Foodways

[Robert Braun]

Elijah Iles provides us with a clue to tableware and foodways in eastern Kentucky along Slate Creek, at least to 1802:

We had to make out with very little, as almost every article used about the house had to be brought from Virginia to Kentucky on pack-horses. Our tableware consisted of pewter plates, pewter dishes and spoons, and japanned tin tumblers. We made much use of gourds for drinking cups. Our cooking utensils were a small dinner pot, oven, skillet, and frying-pan.

Our bread was always corn bread, mostly baked on a board and called johnny-cake, or in the ashes, when it was called ash-cake. Our meat, consisting of bear meat, turkey, venison, squirrel, quail and fish, was often roasted before the fire.

[Greg Carter]

I suggest then that we echo Mr. Iles and roast a squirrel at each event from now on. My rifle caliber so small it can only kill squirrels or chipmunks, so I will do the hunting.

On the serious side, this doesn't say much about frontier possessions does it? It really echoes my posting about frontier Illinois on the "Furniture" thread located elsewhere on this board.

GMC

[Robert Braun]

Almanac, I am trying to reconcile the nagging suspicion that maybe the Southern emigrants of Scots-Irish descendancy that moved to the highlands of Kentucky and Tennessee were not as flush with belongings as one might think... at least early on.

[mary]

I located a slightly different perspective from an early Wisconsin Territorial pioneer.

Laura Chase Smith wrote in the June 7, 1884 edition of the Monroe Sun that: “It is interesting to compare the requirements of social life only 35 years ago [1849] with the demands now to be met by the most simple and unpretentious families in rural and urban ‘good society.’”

Reviewing the pages of a “day book” Mrs. Smith reported that “the actual cash expenditures for the average pioneer family did not exceed $25 per annum.”

"From this old book, it is found that butter sold for 12 1/2 cents per pound; coffee 12 cents; Young Hyson tea 75 cents; whisky at 10 cents a quart; tobacco at 25 cents a pound; meal at $1.75 per hundred; flour at 2 1/2 cents a pound."

She continued:

“Kerosene had not then been used in lamps, tallow candles were cheap and there was little use even for these after 8 o’clock in the evening…”

"Dried apples from 'York state' or Ohio were 'imported.' Salt pork and whitefish, both cheap, were once a week luxuries. The woods were full of game. The red deer roamed fearlessly through the woods, and were not driven out until many years later from the counties of Manitowoc, Calument, and Sheboygan, where James McM. Shafter, a mighty hunter, with his gun and dogs hunted them remorselessly.”

“To go to housekeeping in a clean new log cabin with a bright, young husband—healthy, cheerful, hopeful, with six plates, as many cups and saucers and spoons (not silver), a rocker, two chairs, a bedstead, a cooking stove, “with a bright hearth and a hearth swept clean” was by no means an unhappy lot… But, after all, it was a hard life, especially for the young wives and mothers. …Far from her early home, from mother father, sisters, friends, it needed a stout heart and a patient spirit to preserve her spirit from unlovely repining.”

[Gene]

Theres nothing to reconcile...it's true.

[Robert Braun]

Thanks for your comment Gene.

I think we agree that asserting a fact or series of facts as true is one thing; proving it is another.

Like examinations of long accepted "facts"--tapered tin cups, camp furniture and the "frizzen," one of our goals here is to attempt to assemble information that can verify long-held historical notions. Even those notions which, on their face, appear to be intuitively obvious.

There's much mythology out there... and our goal is to test some of these popularly-held conventions.

[Gene]

There is one simple document to look at...the last will and testiment. Ive viewed a few, and the possessions left behind to the families were few.

[Robert Braun]

I agree that inventories of possessions from those folks that passed away is one tool for looking at "quantities" of possessions.

The context of these documents is also important... which is why we have expanded our search to consider other sources of information as well.

Do you have some inventory lists you would be willing to share?

[mary]

As a return to our subject on foodways, I offer the following quote from Mr. Benjamin P. Thomas' Lincoln's New Salem

Cooking was done over the open fire, sometimes on a "flat oven," or in a "Dutch oven,"; and with the skillet, frying-pan, iron pot, and kettle. Stoves were unknown, and matches were just coming into use. The basis of the diet was corn meal, prepared in every way form mush to "corn dodgers," the latter often hard enough "to split a board or fell a steer at forty feet." This was supplemented by lye hominy, vegetables, milk, pork, fish, and fowl. Honey was generally used in place of sugar. In summer grapes, berries, and fruit were added to this fare. The women made preserves, but most families used them only on special occasions or when company came."

Mr. Thomas also stated: Each family produced most of what it used, although the presence of craftsmen in the village indicates some division of labor. But even craftsmen had gardens..."

