Rations

[Silas]

Re: The whats in season in what state , at what time of year question

Here's a link which could help : http://www.geocities.com/Texasground...odinSeason.htm

[fedhead]

Re: The whats in season in what state , at what time of year question

Ummm...do you mean, for instance, when are blackberries ripe in Gettysburg, or apples in Virginia? (Or, given apparent climate change, when *were* blackberries ripe, because it may have been earlier or later.)

That's the information i am getting at .

Thanks for the link, i must of missed it i visit the groundhornets site from time to time .

[Poor Private]

Re: The whats in season in what state , at what time of year question

Everyone looks at what crops or fruit that are available at the time. Lets not forget game.
Such as deer, pheasant, possum, squirrel, or any other edible furry or feathered creature. If they saw it they shot it, or snared it.

[Becky Morgan]

Re: The whats in season in what state , at what time of year question

The issue of what game was where may be a real eye-opener. In our area, turkeys have been reintroduced and have prospered. However, I assumed they died out with heavy farming in the late 19th century. Try 1803! The wolves were exterminated about that time, too. I'm 49 and can recall when a hunter getting a deer, or even seeing one, was worthy of a newspaper article. Now we're lucky not to hit one on the way to work.

From what I can find, rabbits and groundhogs were plentiful in CW days, although they would all but disappear during the Great Depression. Both taste pretty darned good. Possum is more a desperation meat since they're anything but clean feeders. We were very short on squirrels for a few years, but they've come back to what are supposed to be reasonable levels for our area. Not many local histories, diaries or letters seem to mention when game disappeared; it's as if everyone were too busy to notice. I know the Farm Bureau probably has a record of when bounties were lifted. etc., which might be a good way to judge.

[Old Reb]

Re: The whats in season in what state , at what time of year question

Captain Elija Perry of the 17th Texas mentions in letters home of seeing folks eat poor pig in Arkansas. Poor pig was slang for dog. Yummy!:)

[Annette Bethke]

Re: The whats in season in what state , at what time of year question

This site lists current crop seasons for each state. It might help.

http://www.pickyourown.org/cropavail.htm

[Stu_Sac]

Re: The whats in season in what state , at what time of year question

While if we are taking Virginia, I've found the following site to work as a starting point, for this question. http://www.pickyourown.org/VAcalendar.htm Now, this is a modern reference tool, directed at the modern consumer. So there are a couple of follow-up questions that have to be answered, was a particular item common in the planting selection in the 1860's. Then, was a given item in the common diet? As I was discussing with someone else earlier this year, just because Jefferson planted a one, doesn't mean that it was a common planting in Virginia.

Have a good afternoon,

Stu Howe

[Annette Bethke]

Re: The whats in season in what state , at what time of year question

Oops, sorry. Click on "Find a Farm Near You", locate your state and then scroll down to crop availability/harvest schedule.

[ephraim_zook]

Re: The whats in season in what state , at what time of year question

Everyone looks at what crops or fruit that are available at the time. Lets not forget game.
Such as deer, pheasant, possum, squirrel, or any other edible furry or feathered creature. If they saw it they shot it, or snared it.

I think you'd have to take some guidance from Ms Morgan's post. Also, if you think about it, as soon as any semblance of an army (or any other crowd, for that matter) arrives in an area, nearly all the indigenous wildlife would book out toward the next county. They wouldn't hang around, grazing on the edge of camp. Suburban wildlife today has become (1) very numerous and (2) very tame. Deer in my backyard ignore my dogs unless the dogs get rambunctious. Not so 145 years ago.

I agree that if the opportunity presented itself, soldiers would avail themselves of it. But we can't think of wild game as a staple of army food supply.

Ron Myzie

[Annette Bethke]

Re: The whats in season in what state , at what time of year question

was a particular item common in the planting selection in the 1860's. Then, was a given item in the common diet? As I was discussing with someone else earlier this year, just because Jefferson planted a one, doesn't mean that it was a common planting in Virginia.

