The Food of a Younger Land (35 page)

For mush and milk, like corn and salt-pork, were Illinois staples all year around.

In winter selected kernels of corn were treated with lye, which removed the hull, after which the grains were boiled or fried. This was “big hominy” and was a wholesome, satisfying article of diet. Farmers would save all their wood ashes until they had a sufficient quantity; then would cover these with water till the combination formed the lye. The lye water would then be filled with shelled white corn and left till the grains swelled and popped open. The corn kernels were then scrubbed over a washboard with the bare hands, to remove the hulls. Sometimes a preliminary cooking was necessary to finish the removal of the hulls. Then several more tubs of water were used to wash the corn to get the heavy lye out. Much trouble was endured by the housewife to get this job finished. Nowadays canned lye is used, but old timers say the hominy is not so good.

“Hoe-cakes,” originated by Virginians, were made by spreading a thin mixture of cornmeal over a hot iron plate, or on a board placed in front of the fire.

The first inquiry a landlord of those years made of a guest at mealtime was, simply, “Well, stranger, what’ll ye take, wheat-bread ’n chickenfixens, or corn-bread ’n common-doin’s?” “Common-doin’s” was corn-bread; just as corn-pone was, commonly, “knick-knacks.” Of which it is told that, a settler, falling ill, called his best friend to his bedside and asked, “I want you to do one thing for me—take some corn to mill and get it ground, and make me some knick-knacks or I’ll surely die.”

A beverage popular with early Illinois settlers was a drink known as “stew,” consisting of a mixture of water, sugar, whiskey, allspice and butter, served steaming hot. When pioneer schoolmasters followed the custom of celebrating the final day of the school term with parents and pupils, the oldest girl of the class was given the task of preparing the stew. Occasionally instructors partook too freely and became “stewed”—a phrase handed down to the present day.

Genuine tea was both difficult to obtain and very expensive; many substitute brews were used by the pioneers. Among the more popular substitutes were those made from sycamore chips and red-root leaves. In Mercer County the red-root leaves were first dried under a Dutch oven, and then pulverized by rolling between the hands. When brewed and sweetened with honey, this drink was called “grub hyson.” Wheat parched and ground served for coffee. And early settlers agreed that the “hardest difficulty of all” was to teach Yankees to drink sour milk and to use honey for butter.

The homely wisdom of Illinois pioneers prescribed that children be passed through a hole in the trunk of a hollow tree to cure “short growth”; hogs must be slaughtered at certain times of the moon or the bacon would shrink; babies must be weaned at certain times of the zodiac; the “madstone,” a small bone from the heart of a deer, was a valued antidote for hydrophobia or snake-bite; certain persons “blew the fire out of a burn,” arrested hemorrhage or cured erysipelas by uttering mysterious charms; a pan of water under the bed was used to check night sweats; bleeding was the sovereign remedy for fits, loss of consciousness, fever, and many other ills; and in eruptive fevers, especially measles, where the eruption was delayed, a tea made of sheep’s dung, popularly known as “nany tea,” was a household remedy.

Illinoisans got their drinking water from springs. Those who came later dug wells, some of which failed to afford the needed supply of water for drinking, cooking and other purposes. After one or two such disappointments the property owner would sometimes call in the local “waterwitch.” The waterwitch held a divining rod in his hands, which would be drawn down by some mysterious force when held over a vein of water. For this purpose a forked piece of witch hazel was usually selected. With a prong of this tightly grasped in each hand, his arms extended at full length, the point of the fork pointing upward, the waterwitch would slowly and gravely walk over a spot where it was desired to sink a well.

In the event water was found where the waterwitch directed, the discovery was heralded as proof of his powers.

Very few early settlers had cisterns, and rain water was obtained by catching it in a barrel into which the water from the eaves of the house was conveyed by a long slanting board. In warm weather, if this rain-water was not used soon, it would come to be filled with “wiggle-tails.”

Following “winter diet” came “spring sickness.” Nearly everybody used to be sick because of lack of green stuff to eat. In the spring the papers carried daily advertisements of sarsaparilla “to cure boils, sluggishness, thick blood, and other ailments resulting from heavy winter food.”

“The matter in the blood is thoroughly vitiated,” one journal advised its readers, and improving it must be a matter of time. Spring diet should do the work of medicine, largely. First in importance are salads of all sorts.”

Hanging from the cabin rafters would be festoons of dried apples, dried pumpkins, dried peaches, peppers, bunches of sage for seasoning sausage; bunches of pennyroyal to “sweat” the sick and bunches of bone-set to “break the ager.”

A product strictly of the central prairies relished by Cavalier and Yankee alike was the vinegar pie. Early Illinoisans felt keenly the absence of native fruit. Along toward spring their systems developed a craving for something tart. To satisfy the craving ingenious housewives invented the vinegar pie—vinegar, molasses, water, a little nutmeg and flour enough to bring the mixture to the consistency of a custard. When baked in a pie tin the resulting product was much relished and remained a favorite springtime dessert until young orchards, coming into bearing, provided real fruit pies to take its place.

Going to mill was nearly always done on horseback. A sack of wheat or shelled corn would be put on a horse with the grain divided so there would be an equal amount in each end, and on this a boy would be mounted and started for the water-mill, which was never more than four or five miles away. Arrived there the miller would take the sack in the mill and pour its contents into the hopper, from which it ran in between the two millstones, one of which, connected with a water wheel in the stream beneath, revolved while the other was stationary. Both were sharply grooved properly to crush and grind the grain that passed between them. For this purpose the miller took toll, that is, a certain percentage of the grain, or as is usually said in this sense, the grist.

Following the Civil War, a considerable migration into the lumber country of Michigan occurred.

