraut with salt pork and beans, and ham in the summer

The peasants in the Ukraine had Borscht every day, with meat usually only on Sunday, weekdays it was made by frying bacon and onions to give the Borscht some flavour.

The evening meal was light--cold meat, fried potatoes, soups with grits and milk, etc.

No coffee was served with these meals, sometimes tea in the evening, usually Sunday. Coffee was served in the morning with bread dark and white with butter and jam, and [also] in the afternoon at 3 pm when sweeter baked stuff was served like Zwieback (double rolls), Schnetke (Danish pastry), Fruchtplautz (fruit on top of sweet dough baked in flat pans).

A lot of baking was done on Saturdays except bread which was baked oftener. The Zwieback after a few days were toasted in the oven to be dunked in coffee.” (Note 4)

Gerhard Wiens reflects on the inequities of the era, though he is quite defensive of his father's good will towards all of his male and female servants. During the Revolution Gerhard was an active participant in the Selbstschutz self-defense and White Army forces. He escaped with a group of 62 young Mennonite White Army men via Crimea to Constantinople, where North American Mennonites had their aid headquarters, and then to New York (note 5).

---Arnold Neufeldt-Fast

---Notes---

Note 1: I thank James Urry for sharing the larger document with me, including his own interview notes. Gerhard Wiens, “Memoirs of my life in Russia,” edited by James Urry. Unpublished. In author’s possession. For Wiens' genealogical data, see GRanDMA #110974.

Note 2: This is a composite of comments made by Wiens in his text and in the subsequent interview with Urry ("Memoirs," 21f.; 49f.).

Note 3: Wiens, “Memoirs,” 14.

Note 4: Wiens, “Memoirs,” 14.

Note 5: For a fuller account of this group, see Irmgard Epp, ed., Constantinoplers—Escape from Bolshevism (Victoria, BC: Trafford, 2006).

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Estate map from Helmut Huebert, Mennonite Estates in Imperial Russia, 2nd expanded ed. (Winnipeg, MB: Springfield, 2008), 370, https://archive.org/details/mennoniteestatesinimperialrussia2ndeditionocropt/page/n387/mode/2up.

Annotated historical map provided by Viktor Petkau, https://chortitza.org/kb/p67923.jpg.

Photo of the David Schroeder estate in Gerhard Lohrenz, ed., Damit es nicht vergessen werde. Ein Bildband zur Geschichte der Mennoniten Preussens und Russlands (Winnipeg, MB: Canadian Mennonite Bible College Press, 1974).

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