Recipes / 8 Comments/ October 20, 2015 / 4 minutes of reading
Lately,I have been studying the American pioneer recipes that were cooked on their westward trek. Many of the methods and recipes that they utilized could work very well for us in a TEOTWAWKI situation. The list of foods that they carried are a surprisingly close match to what many of us store today. Their list included such items as beans, corn, wheat, rice and dried fruits and vegetables. These are the foods that are the mostinexpensive for us to store today and still provide the nutrition that we require.
In addition, they carried dried and salted meat. The salted meat was often in the form of bacon. Of cause, they supplemented this by hunting and foraging whenever they could, which are both much more difficult than most people realize.
The bacon they used was different from today’s. Their bacon was not the one-pound packages of sliced bacon that we are used to picking up at the grocery store. It was more like what we might know of today as salt pork. It was a heavily salted side or back portion of pork, fattier and often unsmoked, and preserved in a barrel of brine. You would get out a piece and cut off the amount of meat you needed. You then placed the rest back into the brine. The bacon would often need to be soaked for a time to remove some of the saltiness before being sliced for frying or cut into pieces for soups or stews.
Because of shortages of both money and food, many pioneer recipes used “alternative versions” of favorite dishes. They substituted, improvised, and invented while cooking. Molasses was often used for sugar. Vinegar could be used to imitate lemons. Boiled, mashed beans mixed with plenty of nutmeg and allspice made a good pumpkin pie. One frontier cook made “orange marmalade” by boiling carrots in sugary syrup flavored with ginger.
Here are a few of the Pioneer Recipes for you to try. You’ll notice all the ingredients are shelf stable. If you’ve been storing food for very long, you probably already have most or all of them on hand.
Allow milk to form clabber (unpasteurizedmilk allowedto turn sour, until the milk thickens or curdles into ayogurt-like substance)
Skim off cream, once clabbered.
Set clabbered milk on very low heat and cut in 1 inch squares.
Place colander into clabber.
Dip off whey that rises into the colander.
When clabber becomes firm, rinse with cold water.
Squeeze liquid out and press into ball.
Crumble into bowl.
Mix curds with thick cream.
Mormon Johnnycake
This wasa form of cornbread used by the Mormon immigrants,
2-cups of yellow cornmeal
½-cup of flour
1-teaspoon baking soda
1-teaspoon salt
Combine ingredients and mix in
2-cups of buttermilk (add vinegar or fresh lemon juice to powdered milk to make buttermilk) and 2-tablespoons molasses.
Pour into a greased 9 pan and bake at 425 degrees for 20 minutes.
Root Vegetable Pasties
Ingredients
1 onion chopped
3 potatoes, cooked and mashed
3 carrots sliced
2 turnips, cooked and mashed
Whatever herbs, spices, salt and pepper you have on hand.
Mix the vegetables, adding anything else you have, for example meat or cheese.
Make enough pie or pasties dough to make two pies. Cover ½ of a pie with the vegetable mixture and fold the other ½ over the top. Now seal the pasties by wetting the edge of the dough and pressing it with the times of a fork. Poke a couple of holes in the top to let the steam out and cook until golden brown.
You can make smaller pies if you have a large family, so they can take what they can eat and you have no waste. During these times, you will be saving every scrap of food you have, so think smaller portions for a no waste meal.
Vinegar Lemonade
Mix 1 to 2 tablespoons of apple cider vinegar into a 12 ounce glass of water.
Stir in 2 tablespoons of sugar to taste.
This was a good source of vitamin C
Red Bean Pie
Beans were a staple of the pioneer recipes. Beans could be easily stored and they were inexpensive.
1-cup cooked and mashed pinto beans.
1-cup sugar.
3-beaten egg yolks.
1-teaspoon vanilla.
1-teaspoon nutmeg.
Place the combined ingredients in an uncooked pie crust.Bake at 350 degrees for 30 minutes.Make a meringue with the leftover egg whites.Spread over baked pie and return to oven to brown.
You will notice that all these pioneer recipes use very basic ingredients and are cooked from scratch. Any of these recipes could be cooked outdoors with Dutch ovens, solar ovens, or other methods, including a wood stove. I believe that understanding how to use pioneer recipes will give us the ability to utilize whatever foods we have available and still make them tasty.