Houses were rudely built in these areas and settlement was transitory. Hundreds of small communities would spring up, only to disappear when the land was cut over and the saw-mills removed to new timber land. Such conditions did not encourage variation in diet; food monotony reached a new high in lumber operating sections of the state during the last three decades of the nineteenth century.

Paul Bunyan felt there were two kinds of Michigan lumber camp cooks, the Baking Powder Buns and the Sour-dough Stiffs. One Sour-dough Sam belonged to the latter school. He made everything but coffee out of sour-dough. He had only one arm and one leg, the other members having been lost when his sour-dough barrel blew up.

The hyperbole serves to emphasize a truth. The sour-dough pancake has always been a favorite food among lumberjacks everywhere. To the camp cook a continuous supply of sour-dough is an indispensable part of camp equipment, and he is never without his batch of “starter.” The “starter” is a portion of dough reserved from previous mixtures and stored in the kind of barrel that proved disastrous to Sour-dough Sam. Zealously guarded, the “starter” can be kept for weeks in ordinary temperatures.

The night before the pancakes are to be fried, the cook assembles his batter, using the starter as a leavening agent. Flour and water are added to the starter, and the mixture is left near the stove to rise. By morning it is a light and frothy mass smelling pungently of fermentation. After reserving from the batch a starter for the next morning’s pancakes, the cook adds salt, sugar, eggs, a little fat, and a pinch of soda. He pours large spoonsful of the batter on a huge, fire-blackened griddle, abundantly greased with smoking pork rind and very hot. Then, after the griddlecake has fried a few moments, he flips it expertly and it’s as good as done.

In the old camps it was customary for the cook to install, near the door of the shanty, a crock containing sour-dough batter in various stages of fermentation. Into the crock went all left-over batter, and scraps of bread, doughnuts, cake, or pancakes, which quickly attained the semi-liquid consistency of the batter.

Standing in a box sled among steaming kettles of beans, beef stew and tea, the bull cook drove over a road to a central point in the woods, to blow his dinner horn. The call carried five miles through the snowy forest. Then he howled like an Irish wolf: “Ye-ow! ’s goin’ to waste.” The men swarmed toward the box sled from every direction. Though they ate around a big fire of slash, the beans froze on their plates and the tea froze in their whiskers.

At night they came into camp stamping with cold and grim with hunger. In the cookhouse the long tables were loaded with food; smoking platters of fresh mush, bowls of mashed potatoes, piles of pancakes and pitchers of corn syrup, kettles of rich brown beans, pans of prunes, dried peaches, rice puddings, rows of apple pies. The big camps fed the men bountifully and well.

The jacks ate silently, with great speed. If a greenhorn was tempted to make conversation, he was reminded by a placard on the wall: “No talking at the table.”

The cook was the king bee of the camp. He was well paid and well worth his pay, handling prodigious quantities of food, baking, roasting, frying, stewing, for a hundred men who ate like horses, feeding them lavishly on an allowance of thirty cents a day per man.

The preparation of beans verged on ritual. A deep hole was dug on one side of the fire and filled with glowing embers. When the beans had been soaked for twenty-four hours they were taken out and scalded. With deliberation the cook now chose the right kind of an onion and placed it on the bottom of the pot. Then the beans were poured in until the pot was filled within six inches of the top. Slices of fat pork were laid across this, a sufficiency of molasses was poured upon the whole, and the pot sealed. The embers were now taken from the hole in the floor and the pot inserted. All space around the sides was filled and packed with hot coals and the bean hole covered up. The fire was made over it and kept burning twenty-four hours, when the cooking was complete. This made a rich and golden breakfast dish.

Beans and salt pork—generally “sow-belly”—were the substantialities of the menu, and fried cakes made the dessert. Upon this unadorned diet the men thrived, for there was little sickness among them.

Taken at random from a long list of meals served at small Michigan boarding houses, hotels and even in private homes, one that appears quite typical consisted of bread, fried salt pork, onions, home-grown lettuce and tea. This was for supper but breakfast was much the same, with the possible exception of onions. Those who carried a lunch to work took bread, pork, onions, and lettuce, and cooked dried beans in a tin pail. Such pails were more often than not of a 5-quart capacity and were filled to the brim. The tin dinner pail was the pivot point around which the day revolved—that and the water pail. The latter reposed on a bench near the school-house door with a tin dipper either in it or hanging from a near-by nail. Just above was a shelf for the dinner pails. The opening of the dinner pails in the country school, upon the very instant of dismissal, was an occasion for conjecture. Barter and trade ran high at the dinner hour, and those children whose mothers held the highest reputation in the culinary art were likely to go home at night in a state of hungry bitterness.

Released odors, as the tin tops were pried out of the pails, often gave out advance information regarding contents. That of sour pickles predominated, injudiciously mixed with the aroma of chocolate cake or fried cakes. Fresh bread, redbrown spice cake richly embedded with raisins, were fair plunder for the cunning speculator. Often, too, there would be an addition to the well packed pail—perhaps a small glass of jelly, with one of Grandmother’s old silver spoons to eat it with. Or a little jar of baked beans with another of piccalilli or chilli sauce. The bread was of more than generous thickness, maybe a hunk of some kind of cold meat, a hard boiled egg, a piece of pie, a doughnut, and—for most—the inevitable pickle; if there was room for an apple it went in. Otherwise it went into a coat pocket.

Michigan house-raisings were conducted to the accompaniment of a great deal of liquor and in some quarters it was not considered proper to have a raising without it. When Indians were among those invited, special care had to be exercised in permitting them access to the barrel, as they had a tendency to drink almost as heavily as the whites.

It was a day of mighty breakfasts and Michigan was the state for it.

When the lumber boom died, Michigan lumber jacks packed up their axes and families and joined the great westward migrations of the sixties and seventies.