One of my ongoing debates with myself is whether pioneers drank milk as a beverage. I'm starting to get the feeling that for the most part, they considered it a food item, but not a beverage. I have run across one anecdotal secondary source which said that in the 1870s in St. George, a well-set table would have three beverages on the table at dinner time: one of water, one of the local wine, and one of milk. Also, I found the citation I mentioned previously about Cambric tea, but in that instance it seemed it was out of desperation, and even then considered as a substitute for solid food.
On the other hand, I often come across such items as these:
**Andrew Israelson, a Dane crossing the plains in 1864 at the age of seven had just sat down to breakfast when the cattle stampeded. "I was eating bread and milk, and I lost my spoon, a good silver one." Sounds like a breakfast cereal approach.
**Mary recalls her father, William Greenwood, pioneering in Iron County, 1856. "Father had one good cow that supplied them with all the milk and butter they needed. But they had very little bread to go with it. To make their milk seem more foodable they gathered bullberries and boiled them in it. The acid in the berries curdled the milk which gave them something to chew."
**Ruth Page Rogers recorded in 1854, "I had bought a pig of Mrs. Sheffield for which I paid two dollars. Two weeks I milked two cows for Ann Lapworth for which she gave me the skimmed milk for my pig." In this instance, the cream was kept aside for butter. It seems they valued the milkfats for butter and cheese, but the skim milk wasn't fit for anything but fattening pigs.
So... did they drink milk? Elizabeth Kane noted dining in a Mormon home in Provo, 1872, and there was creamy whole milk in a pitcher on the table. I guess some did. But I think more often milk was viewed as a raw product to be used in the creation of other food items. I'm still collecting evidence on this issue.
Potato Paste/Peppermint Chocolates (1912)
3 months ago
9 comments:
I did read a cookbook geared towards the ignorant immigrants, in which the lady author was pretty upset that the ignorant immigrants did not consider milk a food, but rather a beverage, despite its healthful properties which SHOULD make it a staple rather than a incidental beverage.
Rather strange to think that I currently have 6 gallons of what the pioneers might have thought of as "pig slop" in my fridge.
More questions: what about "pie plant"? I think its rhubarb. It was often mentioned in books I read as a kid.
And another: Indian Pudding. I have a cookbook "The Shaker Cookbook: Recipe & Lore from the Valley of God's Pleasure" that refers to it as a pioneer dessert along with another called Appone (cornmeal, maple syrup, and wild crushed fruit baked in a pot. Did our pioneers make these dishes? No recipe for Appone, but I am curious.
Jana, could you point me towards that cookbook? What's the date on it?
Pie Plant: Yes, its rhubarb. I've got a recipe somewhere for a steamed pudding made with a pie crust and a filling made of pie plant. I'll try to post it sometime.
And as for Indian Pudding, a lot of the old stuff uses Indian references anytime you have corn meal in a recipe. In my most recent post about recipes, if you follow the link to the cookbook page, there's a cookbook with a recipe for "bannock bread" or something like that. Its just corn bread. The Bannock are a band of Indians linguistically and geographically related to the Shoshone, but I don't think they were farmers, so the corn reference is an anomale. You might have already noticed the linguistic tie of Appone to "corn pone", which I believe has a native american origin.
It was somewhere in the Feeding America project I think. Maybe? I remember that she had very definite ideas as to what was and was not healthful, but it was unique in that she actually gathered recipes from the various immigrant populations that fit her ideas of what was good or bad and compiled them so that the immigrants would actually EAT according to the diet she thought was best instead of ragging on them for eating all their foreign foods and demanding they eat good AMERICAN food, foreign food being inferior and all. Pretty revolutionary for the time.
Found it! "FOODS OF THE FOREIGN-BORN In Relation to Health" by Bertha M. Wood. Sadly, it was published in 1922. Boo. "In this country [Italy] it is an effort to get milk, and it has to be planned for. As it is usually considered a drink rather than a food, the food is bought first, then if any money is left, and usually there is not much, it is used for milk."
Right on Jana! During the 19th and early 20th centuries some authors and dietitians used food as a vehicle for discrimination. Pasta just wasn't a suitable use for flour. Any decent person made yeast raised bread with their flour. This is one way we discriminated against the huge influx of immigrant groups such as Italians. Likewise, the churro sheep of the Navajo were not good enough. So we killed their herds and forced merino and western whiteface sheep on them instead. Now 150 years later, we see why the churro sheep made so much sense for their uses, and Navajo ranchers are reviving the breed. Crazy stuff we did...
Found another reference while browsing Feeding America and thought of you. :D
"I have said little of drinks in this place, because in the first place, I hold there is but one proper drink in the world, viz., water;" [p. 89]
"Although I regard solid food as generally preferable for healthy adults, and think it better, as a general rule, that bread, when eaten, should be eaten alone, and a full meal made of it, yet of all the liquid forms of food used by man, milk is the best" [112]
-The Young House-Keeper: or, Thoughts on Food and Cookery, by William Andrus Alcott (1846, c. 1838)
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