Maine Dinner

One of my favorite things about Maine is the super fresh seafood. Here my husband and I are enjoying a ‘Shore Dinner’. The lobster and the crab are buried under the clams and the mussels. All the seafood was caught that morning.

The Feral Chicken

In the interests of accuracy, I research many many things for inclusion into my books. I’ve dyed with indigo, for example . (And what an adventure that was; it smells like rancid pee.) I’ve gone interesting places, such as Salem (for Death in Salem) and the Great Dismal Swamp of Virginia (for Death in the Great Dismal).

And I try different recipes and eat things I might not otherwise eat, such as a Shaker pie made of heavily sugared sliced fresh lemons (so sour it could not be eaten) or ployes (a kind of pancake made from buckwheat and not bad.)

My latest experiment – a free range chicken. My husband and I belong to a CSA. They have a chicken share but this offering was not from the share. It was a hen past her egg laying days. So, in the spirit of adventure – and tasting a chicken as our ancestors might have, I took a chicken.

I was warned to stew it gently which I did. I have tasted venison that was more flavorful and tenderer than this chicken. In addition, the chicken was so small it would not have fed a hungry man. The drumsticks had about an oz of meat on them. If this was an example of the chickens available back then, it is no wonder the early colonists relied on hunting.

Chocolate

While we were in Costa Rica we stopped at a chocolate plantation. I’m sure everyone know the story; how a chocolate drink was served to the Spanish conquistadores and from there went on to become one of the most popular foods in the world.

Cocoa pods on a tree.

The seeds inside are coated in a sweet jelly like substance. That has to be taken off.

Once the jelly like substance is removed, the beans are fermented. After fermentation, the beans are dried.

 

Then the beans are cleaned and roasted. The shell is removed. The tool used to do that at this plantation was a large mortar with a pestle to crush the shell.

The inner seeds, the cacao nibs, are then ground to cocoa mass, unadulterated chocolate in rough form.

These nibs are heated and reduced to a liquid. Adding sugar, cinnamon, nuts and more -yum.

The higher the amount of the chocolate (you will see 70% for bittersweet for example) the stronger the chocolate flavor.

Eating clay or pica boo!

One of the cultural activities brought over from Africa was eating clay. A puzzle to medical practitioners, it was labeled pica and has always carried a stigma. Pica is eating non-nutritive materials like earth or, in some cases, laundry starch.

Well, despite the stigma, it turns out that eating clay has been around a long time, since Greek and Roman times. Holy clay tablets were widely distributed and traded throughout the Mediterranean and Western Europe as cures for poison and the plague. According to one source (EnviroMedica), the tablets were blessed by the Roman Catholic Church as late as 1848. Studies have shown that clay eating is highest where calcium and iron intake are low.

Although not confined to pregnant women, a high percentage of pregnant women ate – and eat – clay. The current thinking is now that since the nutritional demands during pregnancy are so high – and pregnant women in the past couldn’t take the pregnancy vitamins, they ate mineral rich clay to support the baby. The clay also helps with nausea and vomiting and, as clay goes through the digestive tract, absorbs toxins. One of the preferred clays is kaolin, a white clay that is used as a base in Kaopectate. So anyone who has taken Kaopectate has ingested clay for stomach upset.

Eating clay has been used by cultures world-wide, In Bolivia and Peru, wild potatoes (which are toxic and bitter) are cooked in clay dishes. The clay leaches away the glychoalkaloids found in the wild potatoes and makes them edible.

The United States has deposits of kaolin. One of the largest is in Georgia. No less than a personage as Josiah Wedgewood ordered from the mine for his fine china.

A final note: kaolin is available from Amazon.

Who knew?

 

More about Horses

As humans began using horses for transport – and war-horses rapidly became very valuable. Forrest quotes a Mitanni horseman as saying a trained horse was worth twice as much as an ox and even an untrained horse twice as much as a cow. For many cultures horses became too valuable to eat. The first talking horse in literature, (in cuneiform dating from the seventh century) the horse says ‘My flesh is not eaten’. He has become too valuable and not just in money. A horse lends prestige.  A trained horse was essential for warfare (the horse is a ‘glorious creature’ clothed in copper armor). Where would the chevalier be without his steed?

