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.

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.