If you don’t own any cast iron, yet, recommended is a Dutch oven and a skillet. In this set from Lodge, you get both.
Recipes serve as valuable guides and teaching tools for novice cooks. They provide an organized, step-by-step approach to cooking and help individuals learn cooking techniques, terminology, and basic kitchen skills.
With a properly written recipe, its ingredients and serving size are exact and measured accurately. Based on this information, a nutrient analysis can be done to evaluate the nutrition content of the dish, which is important information for some.
Recipes are guides for cooking. It is important to read the whole recipe before you begin cooking. This helps you know how the dish is made. All recipes start with the name of the dish.
The fire pit was used as the oven and stove. The stove part of the fire pit consisted of a metal rod from which pioneers could hang “S” hooks and could then cook their food in Dutch ovens hung from these hooks. Pioneer Dutch ovens were very similar to Dutch ovens we use today.
Cooking improves your overall health simply by the variety of vitamins, minerals and nutrients you are getting from the ingredients. By learning to cook, you are controlling your calorie intake, and your protein intake, and you are able to finally determine what foods you truly do or do not like.
By cooking a new recipe, you'll be able to improve your cooking skills, connect with other cooks, discover new favorite dishes, learn new techniques, and get creative in the kitchen.
Preparing fresh foods will put necessary nutrition into your diet and increase your energy and quality of health in the short and long run. You will learn proper planning and preparation skills to see a task through while contributing in a positive way to the health of your family and friends.
Because when you read a recipe, you get a better idea of what the final product should look like and how it should taste. A good recipe can make your food delicious—but if you don't read it all the way through before starting to cook, you might miss some crucial information.
For example, cooked foods tend to be softer than raw ones, so humans can eat them with smaller teeth and weaker jaws. Cooking also increases the energy they can get from the food they eat. Starchy potatoes and other tubers, eaten by people across the world, are barely digestible when raw.
The 5 Parts of a Recipe. The yield tells the number and size of servings the recipe will make. Why is this important? Knowing the yield in advance helps one to know if more or less food is needed – whether or not to make more or less of the food.
Recipes provide consistency in the production of menu items. Recipes provide food cost control. Recipes provide knowledge for front of the house staff as a sales tool and to help consumers with dietary concerns and allergies. 2.It is important to read the whole recipe before you begin cooking.
The ingredients list is one of the most important parts of a recipe, and it should be listed in the order that it will appear in the directions list. Make sure to be specific and list exact amounts needed; and include the state of ingredients (i.e., frozen, softened, melted).
Breads, potatoes, rice, and starchy foods put backbone into a meal and the hungry souls who ate it. The mainstays of a pioneer diet were simple fare like potatoes, beans and rice, hardtack (which is simply flour, water, 1 teaspoon each of salt and sugar, then baked), soda biscuits (flour, milk, one t.
Colonists preserved food using eight basic methods: fermentation, burial, drying, curing, cooling, freezing, pickling, and canning. Fermentation happens when starches and sugars react with microorganisms and produce alcohol. Fall harvest arrives, grapes are plucked from the vines and apples from the orchards.
They grew crops and raised farm animals for milk, eggs, and meat. In the winter they hunted and ate preserved food, including beans and grains. Pioneers also made their own clothes out of wool, flax, old cloth, and leather.
Why is recipe testing important? Instead of making a recipe just once before posting it on your blog, thorough recipe testing ensures that your readers will get a consistent, delicious final product every time they make your recipe (as long as they follow the recipe closely!).
The study of food allows us to understand the plants and animals that we eat and how to improve current food systems to make them more efficient and sustainable. Below are the six main reasons why food science is important now and in the future.
As I wrote in my previous article on recipe writing, “Having a well-written recipe is essential for anyone looking to recreate a dish or share their culinary creation with others.” Accurate documentation allows others to follow your recipe and achieve similar results.
Accurate Nutrient Content: Standardized recipes help ensure that the best possible food items are produced every time. ingredients and quantities are used each time the recipe is prepared, the cost per serving remains the same.
Introduction: My name is Fr. Dewey Fisher, I am a powerful, open, faithful, combative, spotless, faithful, fair person who loves writing and wants to share my knowledge and understanding with you.
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