By the time of the Old Testament, horses were forbidden flesh.  Romans, who happily consumed dormice and ostriches, would only eat horse meat in extreme poverty. Christians, who moved away from the strict dietary restrictions and ate pork and shrimp, kept the one forbidding horseflesh. There are cultures now who eat them. True. When Christianity moved into pagan German and east to the steppes of Eurasia it moved into territories where the horse had been eaten for centuries. It took a long time to establish the taboo. Among these ‘barbarians’, horses played a mythological role and were sacrificed and eaten as part of the rites. Like the bull in Ancient Crete. horses were divine. After sacrifice they were eaten, partly because it was believed eating sanctified flesh took the divinity and the other attributes of the animal into the human body.

In France, in an effort to encourage eating horseflesh, horse banquets were arranged in the middle 1800s.

To this day, people in some countries such as the U.S. and Great Britain do not eat horse meat. In France, however, horseflesh  turns up on menus, sometimes to the chagrin of a diner whose French is not up to the translation. This happened to a friend who, when she discovered what was on the plate in front of her, went supperless. I share her revulsion even though I will happily consume chicken.I cannot imagine myself eating either horse or dog, the two companions that have shared our journey through history.

Money, scissors and more

Much research was and is required for the Will Rees mysteries. After all, they dressed differently, ate differently and mostly lived different. Most people then lived on farms. And, of course, there were no telephones, landlines or otherwise, no computers, no cars – the list goes on and on.

But as I research Bronze Age Crete for my next series, I realize how many things there are. Money, for example. Every Western country as well as China, India and more had money. Well, there was some money in the Bronze Age. In what is now Iraq and Iran, shekels were used. They were tied to a certain amount of barley. Consistent weights for gold and silver were beginning to be set up. But can I casually say my characters in Minoan Crete went to the market with their money and purchased something? No. Something must have been used; after all, Crete was the center of trade. Did they use a barter system or a combination of both? Obviously, more research is required.

I talked about needles in my last post. Well, let’s move on to scissors. Rees uses scissors and we would recognize them. Scissors were invented during the Bronze Age but they were not the scissors we know. More like two blades attached with a copper band.

And the people of Rees’s time period ate similarly to us. More meat heavy and certain vegetables were newish such as potatoes and tomatoes but we would recognize most of their food.  The Minoans ate differently. Sure, they ate lamb, seafood and goat, lentils and other pulses, grains such as barley and wheat. But did they consume dairy products? Had they learned to make cheese? So far, although there are competing theories, no one seems to know.

And did they eat beef? The bull was sacred to them. The Classical Greeks sacrificed Cattle by burning the hides and bones so the aroma would go up to the Gods. Did the Minoans sacrifice their Bulls and do the same? Or did they treat their cattle as they still do in India today: cattle are sacred and not eaten?

But they did consume beer, wine and a fermented honey similar to mead.

Shaker Herbs Part Four – Culinary Herbs

The Shakers served plain food but it was nourishing and, from the recipes I’ve tried, flavorful. There was some overlap of course. Basil, for example, was used as a tea and an aromatic to prevent excessive vomiting. Rosemary was also used as a tea and its oil was made into a liniment.

Some of the other herbs are not so unsurprising. One of my favorites is for a Dandelion salad. (Seriously!) The mixture includes dandelion leaves, simmered until tender and drained, then put into a saucepan with egg yolks, cream, butter and other herbs such as mint, lemon thyme and so on. The mixture is put on slices of stale bread and fried and then seasoned with oil and vinegar and parsley.

Fish was poached with chamomile leaves or covered with chamomile sauce. (Make a roux with butter and flour (2 Tablespoons each), add a Cup of chicken stock, parsley, the chamomile leaves and add salt and pepper to taste,) Marjoram, basil, parsley and basil went into meatloaf, tarragon, summer savory, marjoram, chervil and thyme into chicken fricasee.