It would be interesting to compare the foodways of New Salem to the situations found in the Mineral District!

mary.

[Marge Smith]

I just found cranberries for sale at Galena in 1829 brought in from Green Bay. So I think one source is the newspaper ads and we have them back to 1828, but we don't know who bought what.

The probate inventories tell us hopefully what "kitchen furniture" they had. But I do not have your knowledge of these early cooking methods to understand the utensils listed.

We also know that according to the Black Hawk War Claims that they were growing lots of potatoes and cabbage. And they had lots of hogs running around loose. So sauerkraut & pork - perhaps, ugh!
Marge Smith

[mary]

Ms. Smith, I was so very pleased to read you mention of "kitchen furniture" in your note.

I I can be of modest assistance in identifying some of the items in your probate inventories, I would welcome the opportunity!

[Robert Braun]

If we agree with Milo Quaife's thesis that four of six emigrants to Illinois and the U. S. Mineral District were of "highland southern" origin or extraction, then the majority of their foodways would mirror these traditions. Some extracts from David Hackett Fischer's outstanding book Albion's Seed include a discussion of highland southern foodways... as brought from English borderlands and modified by American foodstuffs--

In regard to diet, the southern back settlements differed fundamentally from other regions of British America. Samuel Kercheval recalled that the "standard" supper dish in the mid-eighteenth century was a wooden bowl of milk and mush seasoned with a splash of bear oil. The Anglican missionary Charles Woodmason regarded these backcountry meals with horror, and complained incessantly about what he was expected to eat. "Clabber, butter, fat mushy bacon, cornbread," he wrote, "as for tea and coffee they know it not . . . neither beef nor mutton nor beer, cyder or anything better than water." When he visited a community of Ulster emigrants, Woodmason noted that "the people are all from Ireland, and live wholly on butter, milk, crabber and what in England is given to hogs.

Many visitors remarked that backsettlers ate food which other English-speaking people fed to their animals. This observation was repeated so often that it became a clichi of travel literature in the southern highlands. It is interesting to discover that precisely the same statements were made by English travelers in the borderlands of North Britain.

Backcountry food ways are sometimes thought to be the product of frontier conditions. So they were, in some degree. But mainly they were an expression of the folk customs that had been carried from the borders of North Britain. Strong continuities appeared in favored foodstuffs, in methods of cooking and also in the manner of eating.

One important staple of this diet was clabber, a dish of sour milk, curds and whey which was eaten by youngsters and adults throughout the backcountry, as it had been in North Britain for many centuries. In southern England it was called "spoiled milk" and fed to animals; in the borderlands it was "bonny crabber" and served to people. Travelers found this dish so repellent that some preferred to go hungry.

Another important foodstuff in the borderlands and the back settlements was the potato. This American vegetable had been widely introduced to western Europe during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and became especially popular in Ireland, Scotland and the north of England. Despite its American origins, the potato had been uncommon in the English colonies until the North Britons arrived during the eighteenth century, and made it an important part of backcountry diet.

Yet another staple was a family of breadstuffs variously called "clapbread," "haverbread," "hearth bread," "griddle cakes," and "pancakes." Sometimes they were also called scones, after an old Norse word for crust. Ingredients varied, but methods of cooking were often the same: small cakes of unleavened dough were baked on a flat bakestone or a circular griddle in an open hearth. These breadstuffs were brought from the borderlands to the backcountry, where they remained a major part of regional cuisine for many generations.

In other respects, backcountry food ways necessarily departed from the customs of North Britain. Oats yielded to maize, which was pounded into cornmeal and cooked by boiling. But this was merely a change from oatmeal mush to cornmeal mush, or "grits" as it was called in the southern highlands. The ingredients changed, but the texture of the dish remained the same.

Another change occurred in the consumption of meat. The people of North Britain had rarely eaten pork at home. Pigs' flesh was as loathesome to the borderers as it had been to the children of Abraham and Allah. But that taboo did not survive in the New World, where sheep were difficult to maintain and swine multiplied even more rapidly than the humans who fed upon them. Pork rapidly replaced mutton on backcountry tables, but it continued to be boiled and fried in traditional border ways.

New American vegetables also appeared on backcountry tables. Most families kept a "truck-patch," in which they raised squashes, cushaws (a relative of squash), pumpkins, gourds, beans and sweet roasting ears of Indian corn. Many families also raised "sallet" greens, cress, poke and bear's lettuce. Here again, the ingredients were new, but the consumption of "sallet" and "greens" was much the same as in the old country.

Almanac... I'll have a hearty dish of clabber and bear oil waiting for you at our next gathering!

