Lost foods & their place in our impressions

[Bill Cross]

One of the things that is often overlooked in working on an impression is learning about the many textures, and yes, flavors of life in 186X. Some of you may be surprised to learn that our ancestors ate plants and animals that in some cases have disappeared from the barn, orchards and fields of the American farm. Agri-business finds it easier to raise a few varieties instead of many, and American consumers don't help things when they put price, looks or ease ahead of variety and flavor.

The so-called Delicious apple is a case in point, since in most cases it's anything BUT delicious. I recall running across a web site some years back that specializes in period chickens: varieties no longer widely grown, and certainly not part of our food chain.

The New York Times recently ran a piece on a researcher who has cataloged lost foods, and how his efforts may lead to their return or preservation as we seek both sustainable and local alternatives for our table:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/30/dining/30come.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

I heartily recommend it to anyone wanting to learn more about the once abundant variety of American agriculture, since most of the Boys of 186X were from farms and certainly lived off the bounty of rural America.

[Annette Bethke]

Re: Lost foods & their place in our impressions

You might also find ALHFAM helpful in this. They have several PIGS, Professional Interest Groups, that address heritage foods, such as FARM, POTS, and SAP, all of which are interested in heritage agriculture or food ways.

http://www.alhfam.org/index.php?cat_id=119&nav_tree=119

[LibertyHallVols]

Re: Lost foods & their place in our impressions

I know precious little about period foodstuffs. However, what I have learned has come from a single source:

Mr. Jeff Clagg

The man is a walking encyclopedia of knowledge of 19th Century agriculture, food storage, and preparation. Thank you, Jeff!!!

Event after event, Jeff offers period foods to anyone interested in tasting. With each serving, he gives a complete dissertation on the item, how it is grown, how it was used in the period, prep, storage... the whole nine yards!

Tasty delights he has shared include...
Duck eggs (from period variety birds), turkey eggs (from period variety birds), dessicated veggies of all kinds, corn meal (groudnd from period variety corn), sassafras root, pickled eggs, pickled okra, saur kraut, and many others.

Bill is right! The flavors are different than what the 21st Century supermarket/fast-food palate is used to.

It is interesting to note that a group of fellows created quite a stir when they cooked up a rat last year. However, would men not shy about eating rabbits and squirrels, let alone goat, beef, or chicken, that they had killed and butchered really be all that shy about cooking up a fat trench rat? I think not. I think we modern folks use such things as anecdotes to show "how bad they must have had it".

[Bill Cross]

Re: Lost foods & their place in our impressions

John, that's a good point. There's an old Italian saying that goes "you don't want to watch sausage being made." Men at Petersburg, especially on the gray side, would've considered a rat something to savor. But even other items take courage: I have a can of smoked oysters that's 2-3 years old. Could never bring myself to eat them.

My wife cooks with traditional corn meal, and it's much different than the usual commercial stuff. Have found the same thing in oils: Chinese imported peanut oil smells like peanuts (duh!) while the American variety has been filtered to the point it has no smell at all (or very little).

[Cfarrell]

Re: Lost foods & their place in our impressions

People today don't realize that somebody had to kill that chicken before it went in the bucket at KFC!

I remember an event a few years back when a small detachment was sent out to forage for food. To make a long story short the detachment stumbled across some civilian women cooking dinner...it ended up being that the detachment would trade the pot of soup for a chicken it had "found" earlier that day. The only request of the women was that one of the big strong men end the chickens life for them. The lady handed the hen to the officer who in turn delegated the duty to a private. (Mainly because he didn't know how to go about doing it.) The private quickly took the chicken and in a flash had done the dirty deed. I still remember that officers face seeing the private hand over the chicken to one of the ladies. He looked like he was going to be sick and he didn't partake in the soup which was chicken and rice that evening.

Regards,

[Spinster]

Re: Lost foods & their place in our impressions

We encountered an unexpected challenge in dealing with 'lost foods' in the last weeks leading up to Banks Grand Retreat. One family unit had raised a period chicken breed with the intent to provide the bulk of our fresh meat with this little flock.

About 6 weeks out from the event, we discovered that these Kentucky chickens were going to need the avian equivalent of a Coggins test in order to travel to Louisiana. A required test to stem the spread of bird flu would have placed those period breed chickens in the $40 a chicken price range by the time they landed in the pot. Instead, we were fortunate to be able to acquire a flock of organic free-range chickens in nearby Nachitoches. Still pricey, but being raised free-range, they knew how to be chickens. We were not quite so shy when it came time to go home, and the remainder of the flock did leave Louisiana with us.