Hancock Village served an herb soup made up of chopped sorrel, chopped shallots, chervil, mint and parsley boiled in milk. Butter and salt and pepper are added to taste and the whole mixture poured over squares of toasted bread.

I want to add a note about the Shaker’s recipe for bread which I found in a James Beard bread book. It is so delicious I could eat an entire loaf. But I digress.

Another soup is apple soup, so tasty on a cool fall day. A quartered apple, cored but unpeeled, a quartered onion and a herb mix of marjoram, basil, summer savory and more combined with cinnamon is cooked in the top of a double boiler. The apple is removed when soft and the soup is strained. Cider and cream is added when ready to serve.

Some of these herbs and herb mixes can be purchased in the gift shops of the various museum communities and at Sabbathday Lake. Hancock Village had a mix that includes basil, parsley, marjoram, oregano, tarragon, thyme and more. It has been several years since I purchased my supply so I am not sure it is still available.

Better lives for women

I tend to think of the 1700s as static in terms of women’s lives but of course it wasn’t. Although Colonial women spent significant time spinning, weaving (if they had a loom) and making candles, as the century wore on households transitioned from frontier living where everything had to be made in-house to a time where necessities could be purchased. Of course the coastal cities like New York, Philadelphia and Boston enjoyed a higher standard of living even before the Revolution. Clothing or fabric, furniture and other luxuries were imported from England and the daughters of affluent households, well staffed with servants and/or slaves, had no need to use the wheel. They did ‘fancy’ work: embroidery of other decorative needlework.

But I digress.

By the late 1700s even rural communities, even in Maine, had access to items which could be purchased – such as dress goods – that would make a woman’s life easier. (Salem with its fast merchant ships and ties to the Orient, imported cloth of all kinds from cotton muslin to silk, cashmere shawls from India and more. Some of these goods made it away from the coasts. It is no surprise to learn that Salem at this time was the wealthiest city in the United States.) Labor could be hired to help in the fields and in the house. Will Rees, traveling weaver, was not the only (male) weaver who went from house to house plying his trade. (Women weavers were bound to their homes.) Spinners could also be hired, Usually widows or unmarried daughters in a large family, these women would spin for an agreed upon price.

But what about the frontier women. The frontier continued to push west and, by the late 1790’s, was pushing past Pittsburgh. Contemporary observers of Pittsburgh were vastly critical of the dirty streets, through which hogs ran unheeded. Most of the houses were wood or frame, but brick was beginning to take over. Glass for windows was imported at large expense. For women, moving to town no matter how dirty, made their lives less arduous. Tasks could be given over to the candlemakers, the washerwomen, dressmakers and shoemakers. Galatin (an important figure during the Whiskey Rebellion) was a weaver. By 1807 there were six professional bakers. In fact, by the 1800’s, the wealthy began building mansions outside of town and Pittsbugh began offering social and cultural opportunities.

The frontier had moved west to Ohio, Kentucky and Illinois.

More about food – Garden Sass

Women in the cities might not be responsible for smoking and drying game and pork as well as preserving other types of food but women on farms and certainly on the frontier were.

Most homesteads owned pigs and even in cities the pigs ran free. Chickens might be in coops or be truly free range, foraging for themselves. (That must have made hunting for eggs fun).

And, no matter how much acreage was in corn, rye or other grains, housewives always had a small patch of vegetables. (Many of them must of had flowers too since lists of seeds and bulbs that were brought over included seeds for peach, apricot, apple, plum and cherry trees as well as seeds for snapdragons, peonies, morning glories and tulip bulbs.)Wheat bread was expensive although wheat was grown in Pennsylvania. In Maine rye and buckwheat were the common crops. Most people ate a bread called ‘injun loaf’, a combination of rye and corn.

