Feasting on the Plains by Cora Leland

Building a sod house began here!

How long from constructing a house to cooking a meal varied.  It wasn't unheard of for  pioneers to bring a cast iron stove, kitchen shelves or even their dining room tables and chairs on their prairie schooners, but most folks were limited to basics.  

Mention is made throughout diaries about the  sweetener, molasses. (Maybe because I love molasses cookies, I seldom write a novel without a molasses cookie scene.)  The Post civil war South's kitchen code was largely to make-do and pretend, while staples like preserves were made with sorghum, and not with sugar.

Recipes for Pie Plant Pie always demand white sugar, even this one from a cowboy chuck wagon's cook: 3 cups of pie plant, washed but not peeled, 1 cup of sugar, 1 table spoon full  flour, 1 teaspoon full butter, top and bottom pastry. The recipe concludes, "cut the pie plant <rhubarb>into small pieces. Mix sugar and flour well with pie plant. Place in crust, dot with butter and cover with upper crust."

In her little house on the prairie series, Laura Ingalls Wilder tells about her the first large meal she cooked. She frantically prepared two different kinds of pie, and forgot the sugar in the pie plant pie.  (Knowing how sour rhubarb is, it's hard to imagine how her guests were as kind as she writes they were. But she was a young bride, and a lot was forgiven.)

It's interesting that corn was a basic in the South and also for ancient Indians .  A Southern staple, grits,  was Indian favorite as well.  Muscogee (Creek)Indians made grits by soaking corn kernels in hardwood ash then cooked the rinsed kernels in a ceramic vessel.  The gruel was then mixed with crushed hickory nuts of deer bone marrow and topped with an egg.

A Creek warrior by Frederic Remington, 1903

Several times a day I come across pioneers and settler groups I'd never imagined, and my thoughts have turned to migration from other parts of the huge continent. 

Southerners were required to cut back far from the opulence they'd known before the Rebellion. Their recipes show the cheerful, enthusiastic cooks continued to love their foods, but to adapt, like when they'd used sorghum (instead of sugar) in staples like preserves. They came to depend on eggs, fish and wild game instead of fresh meat.

Still earlier records from the Lewis and Clark Expedition show a willingness to get food out at record times.  Bills state that a vital emergency food was 'portable soup.'  It was also known as 'veal glue' and 'pocket soup.' The expedition bought 193 pounds in Philadelphia!  

The recipe calls for 10 pounds of veal, then  meaty bones, like calves feet. It was cooked in 'a sufficient quantity' of salted water and strained many times, the last time through flannel. Finally the glue was dried into 'tablets' that would last 4-5 years.  

Lewis and Clark

   Though cook stoves were easily available by the 1880's, this was far from the truth earlier in the 1800's.  Railroads made life a great deal easier.  From the beginning of the transcontinental railroad project in 1863 until its completion (1869) and throughout the century, cook stoves emerged in smaller communities throughout the West.

But life in wagon trains demanded that pioneers end breakfast by 4 am. Opinions vary, but some wrote that they made up their bread while riding in wagons.  At the end of the trail, they wrote that a vessel containing pancake batter stood ready in their kitchens.  Yeast was the starting levening agent, and the batter fermented. Even when it froze, the pancakes were tastier. 

As nomad  hunter-gatherers, Indians led a simple life, as well. During the various stages of transition, though, their diet changed.  By 1890 Indians were strictly confined to their reservations and not allowed to hunt, fish or forage as before.  Rations were to replace that and various agencies supplied them.

The Rosebud Agency was the reservation home for the Brule Lakota Sioux. It's an icon to many of us who read Western history and it was here that many tribes received their rations. Below is one photo of the Rosebud Agency beef distribution.

It seems that live cattle were also distributed to the Lakota.

All tribes received food rations of some sort, even after personal allotments of land had begun.  

Comanche receiving food distribution (the ladies with parasols were spectators)

A general tribal food distribution

But cooks continued to make holiday celebrations (though the very early colonies might not have).  The gifts were simple, and often non-existent, but the kitchens were bounteous. Laura Ingalls Wilder recalls her mother's cooking  for at least a full day before a celebration.  

An early hearth kitchen