Definitely not "Easy Mac"

I'm on those last few days before I start back to school, and as usual, I'm trying to cram as much into those days as I can. One thing that I always end up doing is cooking some of those kinds of foods that take a lot of time. Yesterday I decided to cook some dry pinto beans. I very rarely make them, because they have to cook so long. I scooped a couple of handfuls out onto the cabinet, checked them for little stones and withered beans, washed them, and put them on to boil. The first time I lifted the lid to check on them, I smelled that rich, earthy aroma. And it made me reflect on how much different food is now than it would have been back at the time of our ancestors.

While the beans were simmering all morning and then all afternoon, I thought about all the other foods I rarely cook because they take so long. Baked potatoes, for example. I love oven-baked potatoes, but there's just not enough time once I get home from work to cook them in a timely manner before it's time to start getting the kids ready for bed. So we don't have baked potatoes. I know, I could bake them in the microwave, but they just don't taste as good and they get hard quickly. I also don't cook roast beef (except once in a while in the slow cooker, but it's just not the same). I never make hot rolls - they have to rise, not once, but twice. I don't even make homemade biscuits for breakfast; there's just not enough time.

It occurs to me that the so-called "time-saving" devices really haven't given us more time; they've just made it possible for people to fill their time with more stuff. Cooking for the family would have been a major activity of the day for a pioneer mother. Maybe it would have even been THE major activity of the day, given how time-consuming real cooking is. Whether it was making loaves of bread, or roasting and basting a turkey, or peeling potatoes, or whipping up a cake from scratch, cooking a real meal for a large family would take a long time. That was her job (assuming, of course, that she wasn't also helping in the fields and having to cook supper after she came in - which I'm sure happened plenty of times).

But now cooking supper is something that needs to be done quickly between getting home from work and getting the kids to bed at a decent time so it won't be too hard to get them out of bed the next morning to get to school on time. So it's less about "cooking" than it is about "throwing something together." I scanned through my cabinets and found the following items: packaged noodle mix, a taco kit, some Easy Mac bowls, muffin mix in a package, biscuits in a can. All of it can be "thrown together" in 20 minutes or less. Of course, canned biscuits aren't as good as homemade biscuits, and Easy Mac isn't as good as my homemade mac-n-cheese. But I guess we sacrifice some taste for some convenience.

Don't you wonder what a woman from 100 years ago would think if she looked into my cabinets???

Not ANOTHER Burger.....

This post is one last leftover from our Christmas trip. Since we were traveling in the car and staying in hotels rather than taking our camper, we ended up eating a lot of fast food. That means we had a diet of mainly hamburgers and fries, which we certainly tired of long before the trip was over. That made me think of the type of diet pioneers survived on. While it wasn't burgers and fries, it wasn't much more varied, and I'm sure they got tired of it too.

While I was writing my book, I noticed that it seemed the characters were always eating some form of cornbread - cornpone, hoecake, cornmeal mush. When they could get it, the meal might include some salt pork or bacon. Those two items, cornmeal and pork, formed the heart of the diet for most people, especially poor people. Of course, a garden (if they had one) would supplement that diet with beans, greens, squash, potatoes, sweet potatoes, or pumpkins, and a man could bring in fresh meat by hunting (assuming game in the area where the family lived had not been hunted to the point that it was scarce). Occasionally, an old hen might end up in the stew pot or skillet, but until a flock was built up enough to supply cockerels, the hens were too valuable for the eggs they produced. So for most people, the two most reliable sources of food were corn (which grew readily in the United States) and pork (since pigs are easy to care for and since the meat could be preserved by salting it or smoking it in the era before refrigeration).

Even if they were grateful for the food, I'm sure there had to be a day once in a while when someone looked at his/her plate and thought, "Corn mush? Again?"

Another Autumn Treat

A week or so ago, a man we know gave us a little bag of persimmons.



A pioneer cook would no doubt know just what to do with these sweet fall fruits; I did not. The persimmons sat on the kitchen cabinet until my husband pointed out they were starting to get very soft. I knew I had to do something with them or let them go to waste. I went to the handy-dandy internet and found a recipe for persimmon bread, something I thought a pioneer cook might have made if she had gathered a bag of persimmons. The recipe was on the Allrecipes site. I thought it seemed like something with simple ingredients that a pioneer cook would have had in her kitchen (although I do wonder - was cinnamon available? Probably not on the frontier, I would guess.) I substituted pecans for the walnuts and left out the raisins (personal preference - I hate the way they get all swelled-up and soft!)

