Fabric: Fronts, 100% wool leftover yardage from a petticoat. Back, wool broadcloth left over from remnant (is that a remnant remnant?) purchased for Mr S’s short jacket. Lining, heavy-weight linen.
How historically accurate is it? Well…the pattern has good documentation and the fabric is within reason for the period. The waistcoat is entirely hand-sewn, and the coarse linen pocket linings match extant garments in collections. So I know that’s good. And as it turns out, I completely and inadvertently made…this! So excited to find this! More excited than you’d expect! First quarter 19th century means 1813 is A-OK!!Also, that waistcoat is HOT! So I think I have achieved pretty accurate, even if it will be used in a time machine back to 1799.
Hours to complete: This was much faster than the first one. 12 hours for cutting and sewing, with about 3 hours just on button holes.
First worn: To be worn by the new owner (The Young Mr) January 19, at the Winter Frolic
Total cost: Since I used fabric left over from a petticoat and the jacket, I’d say the cost was really only in the buttons, so $14.50.
There was a mild flurry about a year ago around the release of Evening’s Empire, by Craig Koslofsky. Like the 2005 book by Roger Ekirch, At Day’s Close: Night in Times Past, Koslofsky’s book examines pre-electric lighting patterns of behaviour at night, including sleep patterns. The BBC has a nice article on the two here. Both Koslofsky and Ekirch assert that until the 19th century, humans typically slept in two blocks of about 4 hours each, and scientists confirm this natural tendency.
Last year, between December and March, I had the luck to test this theory, and once again, it seems I will be sleeping old school, in blocks of time. Unfortunately, these blocks of time are often 2 hours and not 4 hours, as the scientists and historians claim we need. User testing of one shows me that 2 hour sleep blocks (or 4 hours followed by 2 hours) are inadequate and I may be near-hallucinatory by March, just as I was last year.
When doing living history, its always better not to skimp on resources.
The majority of us do not consider the chicken. We may consider whether the package of chicken we purchase is free range, organic, cage-free, grain fed, cruelty free. But we are unlikely to think about the implications for the physical being, the essence of chicken-ness, that the chicken’s conditions create for it.
And I am here to tell you that the cage-free, organic, free-range chickens and chicken parts that you purchase at Whole Foods or your other large vendors bear little to no relationship to the actual free-range, catch-as-catch can, ne’er-do-well chicken of the historic barn yard. For one thing, living history chicken is ripped.
It’s well-developed physically, with strong, sturdy bones and robust ligaments. Its musculature is tight: this is not a bird in need of a personal trainer. Its meat, when cooked, is not white. It is dark meat, not so dark meat, and sort-of white meat. Its taste was described to me as gamey, but I disagree. It was chicken, but earthy, sweet and fresh and rich.
But all that came after the meeting of human, knife, and chicken.
Disassembling the chicken fell to me; I declined rubbing butter into flour having prevented a fall down cellar stairs by putting my hand in fresh goose guano, so I after I washed my hands, I addressed the chicken in its bowl, and took up a knife.
By this time, post-carrots, -parsnips, -squash, -string, -tallow and -suet, the knife lacked the purest essence of knife, that is, sharpness. But it functioned well enough for the task, with some persuasion. The skin was much thicker and more resilient than a store-bought chicken, and greasier, though not in an unpleasant way at first. The muscles were well-developed, and pink. Rosy pink, deep pink, dark like wine. There were no large slabs of the shiny, flaccid, pale meat you find on the chickens in the store. Those aren’t chickens any more: those are products.
The process of quartering the chicken took strength and pressure on the knife, and the strength of my hands. I did have to rip joints apart, and break the carcass’s back. All of this had a sound, and a mild smell of chicken, mixed with the melting tallow. But it was the sound that, with the greasy, slick knife, and the grease that soon covered my hands and wrists, that kept bringing me back to what I was doing, and that, when the bird was broken apart and in the pot and my hands washed, again (they itched), send me outside and up the hill for air and sky.
We boiled the chicken in a kettle we’d already boiled crook neck squash in; later, we added sage, thyme, parsnips and carrots. It was delicious. The broth was incredible, and the whole meal very simple. That’s the whole of the recipe: boil a chicken, add herbs and root or fall vegetables, boil until done, serve. Use any uneaten broth and bones/meat for stew, pie or other dishes. That’s it.
The product chickens from the market are bred to fall apart. They haven’t got what a running, pecking, eating everything chicken’s got in muscle, ligament, and tendon.
On Sunday, after we came home, I looked at the food in our cupboards. There were boxes, cardboard, plastic, layers of packaging. The cheese was square. These things came from the good market, but were they food, or were they products? I felt like a passenger on the ship in Wall*E, and I was appalled.
This is the house at the farm museum where we went to work on Sunday. That bright orange under the window is squash. The part painted red is an office addition and not interpreted space.
This is the view from the site. It is not exactly what the tenant farmers would have seen, even discounting the power lines and road surface. But even with the caveats of constant change in mind, I do not have access to a better lab for understanding the past. There are times when even the smart and sophisticated among us cannot come up with a better (just between us) interpretation than, “1799 sucked. And it was greasy.”
That’s not what we want the visitor to learn (everything in the past was hard) though sometimes I fear that is all they take away. Callie, seen here swearing in my hand, was trying to take away leftover chicken and so was taken away herself.
The more time I spend stooping to reach a vat of tallow, or tearing a chicken carcass apart with my hands and a dull, greasy knife, the more I think that what we fail to grasp is not that people thought differently in the past. It’s why they thought differently.
Lives could be a great deal smaller: tasks were hard and all-consuming. Even as I realized that work would be faster with greater familiarity, I also saw that repetition would not breed enlightenment, because increased speed would only make the next task come more quickly.
Kirsten Hammerstrom 
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