Tag Archives: cooking

What did they eat in 1797?

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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.

 

 

 

More about salads – and vegetables

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Salad has a long history. One source I read claimed that the Greeks and Romans ate mixed greens with dressing.

I have salad recipes in my Queen Elizabeth I and King Richard cookbooks although they also include things like figs and are sweeter than we normally think of salad, which is now seen as more of a healthy food. The recipes from these renaissance cookbooks read more like dessert.

Besides wild greens and the tops of beets and turnips, early American farmers also grew several varieties of lettuce, cucumbers, radishes. What’s missing from the usual American salad? Why, tomatoes. Although now considered Italian, tomatoes are actually, like potatoes, from South America It was brought to Europe by Spain. And, a member of the nightshade family, it was considered a poison. It was not eaten at all during the Colonial period ( and grown as a decorative plant) but by the early 1800s was popular as a food. One story lists Thomas Jefferson as the who began planting and eating tomatoes. He was a passionate gardener who tried new foods but we don’t really know for sure.

But I digress. Cucumbers were frequently used as a salad and I have found old recipes for cucumber salad which usually consists of chopped cucumbers and vinegar.

Other vegetables: artichokes, onions, garlic, parsnips, asparagus and of course things like cabbage were popular. We think of the diet at this time as meat heavy, and it was, but cheese and diary and grains, as well as the vegetables, were also a big part of the diet.

I always mention food in my books. I’m a gardener myself and clearly a foodie – which regular readers of my blog can surely tell. And I find it fascinating to discover what our forefathers ate and didn’t eat. Sometimes it is surprising.

food in the 1790’s – salad and maple syrup

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Although trading went on, most food eaten was, by necessity, local. The port cities like Salem could import oranges, nuts, figs and more but for the outlying farms these items were exotic luxuries.

Salad (or salat) has been eaten for hundreds of years. Greens such as beet and turnip tops and spinach, cabbage are all greens that might be used. For the early New Englander, wild greens such as dandelion greens or violets would be eaten. (Fiddleheads are still eaten by Mainers, cooked of course, and have a flavor similar to spinach.) Our idea of a salad with lettuce and tomato was not the salad eaten by the early colonists. One of the memoirs from this time expressed a hunger for greens after a winter of salted and smoked food.

Poke weed was also used as a salad green. It is, however, poisonous, although the very young leaves – from accounts I have read – are not. I haven’t tried them. I have also read that the leaves are edible after cooking three or four times, discarding the water in between.

One note: since the native American tribes knew how to tap the sap from maple trees, maple syrup quickly became a staple. It was used as both lightly boiled sap, and the syrup we are more familiar with today.

 

 

Californa – visit

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California visit

While at Bouchercon, my husband and I took a quick trip to Los Angeles.  I like this city and not just the weather. For one thing, Los Angeles is the home of many world class museums. On this trip, we visited LACMA – the Los Angeles Couny Museum of Art. They had a special exhibit on the armor of the samurai. It was beautiful as well as functional. I especially enjoyed the art deco textiles. As a weaver, I was astonished by the complexity, as well as the beauty, of these pieces.

lacma lights

A display of all the lights used in LA grace the front walk before the gates.

Because it is LA, of course, there are unique LA twists. Every place has food trucks. LA has unusual ones. Not a hot dog truck in the bunch but there is seafood, sushi and ethnic food of all varieties.

food truck

We stopped at the Nespresso store for coffee. It makes starbucks look like gas station coffee. All the staff wear black uniforms that look almost like martial arts outfits. Art work related to coffee adorn the walls and the front, where the coffee and food are served, looks like someone’s living room with sofas, little tables and comfortable chairs.  (The back half is where the capsules are actually sold. And expensive coffee it is too.) More than anything, this store reminded me of a temple set up for the worship of coffee. I love coffee and am a huge coffee drinker but to my New York eyes, this looked  over the top.

Of corn and raccoons

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Since there is nothing as delicious as fresh veggies, especially corn, I have tried to plant the latter over and over. What happens? The raccoons beat a path to the garden, scaling the fence and trampling everything in their path to get to the tasty morsels.

This year I thought I’d outsmart them. Burpee developed a special desk variety.The stalks grew tall and lush.

stalks

 

 

 

 

 

Ears were clearly growing on the stalks. So I picked some.

corn

 

 

 

 

 

this is three ears.

Laughter may commence.

