From the New York Times, November 13, 1866

I was researching the cowardly murder of J. King Robinson who was killed in Utah, October of 1866. A dispatch from Utah on the subject was printed in the New York Times. As part of the dispatch from Utah came the following on the state of liquor and distilling in Great Salt Lake City, for what it's worth:

"The city authorities have for some time past endeavored to keep this traffic [the liquor trade] within narrow bounds, very latterly having had but one place for its sale, and there "not to be drunk on the premises." This policy has been virulently opposed, chiefly by the "Gentiles," though many Mormons were not well pleased with it. This one place--the "City Liquor Store"--is now closed, through a petition from many citizens. So just now there is no place within the city boundaries where liquor can be legally made, bought or sold. This is the Puritanical extreme and sorely vexes the moderate drinkers as well as the heavy soakers. As one extreme by natural reaction follows another, it would not be surprising if before long the city should deem it advisable to grant licenses to make and sell liquors more generally than it has done for some time past. There is another point. In consequence of recent wet and snowy weather, hundreds of bushels of peaches have rotted under the trees, which fruit, most of it, would have been made to yield "peach brandy," if the distilleries had been working."

Historical Hearth Bread, again

In my book Plain But Wholesome due out this fall from University of Utah press, there's a chapter about bread, with a few recipes. Mostly it is a history or survey about the place of bread in the diet of Mormon pioneers, which is significant. I wasn't ever really satisfied with that chapter though. Constraints of space didn't allow a thorough discussion of the bread-making process in detail.

Two days ago I fired up my brick oven to have a stab at bread in large volume. In preparation I happened to read Miss Leslie's recommendation for bread, found in her Directions for Cookery I was looking at the 1853 edition; a similar edition is found in the Utah Territorial Library catalog of the same year. This extract is not included in Plain But Wholesome. Patience, dear readers, it is a bit lengthy, but has interesting details...

"Take one peck or two gallons of fine wheat flour, and sift it into a kneading trough, or into a small clean tub, or a large broad earthen pan; and make a deep hole in the middle of the heap of flour, to begin the process by what is called setting a sponge. Have ready half a pint of warm water, which in summer should be only lukewarm, but even in winter it must not be hot or boiling, and stir it well into half a pint of strong fresh yeast; (if the yeast is home-made you must use from three quarters to a whole pint;) then pour it into the hole in the middle of the flour. With a spoon work in the flour round the edges of the liquid, so as to bring in by degrees sufficint flour to form a thin batter, which must be well stirred about, for a minute or two. Then take a handful of flour, and scatter it thinly over the top of this batter, so as to cover it entirely. Lay a warmed cloth over the whole, and set it to rise in a warm place; in winter put it nearer the fire than in summer. When the batter has risen so as to make cracks in the flour on the top scatter over it three or four table-spoonfuls of fine salt, and begin to form the whole mass into a dough..."

This "sponge method" is called by most bakers today a "poolish." It aims to grow yeast strength and flavor profile in the bread over time, most typically in breads we would think of as "french bread." This method is described quite similarly in Rose Levy Beranbaum's The Bread Bible, (2003) and it is the method I use when baking hearth bread from yeast.

Leslie's bread method goes on for 500 more words, still not doing justice to the topic. So, dissatisfied as I was with my treatment in the book, I sat down and wrote a new treatise on the subject, which so far is running on to 20 pages. If I ever get to a point that I'm happy with how the brick oven performs, maybe I'll put this little treatise into a small pamphlet to give to people who come to a bread-making workshop. For now, you can visit The Fresh Loaf for further explorations of bread starting from a poolish.

Flour

It's hot, ain't it? Looks like 90's and wildfires for the rest of July and into August. I've been having second thoughts about firing up the brick oven. Hopefully an electric fan might keep a draft out the basement door.

In reading old newspapers, trail diaries, etc. I often run across references to the price of flour. For example, in 1846 Louisa Pratt noted "flour best quality $1.25 per hundred wt." in Bonaparte, Iowa. Leonard Arrington, once historian for the LDS Church, noted in his article, "The Mormon Tithing House: A Frontier Business Institution" that once the Mormons were settled in Utah, the bishop's tithing house used wheat and flour prices to set all other commodity prices in Utah.

So it was with interest that I went to the Big J mill in Brigham City to see what flour costs. At the grocery store I often see it at $1/lb. especially for King Arthur flour. If you buy 20 lb. bags you can often get it down to $0.50/lb. But at the Big J mill I got it for $35 per hundred. Quite an inflation of price from Louisa Pratt's time, but compared to King Arthur, not bad at all.