[Marge Smith]

These poor ignorant people. They assimilated nothing on their long trek from Ireland to the leadmines. They got off the boat, met up with people from other orgins and didn't copy or adopt any new methods. They started migrating west and again were too dumb to learn a different way.

Many of the people at the fort came from Jackson Co and Perry Co., Illinois down in French country. But you're saying the women wouldn't have been aware of different recipes, then you don't know women.

Then they get to the mines with all this variety of people from all over and they didn't assimilate anything even in their own communities.

I think the people from Cornwall adapted when they arrived. I think the Germans also adapted to different ways. So what was wrong with the Scotch-Irish.

Wisconsin has an excellent history of food "The Flavor of Wisconsin" by Harva Hachten, published by the State Historical Society of Wisconsin, Madison, 1986 2nd printing. that has several essays on food history.

Also Wau-bun, Julie Kinzie tells what she ate at Oliver Kellogg's house. I don't remember whether she discusses food at Hamilton's Diggings. I'll have to review that.

I found the 1850 census for Coles County, Illinois (Lincoln-Log) on-line. Yes, those people seem to be all KY, TN, Carolinas. So they didn't get any diversity. But if you look at the mining census even in 1830 and see the different name origins - this surely was a melting pot.

And the early newspaper in Galena helped. One article was on French manners, another on why women should be educated, and more -- this all before 1835.

You can look at southern foodways, but I don't you can assume that all those foodways were here. I think you have to look at local research sources.
Marge

[Marge Smith]

Mary -
I'll get you a list of kitchen furniture as soon as I can
compile it.

Marge

[Robert Braun]

Marge said:

These poor ignorant people. They assimilated nothing on their long trek from Ireland to the leadmines. They got off the boat, met up with people from other orgins and didn't copy or adopt any new methods. They started migrating west and again were too dumb to learn a different way.

Many of the people at the fort came from Jackson Co and Perry Co., Illinois down in French country. But you're saying the women wouldn't have been aware of different recipes, then you don't know women.

Then they get to the mines with all this variety of people from all over and they didn't assimilate anything even in their own communities.

I think the people from Cornwall adapted when they arrived. I think the Germans also adapted to different ways. So what was wrong with the Scotch-Irish.

Wisconsin has an excellent history of food "The Flavor of Wisconsin" by Harva Hachten, published by the State Historical Society of Wisconsin, Madison, 1986 2nd printing. that has several essays on food history.

Also Wau-bun, Julie Kinzie tells what she ate at Oliver Kellogg's house. I don't remember whether she discusses food at Hamilton's Diggings. I'll have to review that.

I found the 1850 census for Coles County, Illinois (Lincoln-Log) on-line. Yes, those people seem to be all KY, TN, Carolinas. So they didn't get any diversity. But if you look at the mining census even in 1830 and see the different name origins - this surely was a melting pot.

And the early newspaper in Galena helped. One article was on French manners, another on why women should be educated, and more -- this all before 1835.

You can look at southern foodways, but I don't you can assume that all those foodways were here. I think you have to look at local research sources.
Marge

Marge, one of David Hackett Fischer's most pursuasive argements is that persons descendant from the Scots-Irish and English borderer migration to the American upcountry are "profoundly conservative and xenophobic." These tendancies were expressed in a "strong mood of cultural conservatism."

He continued: "From the seventeenth century to the twentieth, travelers in the backcountry have often remarked on the intensity of its attachment to ancestral ways."

Do you recall the series of books entitled Foxfire? My goodness... backcountry people were still living in log cabins and eating corn dodgers and pork side meat in the twentieth century! Why? Fischer quoted one Appalachian woman: "We never let go of a belief once fixed in our minds."

Marge, to use your examples... if the post-BHW Cornish migration to the Mineral District, and the 1840s-on influx of Germans to America adapted so well-- I suspect that foodways like the pasty and the saffron cake, the bratwurst, saurkraut, etc. etc. would have died out like hard cider died out. These foodways persisted for many of the same reasons "highland Southern" foodways and traditions endured for so long-- people adhered to the customs and traditions of their ancestors.

There may very well have been a blending of culture in the Mineral District... but certainly not to the degree that we modern people would impose on 1827 Americans. Their society was strongly striated and delimited... much more strongly and markedly than America of today. If we accept that the majority of emigrants to the Mineral District were Southerners--- decendants of the English/Scots Irish borderer migration to pre-Rev. War America-- then these people would have clung to their customs, traditions, and "ways" most tenaciously of all.

Using this thesis... might the newspapers of Galena be trying to tweak the noses of many of their culturally entrenched readers? And might the minority Yankee element in the region be prone to derision and poking fun at the highland Southern ways of their neighbors--- as you have?