Vegetables grown included spinach, rhubarb, several kinds of peas, beans as well as turnips, carrots, cabbage, beets and cucumbers. In more southerly climates than Maine artichokes were popular. A variety of herbs were also grown and had to be tied to the rafters and dried every fall.

Where are the potatoes? Although a new world crop (the Incas had thousands of varieties), potatoes did not get to the colonies until late in the 1700s. They quickly became a popular crop. And where are the tomatoes? Considered poisonous a hundred or so years earlier, they were still suspect.

All the vegetables were lumped together under the term garden sass.

Sugar and salt were both expensive. Salt especially was valuable and desperately needed for food preservation. Honey was the most common sweetener – ironic since bees are not native to the New World. They were brought over with the first colonists, however, and quickly became wild. The other common sweetener was from the sugar maple – maple sugar and syrup.

One final comment: the immigrants to this country brought their own eating habits with them so there were variations in what the colonists ate, depending on country of origin. The Scottish, for example, had to give up oatmeal porridge and switch to cornmeal mush for a time.

 

 

 

Housekeeping – Laundry

Housekeeping  – 1790s – Laundry

Another really labor intensive and, to my mind, awful job was laundry. Water was heated in one of those large heavy kettles and the wet laundry was stirred in it. Water had to be carried from the well and if no well had been dug, from the nearest spring. Clothing was scrubbed clean on a washboard.

This is an antique. I am probably the third or fourth generation to own it. This is a small washboard, probably used for lingerie. The washboards used for heavier clothing would have been much larger.

Of course the laundry detergents we use now did not exist. Usually soap was made from wood ashes and fat. The wood ashes were soaked in a barrel. Why, you may ask. Because wood ashes contain lye. Mixed with fat, lye makes a hard and very harsh soap. Getting one’s mouth washed out with soap must have been incredibly unpleasant!

On the frontier, this lye soap was also used to wash bodies. Lydia, since Rees travels regularly to cities like Salem and Philadelphia, and also because Maine was not the frontier in the 1790’s, would have access to other soaps. Castile soap was made with olive oil and was first created in Spain -thus the name. One of the first manufactured soaps for skin was Pears soap and it was made with glycerine. (Ivory, the so pure it floats soap, was not produced until the 1840s. But I digress.)

Since clotheslines had not been invented yet,  laundry was usually draped over bushes or shrubs to dry –  that must have been fun in the winter. The Shakers invented a variety of methods to dry clothing indoors. If you visit Hancock Village you can see one method with a kind of folding screen like contraption. We can also thank them for inventing clothespins – the kind whittled from one piece of wood with two prongs.

Wealthier women hired a laundress who washed the linen – and later the cotton – sheets and clothing. (For those literary people, Beatrix Potter’s Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle was a laundress as was Emmett Otter’s mother). Until calico came in vogue, (since it was cotton it could be washed) only the body linens were laundered. The silks and velvets were not. (Can I say yuck?) After a few wearings they were passed down to a favored servant. Contemporary accounts describe how these pieces of clothing, gowns mostly, were cut up and the still wearable pieces added to other dresses or made over into other clothing.

Monday was wash day, Tuesday was ironing day. (Wednesday was sewing or mending day for those interested.) Flatirons were heated by the fire and when it reached the proper temperature was used. When it cooled it was put back into the fire and another iron was taken from the hearth. The Shakers also invented a chemical to put into the clothing before ironing to reduce the wrinkling: this was many decades before it was used in the World.

When I think of how much laundry my small family generates and imagine trying to keep up with a large family I shudder. And on laundry day, cooking meals still had to be done. Any free time was spent on spinning or, if a loom was owned, on weaving. Since looms were very expensive not every household had the money to purchase one – that is why itinerant weavers like Rees had jobs. Looms of course were passed down – and that is the genesis of the word heirloom.

Many women – I read one statistic that put the number as high as 50% – could not read or write. Girls did not always go to school. They were too busy working in the home.

I think it bears repeating also that women worked usually with a heavy infant in their arms or a toddler at their heels and were probably pregnant besides.