Stu Howe

Very true. This is where serious reading of diaries and letters come in. The site works well if you already know what crops you're looking for. Affleck's Almanac is a great resource for 1860s plantings, but I not sure he goes that far north.

[Stonewall_Greyfox]

Re: The whats in season in what state , at what time of year question

I think you'd have to take some guidance from Ms Morgan's post. Also, if you think about it, as soon as any semblance of an army (or any other crowd, for that matter) arrives in an area, nearly all the indigenous wildlife would book out toward the next county. They wouldn't hang around, grazing on the edge of camp. Suburban wildlife today has become (1) very numerous and (2) very tame. Deer in my backyard ignore my dogs unless the dogs get rambunctious. Not so 145 years ago.

I agree that if the opportunity presented itself, soldiers would avail themselves of it. But we can't think of wild game as a staple of army food supply.

Ron Myzie

Sir,

While I believe we are in agreement that wild game cannot/should not generally be considered as a staple of army food; numerous accounts support the practice of catching/killing wild game, especially of the smaller variety...robins, rabbits etc...in an effort to supplement the army ration. The bigger issue, would be researching the wild game caught being appropriate for the time and place of the event being portrayed.

While it may be true that in some areas of the country wild animals are more tame than their predescors...it still would not prevent the curious nature of these animals from entering camps in search of food or being in the viscinity of soldiers. Lets not forget that at one time there was an over-abundance of wild animals in the Eastern States, and the siting of these animals would have been farely common outside of cities/metropolises.

Many discussions have been on the AC, as an example of a previous AC discussion on wild game, we may refer to the following;

http://www.authentic-campaigner.com/forum/showthread.php?t=1968&highlight=rabbit

Paul

[markj]

Tabasco Sauce article - Wall Street Journal

Some might be intrigued and edified by this:

Ingredients of a Family Fortune
The hot story of Tabasco sauce.

BY MARK ROBICHAUX
Wall Street Journal Online, Wednesday, October 10, 2007 12:01 a.m. EDT

From the time I tapped the first few drops of Tabasco onto the boiled crawfish I caught as a boy in south Louisiana's bayous, it was love at first bite. I can remember the slender bottle with its red cap and diamond-shaped label standing in quiet superiority alongside the salt and pepper shakers on the kitchen table. Tabasco was a staple of my Cajun home, and I have cooked faithfully with it ever since. Millions of Americans--most of them, it is safe to say, without a Cajun background--seem to share my enthusiasm. How did Tabasco become, so to speak, so hot?

As the legend goes, a Louisiana banker named Edmund McIlhenny--his family's Avery Island plantation in ruins after the Civil War--took the seeds of a Mexican pepper given to him by a Confederate soldier and began a condiment business in 1869, the forerunner of today's company and the origins of a brand name now recognized throughout the world.

In "McIlhenny's Gold," Jeffrey Rothfeder, a former BusinessWeek editor, sets himself the ambitious goal of testing the truth of this founding legend and of drawing a historical profile of one of the oldest--and most profitable--family businesses in U.S. history. He does an impressive job of assembling historical documents, ancient newspaper clippings and interviews with former factory workers, competitors and family members--though no McIlhennys actively involved in the business on Avery Island would cooperate. He admits that sometimes "people's inherited recollections of decades- or centuries-old incidents were all I had to work with." But the result is valuable as a general corrective to a record overloaded with secondhand tales.

Today, Mr. Rothfeder reports, McIlhenny Co. is a business with $250 million in annual revenue, still closely held despite buyout offers of $1 billion. The company produces as many as 600,000 two-ounce bottles of its signature product a day, selling it in more than 100 countries, with profit margins, according to the author, of 25% or more. And yet for all the product's familiarity, the family behind the sauce remains something of a mystery, still operating from remote Avery Island, part of southern Louisiana's Acadian Gothic landscape of high canopies and moss-hung cypress trees.


