Category Archives: farming

Chocolate

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While we were in Costa Rica we stopped at a chocolate plantation. I’m sure everyone know the story; how a chocolate drink was served to the Spanish conquistadores and from there went on to become one of the most popular foods in the world.

cocoa pods

Cocoa pods on a tree.

The seeds inside are coated in a sweet jelly like substance. That has to be taken off.

cocoa bean

Once the jelly like substance is removed, the beans are fermented. After fermentation, the beans are dried.

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Then the beans are cleaned and roasted. The shell is removed. The tool used to do that at this plantation was a large mortar with a pestle to crush the shell.

crushing

The inner seeds, the cacao nibs, are then ground to cocoa mass, unadulterated chocolate in rough form.

deshelled

These nibs are heated and reduced to a liquid. Adding sugar, cinnamon, nuts and more -yum.

The higher the amount of the chocolate (you will see 70% for bittersweet for example) the stronger the chocolate flavor.

Women’s Health in the 1700s

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Pregnancy took an enormous toll on women. Besides the tremendous – and physical work – of running a household, women helped in the fields when needed. Childbirth was dangerous and it was not uncommon for a farmer to bury three wives.

We think that midwives handled the lying-in and birth for the mothers. Not exactly. Both Ministers and doctors attended. (I suspect male doctors were already moving into this sphere, although it is usually assumed that did not happen until the mid-1800s. But why the Ministers? A review of some of the early diaries indicates that a significant number of men were both Ministers and Doctors. What about the ones who weren’t?)

But I digress.

In any event, from the writings of these men, it is clear that they treated women for a variety of ailments. From the 1700s the Commonplace Book of Thomas Robie of Salem reveals that as a physician he stepped into to prevent and promote abortion (!) and to speed and ease delivery of the baby. Because many women experienced soreness of the breasts after childbirth (and this is still true), he recommended a concoction of “Millepedes with the heads off, stampt in white wine or beer” to be taken every morning and evening. (Can I say yuck now?)

Another male healer,  parson, also treated complications of pregnancy and menstrual disorders. His cure for cramps? “. . .every night you goe to bed smell your fingers after you have picked the stinking sweat that is between your toes.” Ugh!

Many of these men did consult with female healers when unsure what to do. Although these women, relying on herbal medicines and lore passed down orally from mother to daughter, were frequently illiterate, a survey of diaries show that the men regularly borrowed recipes from the them.

For all that women were legally dependent, unable to inherit without express willed instruction from her husband, she nevertheless was extremely important in the house. Her illness or death devastated the household. She was a major player in the economy of the family besides caring for children and performing the household tasks that were essential for survival. Perhaps because mortality was so high, every life was precious.

Next up: Herbs and remedies.

More about food – Garden Sass

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Women in the cities might not be responsible for smoking and drying game and pork as well as preserving other types of food but women on farms and certainly on the frontier were.

Most homesteads owned pigs and even in cities the pigs ran free. Chickens might be in coops or be truly free range, foraging for themselves. (That must have made hunting for eggs fun).

And, no matter how much acreage was in corn, rye or other grains, housewives always had a small patch of vegetables. (Many of them must of had flowers too since lists of seeds and bulbs that were brought over included seeds for peach, apricot, apple, plum and cherry trees as well as seeds for snapdragons, peonies, morning glories and tulip bulbs.)Wheat bread was expensive although wheat was grown in Pennsylvania. In Maine rye and buckwheat were the common crops. Most people ate a bread called ‘injun loaf’, a combination of rye and corn.

Vegetables grown included spinach, rhubarb, several kinds of peas, beans as well as turnips, carrots, cabbage, beets and cucumbers. In more southerly climates than Maine artichokes were popular. A variety of herbs were also grown and had to be tied to the rafters and dried every fall.

Where are the potatoes? Although a new world crop (the Incas had thousands of varieties), potatoes did not get to the colonies until late in the 1700s. They quickly became a popular crop. And where are the tomatoes? Considered poisonous a hundred or so years earlier, they were still suspect.

All the vegetables were lumped together under the term garden sass.

Sugar and salt were both expensive. Salt especially was valuable and desperately needed for food preservation. Honey was the most common sweetener – ironic since bees are not native to the New World. They were brought over with the first colonists, however, and quickly became wild. The other common sweetener was from the sugar maple – maple sugar and syrup.

