I have over 500 signups for Death in Salem. Very excited.
There are still over two weeks to go before the end. Will I make a 1000 requests? Only time will tell.
Tag Archives: 1790s
Hired men: the Shaker challenge
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.
Shakers and Alcohol
With a group, particularly a religious group, that has had such a long history, I think there is a tendency to see them as they are and extrapolate backwards. Attitudes toward drinking alcohol have changed so dramatically in the intervening few centuries that that approach is impossible.
Rees’s period, the Federalist period in American History, was a hard drinking age. Ale was used almost like water and was consumed by women and children as well as by men. Cider, which was usually hard cider (it could hardly be anything else without refrigeration) was a common breakfast drink. Many of our founding fathers took a glass of cider first thing in the morning in the same manner we drink our orange juice. Rum was used as part of sailors’ wages. (Rum is made from molasses, a byproduct in the refining of sugar. The more molasses in the sugar, the browner. Sugar has a dark history. Planting and harvesting the cane required more slaves. Cane exhausts the soil so more land was needed. And of course we are all familiar with the health risks of sugar. But I digress.) In any event, rum was the drink of the Colonies. After the Whiskey Rebellion of 1793, whiskey became more popular, more American if you will, just like coffee did in comparison to tea.
The Shakers brewed cider and like the society around them drank ‘spirits’. It was the custom for every Brother and Sister who wished to take a glass in the morning before breakfast and then through out the day. For dinner the Brothers were permitted two gills and the Sisters two thirds of a gill. (Does anyone but me wonder about the livers of all those drinkers?)
But with the Millennial Laws, especially from 1845 (and the rise of the temperance movement) the drinking of spirits (along with coffee and tea – that would have killed me) was forbidden. No cider was made and no liquor was brewed. One of the primary sources I read discussed the struggle among the Family about brewing beer for the hired men. (More about hired men in another post.)
Eventually spirits had to be offered medicinally from the Doctor and then were banned all together. Like other cultural changes, however, this prohibition changed again and later on the Shakers both made and consumed wine with meals.
So the Shakers, like the World around them, changed as prevailing attitudes changed.
Shakers andPets
Although the simple life is certainly a draw in this hectic over-scheduled modern life, I would find living as a Shaker difficult, if not impossible. For one thing, I am not obedient. But also the shakers do not have pets.
The Milennial Laws of 1821 and then again in 1845 laid out rules governing every aspect of Shaker lives. They were not allowed pets, primarily because their focus was supposed to be upon God.
For me, this is a deal breaker. I have had a dog since I was ten, with only a few years here and there without. Plus a few cats scattered among the dogs.
Shelby is my current dog, although she actually, emotionally, belongs to my husband. I wanted a dog for my birthday. When we went to the rescue, she raced to him. Once she’d chosen him, we couldn’t leave her behind. So, I got a dog for my husband for my birthday.
But I digress. Sandy was my previous dog. She looked similar to Shelby – a little lighter in color. Sandy was my best friend. She went everywhere with me. Although a medium dog (65 pounds) she lived to be 17 1/2. The vet was astonished she lived so long. by then she was blind, deaf, and had hip displasia. I was so heart broken I did not get another dog for a few years.
So, having a dog is one thing I could not surrender.
Cookery language in 1797
Cooking in 1797 was a much different affair than it became even a few years later. Benjamin Franklin had invented a stove but it was not yet commonly used, for cooking especially, so much cooking took place over an open fire. In a previous post I discussed leavening. Up to this point, yeast or beating to incorporate air were the methods to achieve lightness in baked goods. But sometimes in the 1790s an American cook discovered chemical leavening, i.e. pearlash. we now use baking powder, a combination of an acid (cream of tarter) and baking soda (a base) to make carbon dioxide and raise the dough. Failing baking powder, which had not been invented yet, cooks used buttermilk for the lactic acid.
But I digress. Besides the new foods with their own (usually American Indian names such as squash), some of the names for tools and methods are not familiar today. I’ve already mentioned Hannah Hill, the name for sea bass. And pearlash. What is that? Also called potash, it is potassium carbonate (lye) and is the result of soaking wood ashes in water. It is bitter beyond belief!