The story actually begins in the pre-Civil War era with a New Orleans plantation owner named Maunsel White, who was famous for the food served at his sumptuous dinner parties. Mr. White's table no doubt groaned with the region's varied fare--drawing inspiration from European, Caribbean and Cajun sources--but one of his favorite sauces was of his own devising, made from a pepper named for its origins in the Mexican state of Tabasco. White added the sauce to various dishes and bottled it for his guests.
"Although the McIlhennys have tried to dismiss the possibility," Mr. Rothfeder writes, "it seems clear now that in 1849, a full two decades before Edmund McIlhenny professed to discover the Tabasco pepper, White was already growing Tabasco chilies on his plantation." The author's evidence: a letter to the News Orleans Daily Delta newspaper attesting that the "Tobasco" is "a new species of red pepper, which Colonel White has introduced into this country." If nothing else, Mr. Rothfeder concludes, the McIlhenny sauce was inspired by White's recipe.

It is certainly true that Edmund McIlhenny began bottling and selling E. McIlhenny Tabasco Pepper Sauce in the late 1860s. Some of the first bottles he sold were bought by Union soldiers still billeted in the South and enamored of the sauce that lent a dash of spice to bland Army rations. The product soon spread far and wide--and fast, thanks in part to a deal with a big national distributor. Mr. Rothfeder quotes a letter from a British soldier in India to his mother in 1888: "I want to call your attention to a sauce. It's called 'Tabasco Pepper Sauce' and seemingly emanates from a man, E. McIlhenny, New Iberia, Louisiana. A drop or two in soup, stew or mixed around with mashed potatoes gives one a great appetite."

The concoction was made in a factory town built on a remote island in Louisiana's bayous that is seemingly designed for hot-sauce production: Avery Island is actually a salt dome with vast supplies of one of Tabasco sauce's essential ingredients. But a great part of the sauce's early success was owed to the McIlhenny family's business acumen.

Given Tabasco's three simple ingredients--vinegar, pepper mash and salt--competitors who had been using the Tabasco pepper in their own sauces were stunned in 1906 when the McIlhennys were awarded a trademark for the word "Tabasco." It was as if someone had claimed the word "mustard." The head of the company, Edmund McIlhenny's eldest son, John, was a former Rough Rider and a close friend of President Theodore Roosevelt's; rival companies suspected that the friendship influenced the government's decision, Mr. Rothfeder says, but they couldn't prove it. The trademark was later successfully defended in court and today stands as an American business rarity: a trademark that is also the name of a generic ingredient. The McIlhennys have vigilantly enforced their rights ever since.

But the primary reason that Tabasco has dominated the hot-sauce category is the consistency of its flavor and spiciness. When I talked with Louisiana's celebrated chef Paul Prudhomme for an article I wrote about McIlhenny Co. in this newspaper several years ago, he told me that other sauces could be unpredictably too hot--or too tart or too salty. "I may use 10 drops of Tabasco, but I can trust that 10 drops," Mr. Prudhomme said. Edmund McIlhenny, with help from a small group of ex-slaves and close friends, had relied on intuition, not laboratory tests, to mix his recipe--with remarkable results. "That Edmund McIlhenny instinctually navigated a near flawless balance between heat and flavor when he invented Tabasco sauce is either dumb luck or yet another indication of his commercial genius," Mr. Rothfeder writes.

Though the company now offers several flavors of Tabasco, including a Sweet & Spicy variety, not much has changed about making the classic sauce over the past 138 years: hand-picked peppers a particular shade of red, mixed with salt and vinegar, and aged three years in wooden barrels that formerly held Jack Daniels whiskey. The McIlhenny process actually dampens the Scoville units, or heat level, in the Tabasco pepper, which would be intolerable to eat raw.

