Pioneer Meals ~ Julie Lence

 

Courtesy Modern Pioneer Mom

 ‘What’s for dinner?’ It’s the phrase everyone across the globe utters daily. Italians are mostly likely serving pasta. The night’s menu in Mexico might include tamales, while over in the Caribbean, folks could be frying fish. In the U.S., dinner ranges anywhere from fast food to chicken & dumplings, to steak & potatoes. At the end of this month, most Americans will sit down to a feast of turkey, ham, potatoes, gravy, and stuffing. With today’s modern stoves,  microwave ovens, gas grills, and deep fryers, preparing a large meal isn’t too difficult or time consuming. Back in the day, it was both. Pioneer women and chuck wagon cooks stood over the fire from sun-up to sun-down cooking the day’s meals. They kneaded dough and churned butter without the help of today’s appliances, and woke early the next morning to start all over again.

Ever wonder what those women and chuck wagon cooks were serving up?

With flour, sugar, corn meal, potatoes, beans, and fruits and vegetables such as pears, squash, corn, and pumpkin filling home larders, pioneer women served a breakfast of coffee, bread & butter, cold meat from the day before, and corn cakes. Lunch was the main meal and included dried pumpkin, beans & butter, turnips, fruit, and some sort of meat (deer, rabbit, turkey, pork, beef, buffalo, and chicken). Supper was a lighter fare of porridge or bread and milk. Molasses or sweetened water was used if milk wasn’t available.   

courtesy YouTube

Chuck wagon cooks dished up meals of beans, fresh beef, dried fruit, biscuits, bacon, potatoes, eggs, and salt pork to cowboys. Saloons served pork & beans with bacon, pickled eggs, and pretzels. And in those lunch pails children carried to school were cornbread and syrup sandwiches, bread with lard, or bread and bacon. To keep meat from spoiling, pioneers often had a smokehouse on their property where early November they would erect a low-burning fire and hang meats to cure. (This process took several weeks and once complete, the meat kept well into the following summer.) Vegetables were canned and fruits were dried.

Cooking and storing food to last throughout the year wasn’t easy. As much as I adore the wild west, I prefer cooking on my electric stove and gas grill and having a refrigerator to keep fruits and vegetables from spoiling.   

Did Someone Say Biscuits? ~ D.K. Deters

When I wrote The Texan’s Favor, one of the main characters, Kat, a farm girl with plenty of cooking experience, relied heavily on tried and true classic recipes.

Have you ever wondered what some of those old-time recipes taste like? Well, I decided to try one out. Full disclosure: I’m not a cook. I also used a conventional oven.

Recipe for baking biscuits (from the Tallahassee Museum, Tallahassee, Florida):

2 cups all-purpose flour

1 tablespoon granulated sugar

4 teaspoons baking powder

1 teaspoon salt

½ cup shortening (Shortening could be substituted with butter, lard, bacon grease, or chicken grease. The latter two will give the biscuits a different flavor.)

¾ cup milk

Preheat oven to 450F degrees.

Sift the flour in a medium bowl. Add sugar, baking powder, and salt. Cut in shortening using a pastry blender (or pulling 2 table knives through the ingredients) until it looks like fine crumbs. Stir in milk until dough leaves the side of the bowl. Place on a floured surface. Knead 10 times. Roll or pat ¾ inch thick. Bake for 10 to 12 minutes or until golden brown.

In the 1800s, pioneers typically used a wood-burning stove on the farm and a small Dutch oven (a cast iron pot with a lid) on the trail.

Some cooks would gauge the stove’s temperature by placing a water kettle on the front burner. When the water boils, the stove is around 450F degrees.

Interestingly enough, the idiom “on the back burner” stems from placing a pan on the back burner of a stove where it’s not as hot.

       

LOL, as you can see, I used the pat method rather than a roller. These aren’t too pretty, but they were flaky, and the consistency was what I expected. 😊 My husband used them for sliders and thought they were good. So, there you have it.

On the trail, Kat would often make Soda Biscuits. I think of these as a no-frills biscuit. She’d cook the biscuits in a Dutch oven surrounded by hot coals.

Another method, which I’m sure many of you are familiar with, is to wrap a biscuit around a large stick and hold it over the campfire.

Have you ever tried an old-time recipe? How did it turn out?