1860s Period Foods - Including Good Down Home Eatin'

[Jim Page]

Betty, I'm an animal lover and also can't abide the thought of any creature suffering.

That being said, a snake is the one creature that really creeps me out and I don't want to be in the same Zip code with any snake. I don't kill them without cause, and that even includes venomous ones that have been near enough to bite me, but I detest seeing them.

--Jim

[BettyO]

Betty, I'm an animal lover and also can't abide the thought of any creature suffering.

That being said, a snake is the one creature that really creeps me out and I don't want to be in the same Zip code with any snake. I don't kill them without cause, and that even includes venomous ones that have been near enough to bite me, but I detest seeing them.

--Jim

Jim -

I love all animals (including snakes) but spiders are a different thing! HA.... yet I wouldn't torture one but kill it outright - I just don't like to think of any animals suffering. However that said - the ONLY thing I've ever killed in my life (aside from flies and spiders) was a copper head snake. It was in my elderly aunt's cellar and I hate to say that I had to beat the poor thing to death with a sledge hammer! I tried to hit it in the head and kept missing - but finally killed it - and felt guilty afterwards!

[Jim Page]

. . . I had to beat the poor thing to death with a sledge hammer!

Well, there's a mental image that will be hard to shake! Betty, when you are on the case, you don't do things by halves!

--Jim

[Craig Hipkins]

Living in North Carolina I usually eat a few copperheads with my lawnmower every year!

Craig

[BettyO]

Augggghhh!!

OK enough with the snakes -
let's get back on period foods......

[L Verge]

Maddie,

Somewhere on another thread, which I can't locate now, you managed to teach me a new word. Since it pertained to food, I'm posting a thank you here.

You used the phrase of cutting an aubergine, and I had no idea what you meant. Aubergine to me is a color - a deep purple. I finally remembered to look it up, however, and found that the color takes its name from a fruit that we are all familiar with. However, we call it eggplant and assume that it is a vegetable - not a fruit.

I love learning new things. Thanks for my "edumacation."

[Jim Page]

Aubergine to me is a color . . . we call it eggplant and assume that it is a vegetable - not a fruit.

Laurie, thanks for posting this. I, too, had looked up aubergine and learned it's what we call eggplant. But I missed the fact that it's a fruit, not a vegetable.

It reminds me of, in the Agatha Christie novels of Hercule Poirot, when Poirot wanted to retire to grow vegetable marrows. I wondered what the heck those might be, until I looked them up and discovered they're what we here call squash!

--Jim

[BettyO]

I was edumacated, too Ya'll!

I also had to look up Aubergine and discovered that it is indeed an eggplant!

[J. Beckert]

Me too! I thought Aubergines were those people that live in the Outback in Australia. I was stunned to think Maddie actually cut one up. The stuff you learn here!

[BettyO]

Joe, you mean Aborigines !! Hahahahaha ! Does sound somewhat like an eggplant!

[L Verge]

While we're in this category: When I was a child, you could walk through the woods and pick chinquapins (spelling) off bushes, peel off their protective cover, and eat the nut inside. Granted, a lot of my woods are now developments; but I never hear anyone talking about those delicious little chinquapins. Are they now an extinct species?

Along the same lines, our woods were filled with beautiful flowers called Jack-in-the Pulpits and also Lady Slippers. Do they still exist?

We also had huckleberry bushes that grew along the sides of the road. You could stop your car on the small shoulder and pick huckleberries to your heart's content. They don't exist wild anymore around here. I assume that the winter chemicals have killed them off.

Sorry, I'm in a nostalgic mood today.

[BettyO]

Speaking of which (didn't know you could eat chinquapins!)

Laurie - have you ever eaten honeysuckle? We had wild honeysuckle bushes growing beside our playground at elementary school when we were kids. We'd pick off the blossoms, pull out the stamen and it would be FULL of nectar. We used to lick the sweet nectar off of the stamens - sweet as sugar! For some strange reason, the yellow honeysuckle were sweeter than the white honeysuckle and we preferred the yellow ones. Anyone else ever do this?

We also used to pick wild blackberries - Still find these occasionally!

[Jim Page]

. . . have you ever eaten honeysuckle? Anyone else ever do this?

We also used to pick wild blackberries - Still find these occasionally!

Betty, I did eat (if that's the right word!) honeysuckle and still do! We have some in the hedge in front of our house.

As for the blackberries, we used to pick those in the woods surrounding our family farm in Northern Florida, but seeing snakes and hearing of folks who had been surprised by black bears while picking berries took much of the fun out of it for me!

--Jim

[L Verge]

Yes indeed, honeysuckle juice is delicious. My family home had lots of honeysuckle vines on the perimeter of the surrounding woods. Mom also trained the vines to go up telephone wires, etc. There is also a red honeysuckle that is delicious, but you have to beat the hummingbirds to those blossoms.

My old property is now abandoned, but there are blackberry vines all over the place - again, you have to beat the birds to them. I love blackberry pie, but I hate blackberry thorns.

Anyone ever pick wild strawberries? Every now and then, the birds distribute seeds in my mulched flower beds, and I get an extra bonus during late-May. As a child, we would go to a 19th-century graveyard near our home to pick these wild goodies. There was also an abandoned plantation home about three miles away that had great ones. I called it Mockingbird Hill because the mockingbird guard dog would throw temper tantrums while we were there. During the Civil War, the plantation belonged to the Griffin family. One of the Mudd descendants, Sydney Mudd who became a U.S. Congressman, married a Griffin daughter and lived there for awhile.

Told you I was nostalgic today. I also bet that you can tell that I hate modern development.

---

I forgot to mention stripping off twigs of sassafras and chewing on the ends.

[Jim Page]

The mentions of berry picking reminded me of my granny's grape arbors on the family farm. She had two types of grapes: one long row each of Concords and Muscadines, and the vines are still producing there today.

I can't remember about the Concords, but I recall that we'd only eat the insides of the Muscadines and not the skins. There was a trick to biting the ouside of the large grape and squirting the insides into your mouth.

Granny also had a couple of Bartlett pear trees that we'd swipe fruit from; she preferred that we leave them alone so she could "put up" the fruit in Mason or Bell jars with sweet syrup.

Two trees that had "fruit" still grow in the back yard of our farm in North Florida, and some of you may be familiar with them. The Chinaberry trees have a fruit that humans can't eat, but birds go crazy over them, and sometimes act drunk after eating the berries.

The other trees are Catawbas, which have an inedible fruit (I guess!) that looks like long snap-bean pods.

--Jim