"McIlhenny's Gold" offers plenty of family-business lessons, particularly on succession planning. Every McIlhenny chief executive has been a direct descendant of the company founder, except for a brief turbulent time in the late 1990s, and each has been as colorful as the last. In addition to John McIlhenny the Rough Rider, the list includes Edward "Mr. Ned" Avery McIlhenny, a bon vivant and naturalist; Walter Stauffer "Tabasco Mac" McIlhenny, a World War II sharpshooter; and the current chief executive, Paul McIlhenny, a man who once offered "the world's largest bloody Mary" to French Quarter revelers. Not all of these company leaders had the founder's astute business sense, but each managed to keep the company profitable.

Certainly running McIlhenny Co. today is infinitely more complicated than in Edmund's time, and Mr. Rothfeder outlines the challenges the McIlhennys have faced: In the 1970s, confronted with a shortage of pepper mash, the company had to move its pepper cultivation to Latin America. By the 1980s, the rising popularity of salsa, Buffalo wings and other hot, spicy foods began to threaten Tabasco's dominance as a one-stop heat source. And today, the swelling number of shareholding McIlhenny heirs--more than 200 of them--has made managing the company's fortunes far more complex than before.

Mr. Rothfeder offers a glum assessment of McIlhenny Co.'s current state: "By apparently neglecting the company's challenges, Paul McIlhenny has further tempted the ire of the younger shareholders, who are increasingly impatient with the business's torpid pace of growth and the lack of imagination in the executive suite." The author suggests that "the unthinkable" could happen: a shareholder revolt and the sale of the company.
Sections of "McIlhenny's Gold" are evocative and gracefully written. (When John McIlhenny hosted a memorable debutante ball deep in the company's salt mine in 1903, "lacy coruscating light glinted off French candelabras onto the crystalline walls, ceilings and floors.") But other sections lapse into boilerplate. For example, the first chapter concludes: "Edmund took with him hard-earned and invaluable lessons about creating, promoting and managing a decidedly competitive business, which he would use again to his advantage." But even if Mr. Rothfeder's style is not as consistently flavorful as the sauce he's describing, the McIlhenny story itself is pure gold.

Mr. Robichaux is the editor of Broadcasting & Cable magazine. You can by "McIlhenny's Gold" from the OpinionJournal bookstore.

*************

Yours, &c.,

Mark Jaeger

[Johnny Lloyd]

Re: Tabasco Sauce article - Wall Street Journal

Hi-
The only reason why MRE's taste decent, at best, in the US Army, is the little bottle of Tabasco Sauce in them... even today what the British soldier said to his mother in 1888 holds true.
Tabasco sauce from a mess hall downrange makes Iraqi goat/lamb kebabs taste "palatable" too, but strangely the Iraqis didn't like it- trust me on this one- it kinda peeves them off when their mouth is on-fire and there is no cold water nearby to cool it off. Remember: You don't wanna tick off the guy with a loaded AK-47 unless your weapon is loaded too. Sounds funny, but I'm not joking.

Our theory that Tabasco kills germs in food was disproven... unfortunately it doesn't kill off dysentery or salmonella- I found out firsthand...

Good article. Was McIlhenny a Confederate soldier?
- Johnny "Texas Pete" Lloyd

[Charles Heath]

Re: Tabasco Sauce article - Wall Street Journal

One word: Nutria. That's the dark side of the story.

[markj]

Re: Tabasco Sauce article - Wall Street Journal

Secret of the pros: one of the best ways to cut down on the "burn" of hot peppers (especially habaneros) is the Mexican Solution: chomp down on tortillas (or presumably, in the case of the Middle East, flat bread) and salt.

Trying to quench the "burn" with liquid (e.g., H2O) can be akin to spraying water on a gas fire: just spreads the capsacin oil around in your oral cavity. However, milk and yoghurt also reportedly work well. I also use yoghurt to remedy "tobacco bite" on my tongue after smoking a cigar or pipe--it really cools things down.

Does anyone have other remedies for the "heartbreak of habaneros?"

Yours, &c.,

Mark Jaeger