The worst part of preparing the recipe was making the persimmon pulp. It seemed that it would be impossible to peel the persimmons with a knife, so at first I tried to pull the skin off - it was a mess! Finally, I had the bright idea to scrape the pulp from the skin with a knife, and that worked much better. I was also pleasantly surprised that it was easy to remove the seeds. A persimmon has several seeds about the size of a thumbnail. Once a long time ago, I picked up some wild persimmons and tried to make bread with them - all I remember is that there seemed to be as much seed inside that skin as pulp, and it was almost impossible to separate the pulp from the seed. Of course, these persimmons were a domesticated variety, so the job was easier, and it didn't take as many persimmons to get my one cup of pulp as it would have taken if I had been using wild persimmons. I guess, though, if you didn't have sweets very often, it would be worth it to sort through those wild persimmons to get the pulp.

End result? The bread was very dense (I guess since soda was the only leavening agent) and dark, but moist and sweet. It reminds me a lot of pumpkin bread. It made a nice breakfast, something different from the typical sausage biscuit or cold cereal. The biggest drawback, though, is that this loaf of bread used only a few of the persimmons the man gave us. The rest are still sitting on the cabinet. I might try a cookie recipe, or I might put the rest of the pulp in the freezer to use for more bread later. Any suggestions?

Pumpkin - A Pioneer Cook's Treasure

"Almanzo ate the sweet, mellow baked beans. He ate the bit of salt pork that melted like cream in his mouth. He ate mealy boiled potatoes, with brown ham-gravy. He ate the hame. He bit deep into velvety bread spread with sleek butter, and he ate the crisp golden crust. He demolished a tall heap of pale mashed turnips, and a hill of stewed yellow pumpkin. Then he sighed, and tucked his napkin deeper into the neckband of his red waist. And he ate plum preserves, and strawberry jame, and grape jelly, and spiced watermelon-rind pickles. He felt very comfortable inside. Slowly he ate a large piece of pumpkin pie." -- Farmer Boy, Laura Ingalls Wilder

One of the staples of the pioneer diet was pumpkin. Not only could it be prepared in a variety of ways, but it also was one of the few foods that could be kept for a period of time and cooked "fresh" in the era before refrigeration. Stored in a cool, dry place, a pumpkin would go for months before beginning to deteriorate.

If pumpkin pie was on the menu, however, a pioneer cook had some work to do before she could mix up the pie filling. In the rest of this article, I'll outline the process of going from pumpkin to pulp.

First, the seeds and stringy matter inside the pumpkin had to be removed. Most pioneer women probably saved the seeds, either to plant the next season or to roast as a crunchy treat. The easiest way to separate the seeds is to dive right in with one's hands -- although it's not a job for anyone who doesn't like the feeling of something slimy!

Once all the stringy insides were removed, the pioneer cook had two choices of how to prepare the pulp. She could either boil the pumpkin or roast it. To use the boiling method, the cook would cut the pumpkin into chunks.

The chunks were put in a pan with a small amount of water and simmered until they were mushy. The excess moisture was then removed from the pulp. I used a sieve, running the pulp through several times, but a pioneer cook probably would use cheesecloth or something similar.


To roast the pumpkin, large pieces would be placed in a dutch oven and set in the coals until it was soft. Although the pumpkin could be peeled first, I left the skin on - because it's fun to peel it off once the pumpkin has been roasted!

Although roasted pumpkin doesn't have as much moisture as its boiled counterpart, there is still a lot to be removed, not surprising when you consider pumpkins are 90 percent water! The more patient the cook, the more times she will drain the pulp, and the better the end product will be.



A medium-sized pumpkin like the one I worked with produces a lot of pulp, and with no way to store the processed pulp, the pioneer cook would no doubt be kept busy making everything pumpkin - pies, bread, stewed as a vegetable. Although she wouldn't have known it, she was serving her family a tremendously healthy food packed with antioxidants and beta-carotene. She was probably just glad to have something to add variety to the limited choices in their daily diet.