Now... what to do with a hundred pounds of flour...

Mortensen? Mikkelsen? Sorensen? Olsen?

Now that Plain But Wholesome is pretty much wrapped up, I've been wondering what to write next. I've been thinking about a little foodways book that focuses on Utah's Scandinavian food traditions over the generations since the original emigrants. This would not be a history like PBW, but more of a look at folklore and family ties, and how foodways evolve over time.


This would require that I find people with Scandinavian roots and interview them about their foodways. I was in Ephraim, Utah a year ago (an historic stronghold of Scandinavian settlement) and ran into a woman whose last name was Christensen. She didn't know her husband came from this long line of Scandinavian settlers. So I guess she wouldn't be one of my potential informants. On the other hand, I was in Manila, Utah last winter and I met a family who still included tradition lutefisk in their Christmas dinner.


I think there are such people out there. I've met a few. But I need about 40 of such folks. Are there 40? Are there ten? Are you one of these? Is there a Scandinavian food tradition in your family? PLEASE CLICK HERE if you'd like to participate in a survey about your family's Scandinavian food traditions.

Hooray!

Well folks, it's official. The fine folks at University of Utah Press have delivered a cover design for the book. I also got a typeset copy of the book via Dropbox last week. There are a few typos to correct, and the formatting needs a bit of work, but it looks pretty snazzy, if I do say so myself. Through the editing process I got a little worried that all of my personality and humor would be stripped out of the text, but it looks like it came through intact. The cover design you see here is basically how it will appear, except that (thankfully) they removed the little green sticky circle with my name, and put the author credit down by the subtitle. This will appear in the Fall 2012 Catalog which you can find online starting in about October. But lucky me! I got an advance copy of the catalog! My book is right up front, pages 4-5 (a two page spread! with photos! and quotes!), very flattering. The catalog says it will be 6" by 9" and 240 pages. It must be an estimate because the index hasn't been done yet. But all in all... HOORAY!!!!

Pioneer Trek!

I checked my email this morning and found a note from a neighbor in my small town. She was recently appointed to be the "food chair" for the Pioneer Trek which will be reenacted this summer. In this celebration of Mormon history, teenage boys and girls don old-timey looking clothes and pull carts through the mountains to re-enact the handcart disasters of 1856. My neighbor saw the blog and thought it looked like a fantastic resource, and wondered why we hadn't chatted sooner.

And then I realized I haven't really written much about trail food here on the blog.



I think I should establish a "Pioneer Trek" area of the blog that is accessible only by a subscription fee. I could give lots of explicit recipes and diary entries, tailored specifically for LDS Pioneer Trek leaders. Wouldn't that be a gold mine? Priestcraft here I come!

But back to the subject, I forwarded this lovely little quote I found in the diary of John Jacques, who was part of the Martin/Willie disaster. He was talking about the handcart company, accompanied by several beeves intended for slaughter, crossing a long waterless stretch of prairie. When the beeves finally smelled the water hole ahead for that night's campsite, they stampeded to the water and wallowed around in it. Jacques wrote, “But it was all the water available and so it was used to cooking purposes— making coffee, tea, bread and porridge or hasty pudding, which when made was quite black, but was eaten and drunk nevertheless.”

So then we would need to put this together with another primary source telling us about "hasty pudding." You can find such references in Eliza Leslie's Directions for Cookery, 1853. Its basically gruel made from either flour or cornmeal. Sounds tasty eh? I'll have to check back to make sure they put some mud or dirt in, just for accuracy. Shall I submit an invoice to the Stake President? Or just write it off as in-kind tithing?

Bill of Fare: what some Mormons ate...

As I worked at finishing up the last of the images for the publisher I had occasion to visit the Special Collections at University of Utah's Marriott Library. I must say Walter is among the most helpful and kind of any library personnel I've met in the course of this adventure.

Walter brought out an original 1863 copy of a book by Richard Burton called City of the Saints, which is a travel memoir written by a British fellow passing through Utah in 1860. In this book is a reproduction of the Bill of Fare for the 1860 Territorial Ball. It exhaustively lists the menu for this upper crust dinner. The book is also available through Google books online here if you want to read the whole thing. That's where I got the image below.



So... which of a hundred interesting things on the menu surprised you the most?