Summer bounty

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I love the fresh veggies from my garden but, at this time of the year, I begin to feel overwhelmed. Everything is bearing and I am awash in produce from cucumbers to turnips to tomatoes.

tomatoes

 

I am busy freezing green beans and zucchini and making tomato sauce. This year I am trying something different: sundried tomatoes. I borrowed a dehydrator from a friend and dried about 8 pounds of tomatoes. I am storing them in olive oil. I now understand why the sundried tomatoes I buy in the store are so expensive. It take a lot of tomatoes to fill a jar.

dried tomatoes

Cooking – Colonial Style

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One of the comments I received on my baking thread concerned other kinds of cooking. I think you can see from my books that bacon (and pork in general) was an important staple. Every one except the poorest owned at least one pig. Descriptions of the times talk about the feral pigs that ran through the city streets (of big cities like Philadelphia and Boston) living on the garbage in the streets. Besides the yuck factor (it must have been a lot of garbage and does anyone else think of the awful smell?) the thought of all those pigs is pretty unsettling. In the countryside too, especially on the frontier, pigs were allowed to roam. I guess there were feral pigs back then just as there are now in the Carolinas.

But I digress.

Besides pork, people ate a wide variety of protein. Chickens were eaten when they no longer lay eggs and a chicken Sunday dinner was a tradition. Game was very important. OK, so one thinks of deer, turkeys and other wild birds, the feral pigs, but turtles? It’s true. One of the recipes from that period begins: Catch a turtle.

It continues: Hang him by the hind fins until all the blood drains. I will spare the sensibilities of my readers and not continue with the rest of the instruction. I pride myself on eating pretty much anything but I confess I draw the line at turtles.

Desserts – 18th century style

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I use a reproduction of the earliest American cookbook to guide my descriptions of food in my Will Rees mystery series. As discussed in earlier posts, there are not a lot of recipes for the kind of cakes and quick breads we know. Most of the recipes are highly spiced, probably to hide the bitter taste of pearl ash. I am beginning to think that the invention of baking powder should be up there along with indoor plumbing and central heating.

So what did they eat for desserts? Those who say fresh fruit may be only half right. Puddings, as discussed in Dickens, seem to be a huge favorite. The dessert we know and call pudding is actually called custard.Pudding, at this time, was a boiled dessert with sugar and spices. Think plum pudding which is boiled in a form or special cloth and is too sweet and rich for a modern palate. Interesting note: one of the desserts listed is potato pudding!

There are lots of recipes for pie- and without a good leavening agent this makes sense. Also, not only fruit but slices of pumpkin, lemons and other stuffs were put between the pastry layers as were various kinds of meats. I tried the sliced lemon pie and although it is very sugary I found it quite tart. The lemon gel under meringue is a huge improvement. I wonder how the pumpkin pie is since the pumpkin is not pureed but added to the crust in slices.

Those who talk about fat and sugar consumption now should read some of these recipes. Loaf cake starts: Rub 6 pounds of sugar (or fugar in the type set of the times), 2 pounds of lard, 3 pounds of butter, 12 pounds of flour, 18 eggs — well, you get the picture. Obviously this recipe is for loaf cakes for a large group.

One of the desserts we don’t see in the modern US is syllabub. This may have to do with the ingredients. One recipe begins: start with two parts cream to one part wine. Another begns: take a pint of cream and sweeten it to your palate. This dessert is usually drunk. I can only guess at the number of calories. I have had it in England, where it is still consumed as a dessert and it tasted like alcoholic whipped cream.

One element used to lighten some of the baked goods is egg whites, which have to beaten by hand. One recipe says beat for half an hour. If I had to spend this much time beating egg whites my family would never have cake.

More about baking

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The replacement for the pearl ash (or pot ash) I discussed in my last post was something called salterus.

Salterus is bicarbonate of soda – yes, the stuff used for stomach acid or whitening teeth. We know it as baking soda and it is the leavening agent in soda bread.

This substance has been known for millenia. The Ancient Egyptians used it as a component of natron, the salt they employed to mummify bodies.

Umm, yummy. Using it for cooking seems more recent. (I read that the Native Americans used it but haven’t found additional documentation for this.) Anyway, baking soda works with something like buttermilk, which has a lot of lactic acid. In chemistry 101, we learn that the combination of an acid and a base yields carbon dioxide and that is what raises the bread.

Baking soda itself is pretty bitter. When I make soda bread I usually use baking powder as well. Pop quiz: what is baking powder? Well, it is baking soda combined with the powdered form of a weak acid but it also leaves less of a bitter aftertaste.

baking in the old days

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Since I haven’t seen a workman for my kitchen for ten days (and counting) and I still am missing doors, knobs, and my new refrigerator, I am moving on in my blog.

I began to think about how cooks baked in the past. They had yeast but what leavener did they use for what we term quick breads.

There was no baking powder. They had yeast but that requires rising. Beer dregs can also be used – I;ve made beer bread but you would not want cookies made from beer.

So what did the cooks use? Pearlash. Wood ashes when soaked in water yield lye. Lye is used to make soap. Lye was also used to soak hominey and for other cooking purposes. Some where in 1780 some enterprising cook used it to make cookies and bread.

I’ve read, however, that it left a bitter alkaline taste in the mouth. The use of pearlash was short-lived. After 1840 a precursor of baking powder was produced.