Eating in the Field: Single-Day Events

On March 28, 2013 By kittycalashIn Events, Food, Living History5 Comments

I’m not an expert, and your results may vary, but here’s what I’ve learned.

Single Day Events without Fires

(e.g. Battle Road, parades, Fort Lee)
For single-day, warm-weather events, ice packs covered in cloths at the bottom of a basket or slipped into a market wallet can keep food cold.

Pasties are self-contained, period appropriate, and require no “hardware” to eat. I wrap them in parchment or plain white paper and tie them with string, or wrap them individually in plain white cloths. Because the filling is cooked and then baked in the pastry, they keep and travel very well. I have a basic receipt here for pork pies; they’re good with chicken, too. Keep the filling a little on the dry side, and you won’t need a plate. I’ve never made an all-vegetable pasty, because I live with T-Rex in a hoodie, but I imagine it would be delicious with parsnips, squash, and maybe even kale.

Another single-day-event solution is bread and cheese. John Buss of the 10th Massachusetts was all about cheese. He writes home longing for cheese, and writes, too, that he can eat cheese again because he’s recovered from the small pox. (That’s one of those historic statements that I try not to imagine too much about.) I’ve never had the time to bake bread from the Amelia Simmons’ cookbook, but I’ve had bread made from it, and it’s great. Pressed for time? Worked later than you thought you’d have to? Whole Foods Take-and-Bake baguettes have played the role of home-made bread, as have various loaves from other grocery stores.

The Hive blog has some good recommendations to fill your basket, so with some repackaging and artful packing, you can assemble an 18th century pick-a-nick basket, or stuff a market wallet with suitable foods. Just please, please: peel stickers off the fruit, and don’t pack bananas, which aren’t seen in the U.S. much before 1880.

Eating in the Field

On March 27, 2013 By kittycalashIn Events, Food, Living History3 Comments

Workmen Lunching in a Gravel Pit circa 1797 Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775-1851 — Workmen Lunching in a Gravel Pit, circa 1797. Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775-1851

A compatriot asked how we handle food and cooking in the field. What do we do about “yucky stuff?” by which she meant meat.

She was doing just about the same stuff we were doing, and with Battle Road around the corner, I thought I’d write about food in the field, and ways we handle it. Other people will have other ideas, but the main things I think about are:

Maintaining authenticity and food safety (Nobody wants flux.)
Historical eating is seasonal, local eating
Gear: less is not only more, but easier

Food safety is one of those things where you really don’t want to compromise too much, though from eating at the farm, I think there is more leeway than we admit. I will confess that when I was poor and in school, I stored dairy products on the windowsill of my studio when there was no fridge, so eating at the farm is like eating… when I was a whole lot younger.

Here are my principles. I’m not an expert, your mileage may vary, but this is where I begin.

Universal Truths

Start with who you are.
Objects you bring, and food you eat, should be true to your impression.
Authenticity goes beyond the date of accouterments: a porcelain tea set may be quite correct for a 1778 Newport or 1763 Boston parlor, but it makes very little sense if you are with a Continental private. One chipped plate is different for a woman to carry, or a piece of pewter. How long either would last you is another story, but at least you’d have a story. If you are the Colonel’s wife, it’s a different matter, even more so if it’s a British Colonel.

Food safety trumps purest authenticity.
Cloth covered, hidden ice packs will hurt no one and may save you misery later.

Stay Hydrated.

Reapers 1785 George Stubbs 1724-1806 — Reapers, 1785. George Stubbs 1724-1806

Soldiers drank water.

In a hot summer camp, we keep a large pitcher full of water (see the Stubbs painting at left). Covered with a white linen or cotton cloth, it will keep coolish and free of dust & insects (or dog fur & fleas, if you’re in the Stubbs painting). We sliced limes into our enormous pitcher, and refilled it all day from the pump at OSV.

Limes are in period; justifying a source can be tricky, but at a certain level, safety trumps authenticity. 98 degrees and 90% humidity means drinking a lot of water.

Chances are you’re a caffeine addict like me, so what do you do? Boil water in a kettle, and bring tea in a screw of clean white paper is one answer. What’s your justification? I’m a personal fan of ‘stole it from my master,’ but in small quantities, perhaps you got it from home, or did a farm woman a favor. Or stole it from her. John Smith (I kid you not), Sergeant in Colonel Lippitt’s Rhode Island State Regiment, in Continental Service, writes in his diary* of apprehending geese and chickens who failed to respond with the correct password when challenged.

*Published as “Sergeant John Smith’s Diary of 1776”, edited by Louise Rau, in Mississippi Valley Historical Review, No. 20, 1933, pages 247 – 270. NB: Kitty Calash recommends reading, not stealing.

Tomorrow: Food-related recommendations by event type.