Other terms:
amber gun, probably ambergris, from the sperm whale. It is now used in perfumery but once was used as a cooking ingredient.
Bladder and leather – the items used to tie over jars of jelly. (Give me paraffin wax any day!)
calavance – an early variety of bean
calapash – the part of the turtle adjoining the upper shell
emptins – semi prepared liquid yeast.
gallipot – a small earthen pot
jump in the pan – a characteristic action of eels when cooked in a pan.
What it tells me is how difficult time travel would be, even a few hundred years in the past. Not just the clothing is different but even simple homey actions like cooking.
Food in the 1790s
While talking with a friend about early American food, and the divergence between American cookery and British, he said the differences were due to the influx of immigrants with their regional cuisines.
Yes, that is partly true, but more so later on,
The truth is that what was eaten began diverging right away.
Take the word corn for example. In Britain, corn was a general term for grain. (So in the nursery rhyme ‘the cows in the corn’, the cows could have been in the wheat. the term used for corn was the American Indian word maize.
Corn was a staple of the American diet, eaten in a variety of ways: bread, pancakes, pone (little cakes) and so on. Including something called ash pone which was cooked in the ashes. (Yuck?)
Squash, another Indian name for an American vegetable, was an addition to the American diet.
They did have something they called pumpkin pie but we would not recognize it. It was slices of raw apple and pumpkin sugared and cooked in a crust. (Unappealing, I think. I tried a recipe for a Shaker lemon pie which was slices of raw lemon, heavily sugared and baked in a pie. Incredibly sour, despite the sugar. But I digress). What we would call pumpkin pie (stewed pumpkin stewed with sugar and spices) was called a pudding at that time.
Other differences: corn cobs were used to smoke bacon and cranberry sauce accompanied the roast turkey, cranberries being an American fruit. Mince pie, by the way, was made with meat – usually venison, not apples and raisins as it is now.
One of the early recipes gives directions for spruce beer. Yes, it really does contain spruce, but also hops and molasses. And speaking of molasses, this is a word Americans, even from this time forward, have used in preference to the more British treacle.
Goodreads Giveaway Ends
I am thrilled to announce that 941 people requested Cradle to Grave. (And here I was wondering if I would break 500!) I have received the names of the winners and will be sending copies of the books to them this weekend.
Goodreads Giveaway
The Giveaway ends tomorrow at midnight; two days left to add your name for the Giveaway.
Will and Lydia travel to New York just outside of Albany after a frantic plea for help from Shaker friend Mouse. There they find Mouse had been accused of kidnapping – and she admits it. Shortly after, the mother of the children is found dead and Mouse is the the primary suspect.
What did they eat in 1797?
With Thanksgiving coming up, my thoughts turn naturally to food.
One of the first things that strikes a modern person when one researches food from this era is how meat heavy it is. The American plate for the last fifty or so years has been meat, a vegetable and a starch like potato or rice.
Johnny cakes or cornbread would have more likely been the starch on the table. And while vegetables from the garden would be available in the summer and early fall, people would have been limited to good keepers like cabbage apples, and carrots after that.
Refrigeration was primitive. Root cellars, holes dug into the ground and cool, were further cooled with ice covered in sawdust for insulation.
But meat, both from domesticated animals and whatever a hunter could bag, was available all year. (Assuming enough wealth to own animals or the skill to hunt successfully.)
Here is a list of some of the animals eaten:
The regular domesticated: beef, pork, mutton, lamb and chicken.
Fish: salmon, shad, Hannah Hill (sea bass), oysters, lobster, cod, haddock, perch, eels
Wild: ducks, geese, partridge, deer, snipes, pigeon, hares and rabbits, turtles and of course turkey.
Recipes included many herbs.
No wonder people longed for greens in the spring.
Goodreads Giveaway
I am so happy to announce that I have broken the 400 mark. I still have a week to go. Will I break 500 requests? Only time will tell.