Category Archives: maple syrup

More about food – Garden Sass

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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.

More about salads – and vegetables

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Salad has a long history. One source I read claimed that the Greeks and Romans ate mixed greens with dressing.

I have salad recipes in my Queen Elizabeth I and King Richard cookbooks although they also include things like figs and are sweeter than we normally think of salad, which is now seen as more of a healthy food. The recipes from these renaissance cookbooks read more like dessert.

Besides wild greens and the tops of beets and turnips, early American farmers also grew several varieties of lettuce, cucumbers, radishes. What’s missing from the usual American salad? Why, tomatoes. Although now considered Italian, tomatoes are actually, like potatoes, from South America It was brought to Europe by Spain. And, a member of the nightshade family, it was considered a poison. It was not eaten at all during the Colonial period ( and grown as a decorative plant) but by the early 1800s was popular as a food. One story lists Thomas Jefferson as the who began planting and eating tomatoes. He was a passionate gardener who tried new foods but we don’t really know for sure.

But I digress. Cucumbers were frequently used as a salad and I have found old recipes for cucumber salad which usually consists of chopped cucumbers and vinegar.

Other vegetables: artichokes, onions, garlic, parsnips, asparagus and of course things like cabbage were popular. We think of the diet at this time as meat heavy, and it was, but cheese and diary and grains, as well as the vegetables, were also a big part of the diet.

I always mention food in my books. I’m a gardener myself and clearly a foodie – which regular readers of my blog can surely tell. And I find it fascinating to discover what our forefathers ate and didn’t eat. Sometimes it is surprising.

food in the 1790’s – salad and maple syrup

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Although trading went on, most food eaten was, by necessity, local. The port cities like Salem could import oranges, nuts, figs and more but for the outlying farms these items were exotic luxuries.

Salad (or salat) has been eaten for hundreds of years. Greens such as beet and turnip tops and spinach, cabbage are all greens that might be used. For the early New Englander, wild greens such as dandelion greens or violets would be eaten. (Fiddleheads are still eaten by Mainers, cooked of course, and have a flavor similar to spinach.) Our idea of a salad with lettuce and tomato was not the salad eaten by the early colonists. One of the memoirs from this time expressed a hunger for greens after a winter of salted and smoked food.

Poke weed was also used as a salad green. It is, however, poisonous, although the very young leaves – from accounts I have read – are not. I haven’t tried them. I have also read that the leaves are edible after cooking three or four times, discarding the water in between.

One note: since the native American tribes knew how to tap the sap from maple trees, maple syrup quickly became a staple. It was used as both lightly boiled sap, and the syrup we are more familiar with today.