One final comment: the immigrants to this country brought their own eating habits with them so there were variations in what the colonists ate, depending on country of origin. The Scottish, for example, had to give up oatmeal porridge and switch to cornmeal mush for a time.

Potatoes

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Potatoes are a New World crop. Developed in Peru and thereabouts, the Incas developed potatoes. Not all of them are edible for humans. They come in a variety of colors, including purple. But I digress.

Potatoes were still rare and not frequently planted. One story out of Colonial times says if a man ate potatoes he would not live seven years. During the 1790s more farmers were beginning to plant potatoes but they were still rare.

Potatoes were exported to England and were called Virginia potatoes. As we all know, they went to Ireland and became a staple in their diet. They returned to this country as Irish potatoes. A fashionable way of cooking them included butter, sugar and grape juice and then mixed with dates and lemons and seasoned with cinnamon and nutmeg. They were finally covered with a layer of sugar. Calorie overload!

More popular were sweet potatoes. They were roasted in the ashes, boiled, made into puddings, and eaten instead of bread. And of course, made into pie which tastes, like pumpkin.

A-Maize-ing Corn

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When most of us think of corn, we think of fat golden ears or popcorn covered with butter.

When the first colonists came to this country, corn was much different. And Indian crop along with squash, corn had to be ground and cooked to make it palatable. Dishes had names like suppawn and samp as well as the more familiar pone and hominy. Corn had to be steeped or parboiled in water for twelve hours and then ground. Samp is corn pounded to a coarsely ground powder and then made into porridge.

Every household had a mortar and pestle or some approximation of such. The Native Americans also had something called a sweep and mortar mill. The pestle was a heavy block of wood shaped like the inside of the mortar and fitted with a handle. It was attached to a sapling which gave it some spring when it was lifted. The sound could be heard a long distance. One story, maybe apocryphal, says sailors in a fog always knew they were approaching Long Island because they could hear the poundings of the samp mortars.

Suppawn was an Indian dish. It was a thick corn meal porridge made with milk. And of course, it was made into cakes.

After the corn was scraped off, the cobs were used as light wood for the fire and also to smoke hams and bacon. (That’s what cob smoked means.)

Pumpkins (or pompkins to use the colonial spelling) and other forms of squashes were also native crops. The potato known to the Colonists at this time was most likely the sweet potato.

Hired men: the Shaker challenge

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Farming is hard work even now with all the modern equipment we use. (Both good and bad don’t you think, but clearly a topic for another time.)   In the 1790s farming was even harder. It remains and was certainly even more so then a very people intensive profession. Lots of help was required, and that is true even now. So hired help was a common feature of early America. Sons and daughters hired themselves out to the neighbors until they had homes and farms of their own. Younger sons, who often never obtained a farm of their own – the older sons inherited – frequently hired on to other farms.  Unattached males traveled from farm to farm exactly as migrant labor does now. This is a long standing practice, continuing right up to modern times. Think of Lennie and George in Steinbeck’s “Of Mice and Men” and the current use of migrant labor. Farms really couldn’t function without this kind of a labor pool.

As usual, I digress.

So Rees and Lydia would have employed help, both inside the farmhouse and outside in the fields. think of Abigail and the boys David took on to help him brng in the harvest.

Even the Shakers employed hired help, primarily men. During the nineteenth century the number of hired men increased as the flow of male converts decreased. (The Shakers always attracted more women than men for a variety of reasons.) The use of hired men within the Shaker community created a number of consequences. Since the men were ‘too much of the World’, they slept in a separate building and were required to eat alone. I would guess that there were still unexpected and forbidden attractions between Sisters and the men. Human biology is very hard to resist and one of the primary sources I read discussed the problems of keeping the boys and girls adopted into the community separate. The attraction the adolescents felt to one another and their efforts to attract attention was a great trial to the Shaker caretakers.

But some of the problems were cultural, if you will. After the Believers had become teetotalers, the Families in Canterbury (New Hampshire), were much exercised over whether to brew beer for the hired men. The community worried that by brewing beer they were risking not only their ideals but also the consequence of drunken men living in the heart of the village. (Described in “The Shakers, Neither Plain nor Simple”. Even though Sisters took on ‘male’ tasks, men were still required.