Old-Time Kitchens and Cooking

If modern conveniences and abundant food availability make it somewhat more difficult to find the 'thanks' in Thanksgiving, all it takes is a short step backwards into history and gaze onto the simple scene of a local La Crosse pioneer-era kitchen, and it should, one hopes, come back quickly.  What's difficult to decide when looking back there is whether we are to appreciate more the simplicity of hunger of the old days, or the exaggerated abundance of today.  Either way, there seems to be some reward in pondering the housewife of old setting a table with home-made gourd cups, or the idea of

using the gas from fish bladders for gelatin in "Calf's-foot Mange," a recipe calling for either a "pint of calf's foot jelly or isinglass along with beaten yolks of six eggs, sweetened and chilled."  In this, the sweetened part shouldn't be taken for granted, for sugar was scarce, to the point that when it did find its way into the cabin, mostly in lumps, it was stored in a bucket-like 'piggin,' or often "wrapped  

in felt-like paper and placed on the top shelf of the pantry...even hung from the attic rafters away from mice and children."  A local story goes that, "on the farm of a certain family sugar was very scarce.  When the son of this family helped the neighbor thresh his grain he was invited to dinner.  To his surprise, they had a sugar bowl of sugar on the table.  When he went home that evening he told his family about the sugar.  They all envied him.  Molasses was used commonly in place of sugar.  Rounds of cheese and firkins of butter were made for family use or exchanged at the market for other commodities."

A lust for spare sugar?  Trading to get a good slab of well churned butter?  My pig for your dried beef?  No doubt the concept of gratitude would be built-in to the year's end celebration of the

harvest.  Who could carve out a smooth wooden spoon had himself a side-trade; to tend to the iron kettle all day long that sat atop a wood stove which must be fired by the labor of axe hands would be

expected.  Food wasn't what you rushed, but what you did for the day.  Many old recipes give some idea of ingredients, but often didn't set out specific measurements, just "a coffee cup or tea cup," full, and cooking times and temperatures were, for obvious reasons, not included.  The skillet distance from the core of a coal might mean black or perfectly brown johnny cakes.  And all too eat on what?  "The early settlers had a very simple table setting, with flour sacking for tablecloths if any...A young bride had round dome-shaped woven wire covers over the food dishes on her table to keep off the flies; especially was this true of the butter dish."

Despite the flies and the work all day long, it must have come as some fine shock to the tongue to sit down to table, hunched over the potato bags, to taste even the most subtle sweet morsel of vanilla in a cold wooden bowl of Philadelphia Ice Cream:

Two Quarts of milk (cream if you have it)

Three tablespoons of arrowroot

The whites of eight eggs well beaten

One pound of powdered sugar

**Boil the milk, thicken with arrowroot, add the sugar, and pour the whole upon the eggs.  If you wish it flavored with vanilla split half a bean, and boil it in the milk