Where are the foods of yesteryear?

"Hard Times and Hardtack" was going to be the title of my article on Civil

War food for Historical Times Magazine. The title apparently failed to please but the magazine and the article will be out on August 1, 2022. 

https://online.1stflip.com/dssx/3jfn/  

I learned fascinating things while writing it. The following tidbits are among the 3,000 words I cut: 

 American cuisine did not spring into existence with the first colonists. They brought their cookbooks and their ideas of what food should be with them, whether they came from Great Britain, France, Spain, Holland (New York City was originally New Amsterdam, founded by the Dutch), or Africa (via the slave ships). 

The first American cookbook was published in 1796 and almost all of the recipes came from English cookbooks. In fact, even in the mid-nineteenth century, American breakfasts did not vary much from those suggested in the preeminent Victorian cookbook, Mrs. Beeton’s Book of Household Management (1861). Any cold meat from the larder “can do duty at the breakfast table”, Isabella Beeton advises, as can potted meat or fish and meat pies. For hot dishes she recommends fish, kidneys, mutton chops, rump-steaks, eggs, muffins, toast, marmalade, butter, etc. The only real distinguishing feature of an American breakfast was the occasional appearance of corn, rice, and sweet potatoes. 

Mutton ham used to be a common dish in this country, as it was in Great Britain. Potted meat, potted pig’s head, salt cod, and cold mush sliced and fried appeared regularly in cookbooks. So did corn fritters, oddly renamed hush puppies in the late nineteenth century.  

A letter from Alexis de Tocqueville to his father dated December 20, 1831, written at Memphis, Tennessee after a trek through the wilderness shows us how primitive frontier food could be: 

…we happened upon a log cabin with chinks on every side through which a big fire could be seen crackling…Picture a fireplace half the width of the room…a bed; a few chairs; a six-foot-long carbine; a hunter’s accoutrements hanging on the log wall and dancing in the draught…the [two or three] poor Blacks served us at his behest: one presented us glasses of whisky, and another corncakes and a plate of venison. The third was sent off to fetch more wood. 

 From https://hudsonreview.com/2013/03/letters-from-america/#.YkG5qOfMIdU, retrieved 3/28/2022.

Hard Times and Hardtack

 As some of you may have noticed, I occasionally write about Georgian era food. This is not solely because I write novels set in the mid-eighteenth century. My fascination with the history of food began when I was nine or ten.  

My father was an excellent and imaginative cook, and should probably have been a chef instead of a rate and tariff analyst. Even so, I might not have caught the culinary research bug but for two things. The first was that he began bringing home Gourmet Magazine. The other was that I loved to read and would read anything I could find. Read "above grade level"? Absolutely, including some books even I wouldn't recommend for children. My mother returned Fanny Hill to the friend who loaned it to her before I got very far into it. Just as well, perhaps. 

So of course I read Gourmet Magazine. At the time, it frequently ran articles on food history, which led to collecting old cookbooks which led to my volunteering to write about Civil War period food for Historical Times online magazine (https://www.historicaltimes.org/). That issue, Number 013 covering the Civil War, will be coming out in late autumn.

Mt. Harmon plantation kitchen at
World's End, Earleville, Maryland

Over the first six months of this year, I researched what people ate in the years leading up to and during the Civil War. Possibly I over-researched: Not only what they ate but why they ate it, how they cooked it, why a distinctive American cuisine took so long to develop, why maple syrup didn't really become a "thing" until after the Civil War, the effect of the Union blockade of Southern ports, and army logistics. 

I tried cooking a couple of the odder dishes. I studied dozens of nineteenth century cookbooks. Most were available on Google Play Books or from institutions for free, thank goodness. 

The first draft of  "Hard Times and Hardtack" ran to well over 5,000 words. The submitted version was down to 2,300, but nothing will be wasted. Some of the cut bits will be recycled as posts here or on my Facebook Page (https://www.facebook.com/anunsuitableduchess) or on Instagram (18thcenturyromance). 

And now that I'm no longer busy researching for the article, I plan to try making coconut pralines and a couple of other recipes I discovered, including one for sandwich cookies stuffed with coconut, pecans and raisins. 

Oh, and my eighth novel is in the editing stages. A Peculiar Enchantment is coming along faster than I expected. With luck maybe it will be released by the end of the year.

Love is the most peculiar enchantment.

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Roman army medics and pecan pie

 

Recently I learned a new word: capsarius. All right, it’s not one likely to come up in casual conversation…unless one is talking about the Roman army. Maybe not then.

The legions had medical units (and wouldn’t that make an interesting TV series? Sort of a cross between M.A.S.H. and A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Forum) which set up about a quarter mile back from the front lines. But the capsarius, about one per eighty-eight legionaries, was in the thick of it, like a modern army medic.

Fun fact: the capsarius took his name from the leather satchel he carried, a capsa. And when he wasn’t stitching a wound, removing an arrow or sending an injured man back to the medical tents, he returned to fighting.

I gleaned all this from the ancient history issue of Historical Times, which also includes pieces on the fate of Cleopatra and Marc Anthony’s children, Hadrian’s Wall, and Bronze Age barrows, among others. It’s online, interactive, and each issue features a different period. You can find it at https://www.historicaltimes.org/.

Currently, I’m writing a piece on food at the time of the Civil War for an issue which will appear later this year. It’s not my usual period, but I’ve been interested in the history of food since I was a child. My research in far, far too many nineteenth century American cookbooks has turned up some astonishing things.

Did you know pecan pie is (relatively) modern? I couldn’t find it in a cookbook until 1910. The Karo® corn syrup that is an essential ingredient was first manufactured in 1902. Sadly, no one was eating pecan pie during the Civil War.  

What they might have eaten for breakfast as suggested in The Kentucky Housewife (1839) was “ham poddage”: eggs served on fried mashed potato cakes, with gravy. “Ham sandwicks” was another possibility: slices of ham seasoned with pepper, nutmeg and lemon, in flour batter, fried in lard, with a gravy of onions, parsley, pepper, flour and cream poured over the whole thing.

If you try either of those, please let me know how they turned out.