The acquisition of rat was far easier and cheaper. I have no idea where Mr. Landrum acquired those he boiled up at Vicksburg NPS, but when Mrs. Morgan and I stirred up a pot of rats and peas at the "Vicksburg Caves" site at Raymond, Missississippi long about 2004, I simply inquired with the veteranarian in charge of animals at a nearby university, and purchased a quantity of medical grade rats through him. Plump, lively, and cage raised, they were about like dealing with a grain fed possum, only smaller.

There's a small knobby apple, probably a type of winesap, that Mama remembered from her childhood, that we've got growing from a cutting. I'm going to be interested to see how old the variety is when we get it up to bearing size.

[Spinster]

Re: Lost foods & their place in our impressions

The only request of the women was that one of the big strong men end the chickens life for them.
,

Cody, we STILL laugh about that one. :D

Earlier that morning, my off-i-shul chicken killin indian(an 18th century reenactor we'd dressed in civil war for the occassion) had come by and quickly and cleanly dispatched 4 small hens for the pot, intended to feed about 30 folks. He also held chicken dressing school for those interested in the process, as he produced a dressed animal that Sister pronounced 'lunchroom clean' with no chance of setting up food poisoning.

I put chickens and rice in pot, and he marched off with some branch of the army, taking his sharp knives with him.

A few hours later, here came y'all and the Lazy Jacks with the biggest dang rooster I had ever seen walking. Honestly, the thing was about hip high on me. And y'all had been hiking with that big rooster for 24 hours.

Despite the fact that we had various farm implements, not a thing had an edge on it, including that scary looking axe I was picking up every time a soldier came into the yard. Since she was trading away our dinner to hungry soldiers, Miss Katie was quite wise to have that Shanghai Rooster dispatched, as he weighed as much as she did.

The priceless look on the face of the officer, as he passed the rooster down through the chain of command before Uncle Tom Yearby took charge of quickly and cleanly dispatching him, was well worth of the price of admission.

Watching two pretty young ladies clean that rooster with spoons and butter knives was another challenge in field craft , and I have not allowed myself to be without a butcher knife since. Thankfully, we had a clean and plentiful water source, as that rooster was wayyyyy overhandled before it landed in the pot.

And while those early morning hens boiled up in little more than two hours, its was a good thing we fed the children before we let y'all march off with our dinner--that rooster was still tough and undercooked 8 hours later.

Mr. Eggleston wrote later, thanking us kindly for the 'chicken bog' and brought lovely lovely chocolate in recompense the next time he came over.

[Zouave Rooster]

Re: Lost foods & their place in our impressions

Bill,

Interesting thread! Besides the vegetable "Heirloom" craze that has taken root for the gardener, there is the preservation of breed stock movement. I happen to be a proud owner of a small flock of chickens that are considered a heritage breed. Some very interesting info on heritage farm animals and the movement are below as well as one commercial farm that offers heritage breeds:

http://albc-usa.org/

http://heirloomheritagefarms.com/index.html

Nothing beats fresh eggs from hormone-free, free range poultry, and the "hobby" farm preserves the breed stock in the event a catostrophic epidemic would effect the commercial breeds. I have had turkey that was also from of these "older" breeds, more flavorful with breast meat that had more natural moisture to it...

It would be interesting to get a mini database going of the types of breeds of fruit, vegetables, & farm animals that were available in the 1860's.

Regards,

Erick Gustin aka Zouave Rooster
51st OVI Co. B
Barred Rocks, Dominques, & Buckeye Chickens!

[Becky Morgan]

Re: Lost foods & their place in our impressions

Just this morning one of the home improvement channels had a show about this very thing. This man was their subject:

http://www.shadownursery.com/

He has been preserving cultivars from all around his native area in Tennessee. The commercial nursery provides ordinary plants and the rest of his farms grow the oddities, including almost-extinct animals.

[Matt Caldwell]

Re: Lost foods & their place in our impressions

http://www.seedsavers.org/

Check it out and order your own seeds to grow into big adult heirloom doccumented veggies to carry on campaign.

My personal favorite, not for taste or color, but simply that every time I hear the name I chuckle is:

http://www.seedsavers.org/prodinfo.asp?number=1186

[Charles Heath]

Re: Lost foods & their place in our impressions

It is always nice to see people rediscover this aspect of the hobby.