Eat, Not Just Meat

On February 22, 2013 By kittycalashIn Food1 Comment

Good advice for every day, if you’re not t-rex

The Young Mr has been unsupervised some of this week (he’s old enough but not always as mature as one might prefer) and I have left him notes to help him with some basics, as he does prefer to rise long after I’ve left for work. In the bathroom, BRUSH YOUR TEETH is affixed to the mirror (should’ve added + HAIR). In the kitchen, another note is taped to the Christmas Cactus above the sink.

My coworkers, many of whom have known the Young Mr since he was in a stroller and had nicknames like Possum Baby and Seal Monkey (he just shivered a small death when you read those names), found this note hilarious. The kid has a reputation as a one-human plague of locusts: he once ate a third of a pound of ham in a 20-minute span while his father and I went to the grocery store. He will eat a large head of lettuce in the hours between when he gets home from school and I get home from work. Entire tins of Altoids vanish suddenly, and all I get is a sulky, guilty look.

So I found this blog post, What’s For Supper? very interesting, as I had been thinking of late, How would I feed the kid in the 18th century winter?

Fantastic Hairdress with Fruit & Vegetable Motif, 65.692.8, MMA

Fortunately, there would have been vegetables. And whether the beds were hot with manure or straw, there would have been some greens. At the farm we had salad in January; would it make it to February, or March? Don’t know, but I love the idea of spinach. Parsnips store well (scrub hard) and are delicious, and apples, too.

I think we forget we did not invent the larger world: it was big before we got here, with ships circumnavigating the globe and caravans crossing mountains long before container ships began losing sneakers on the ocean.

Blame the Milk Maid

On February 7, 2013February 7, 2013 By kittycalashIn Food, History, Living History6 Comments

Pyne, Milk Woman, 1805, MoL — Pyne: Milk Woman, 1805, MoL

What do pewter and tin have to do with costuming? Well, aside from the many expensive buttons Mr S and the Young Mr wish to sport, I got interested in the milk maids’ pails because of their similarity to the tinned kettles used by RevWar reenactors. The uses converged in December in a conversation I had with a colleague about Carl Giordano’s beautiful kettles. (He made my wash basin, but my kettles came from Missouri because I needed them very quickly; the fur trade & rendezvous reenactors have similar material culture interests and needs, because of time period & culture overlap.)

1793: Milk Below Maids, V&A — Milk Below Maids, 1793, V&A

The milk pails look like tin, don’t they? One from ca. 1759, the other from 1805, and both appear to be carrying shiny, seamed metal buckets with brass details at the base and rim. The captions call them pewter, though. So I went to the V&A and the Museum of London looking for pails, but only found more milk maids.

I began to wonder: if the pails were really made of pewter, wouldn’t they be awfully heavy? And wouldn’t there be extant examples? Pewter is highly collectible. There’s a George II pewter milk pail on Worthpoint, but it looks nothing like the pails in the images. Is pewter ever so…shiny? And I’ve never seen seams in pewter the way they appear in the Pyne illustration.
Here’s something that reminds me of that George II milk pail. I think I trust the Met more than I trust an online seller. On the right is a “bucket carrier” from the National Trust (UK) Collections.

Mid-18th century dinner pail with cover, MMA

Mid-19th century bucket carrier, NTC (UK)

Google defines pewter thus:

pew·ter

/ˈpyo͞otər/

Noun

A gray alloy of tin with copper and antimony (formerly, tin and lead).
Utensils made of this.

Synonyms

tin

178, Collet: The Sailor's Present, LWL — 178, Collet: The Sailor’s Present, LWL

Synonym: tin? That’s pretty interesting, even though I don’t trust Google with etymology. But don’t these tin kettles look a great deal like the milk maids’ buckets?

The Giordano tin kettles can be made with brass ears (that’s the part the bail, or handle, goes through). Look at the ears in the photo, and at this detail from “Spring and Winter:”

The ears may be the best lead to follow. There are plenty of ears (handle attachments) if you search the Met for bucket or pail and limit the search the metalwork… but they’re bronze, and Roman. The National Trust (UK) doesn’t turn up much, or the Museum of London (yet).

There’s a silver cream pail at the MFA, and it sort of looks like its handle attaches with ears, but not in the riveted-on kind of way, but in a purposeful and elegant way. This is just about where I start to ask myself why I care, but then a number of other questions present themselves, like:

Where are the milk pails? Are there really no milk pails in museum collections? (Yes, this could be true)
Was this pewter milk pail with attached measures specific to London, as my colleague thinks?
How does milk taste when it spends quality time in pewter (or tin)?
How heavy would a pewter milk bucket be?

Things to ponder as we prepare for heavy snow… In this state, that means dashing out for “French toast supplies.” I’m not originally from here, and I solemnly swear we are legitimately out of bread, eggs, and milk.

Kirsten Hammerstrom

Category: Food