[Cfarrell]

Re: Lost foods & their place in our impressions

Mr. Heath I agree with you 110%!!! I would like to add something else to the equation that a few have been hinting at. This is my big thing that I harp on from time to time and there a number of posts here that can attest to such.
A lot of us here (including me at one point) just want to believe that these fellers woke up one day and were soldiers. Of course this just isn’t the case and when they went off to war many were armed with a knowledge that has become lost to the average 21st century person. What I’m speaking of is plain ole common sense but a 19th century style. You and I know that if we want chicken for dinner we need to go to the store and buy a pack…bring it home and cook. The 19th century version of us would have to go outside to the chicken coop grab a chicken, kill the chicken, clean the chicken, then go about cooking it. A task like this would have been common knowledge to “us.” Many of “us” by 1861 would have probably slaughtered a number of chickens and other farm yard beast! Today if I handed an chicken to the first person I saw at an event and said, “If you can kill this the proper way, clean and cook it I’ll give you a $100”…the person would look at me like I was crazy and probably call the law on me for animal cruelty.

These guys had a common knowledge of stuff like which wood burned hotter or what plant was edible or not. I mean just like the soldiers…rations just didn’t magically appear! (Somebody had to slaughter that beef, pork, or whatever.) How many times have you read about soldiers running out of rations? Not a person on this forum can tell me that these guys didn’t supplement their rations with food stuffs found in the wild. I mean these are the people who looked at an acre of land and just didn’t see trees and grass like you and I would. They saw pine trees which were good for building…an oak tree good for fire wood and oak tree + acorns = squirrels, deer, raccoon, so on and so forth. Take Company Aych for a quick example…at one point of the book I believe (and correct me if I’m wrong) it talks about the writer swimming in a river foraging for muscles.

Disclaimer!!! This doesn’t mean that the next time you go out in the field grab the first tree you see and start eating the bark. What I’m saying here is that a big aspect we are all missing even here on the “authentic” side of the hobby is that these guys knew so much! These guys were like the equivalent of the modern day Swiss army knife…they were versatile and resourceful and knowledgeable…something that we are lacking as a whole in our impressions. So maybe it’s time for us to put away those books on the second day at Gettysburg for a while and pick up one on the material culture of the mid-19th century.

Spend some time learning the difference from a Pecan and Oak tree or a Sassafras and Maple…learn the difference from a dew berry and a black berry…learn how to make pine needle tea or polk(sp?) salad or sassafras tea. I often begin by referring people to a series of books called Fox Fire. WARNING!!! Fox Fire is not a 19th century source of knowledge. But I will argue that the people referred to in the first five books are no more than a generation or two removed from the vets of the War Between the States. Fox Fire should not be read and interpreted as if you were reading a firsthand account of a soldier, but rather used as a building block or stepping stone to a greater knowledge of “back-woodsmanship.” What it will do is give you an understanding of things that could be harnessed from the wild and used in everyday life. It will show you how the people can adapt to the resources provided to them in their area. Its a great starting point but listen to my warning and remember that it isn't writin by or about the individuals we are attempting to portray!

Regards,

[Bill Cross]

Re: Lost foods & their place in our impressions

I'm excited to see the interest in this thread, since I figured it would get one or two posters and then fade into obscurity. Foods never seem to get the same # of hits as ones about guns or "who makes the best frock coat?"

But I would also caution lurkers not to go overboard about the knowledge soldiers had of the land, since large numbers of them (at least among soldiers of the Union) were city dwellers. Indeed, one of the fascinating facts is how many country boys died off in camp from common diseases like measles and mumps their city cousins had immunity to because of exposure in the crowded lanes and alleys of New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Paterson, Cleveland, St. Louis, etc. This has a personal ring for me, since my great-great uncle, Reuben Chapman of the 5th Missouri (CSA) succumbed to what is now a childhood disease that is more a curiosity than a reality (common measles). He was a farmer's son from Crawford County, MO, originally Caroline County, VA. His brother fought bravely in the 9th VA Cavalry right through to the end.

Balance in all things my mother taught me. There are probably some good first person moments to be had between city slickers and country boys about food in an encampment scenario.

[ACo.]

Re: Lost foods & their place in our impressions

The discussion of chicken "termination" made me smile, having been involved in it numerous times as a kid staying with my grandparents on the farm in West Virginia in the distant past. But why has no one mentioned the doc or dandelion plants? Not to mention the squirrel, rabbit (DELICIOUS!), opossum or brother groundhog? (Take my word for it, the last is a little too greasy..... :confused_) The list goes on and on. Fun thread!

[vamick]

Re: Lost foods & their place in our impressions

…learn the difference from a dew berry and a black berry…
Regards,

dew berries!! MMMMM! well one difference is those are the tangle foot briars that will trip ya in a new yark minute iffn ya dont watch yer step!:D
Ive eaten the usual skurrels& rabbits but mud turtle! now theres a feast!