Roughing It

With my kitchen out of commission this past week, I’ve felt as if I were on a camping trip without benefit of Nature’s beauty. My Daddy would say I was “roughing it,” but I realize it’s not so bad. I could have to bring my water in buckets from the river, but instead I can pile them in the bathtub and hope I don’t get spaghetti down the drain.

I wondered how in Thunder our great-great-grandmothers managed … so I pulled a book from my shelf that was originally printed in 1879. It’s called Housekeeping in Old Virginia and was written by the granddaughter of Patrick Henry, Marion Cabell Tyree. She gathered “contributions from two hundred and fifty of Virginia’s noted housewives distinguished for their skill in the culinary art and other branches of domestic economy.” This book was an eye-opener!

Mrs. Tyree included everything a woman needed to know about housekeeping back then, but I think she assumed that one had a domestic staff. In her treatise on bread-making, she says that every housewife should know the theory of breadmaking so “she will be able to give more exact directions to her cook.”

I don’t think Mrs. Baird would take kindly to my instructions.

The book tells you how to clean your house for spring … and you are supposed to start in the attic. The attic??? Puhleeze! I’m not going up there for love or money! Oh wait … how much money?

The housekeepers in this book included recipes for making everything from toothpaste to ink to dyes for the floor along with scrumptious sounding (my tongue is firmly planted in my cheek) recipes for dishes to serve the guests. It will tell you how to cook a squirrel or a robin to make a “delightful” breakfast dish. There’s an interesting recipe for turtle soup.

And, then there was the recipe below for cooking “shoat’s head.” A “shoat” is a newly weaned pig. I would not have the heart to cook it. Don’t tell me you would have the heart to cut off those itty bitty feet and mince them!

SHOAT’S HEAD, TO STEW
Clean the head and feet; and put them on to parboil with the liver. Then split up the head, through the nose, taking out the bones. Cut the meat from the feet and chop up with the liver, season this with pepper and salt.
Lay the head open and fill it with this mince and the yolks of some hard-boiled eggs; if this does not fill the head, add some grated bread crumbs or crackers and butter.
Sew up the head and bind it with thread; put it in the pot with the water it has been parboiled in and let it stew slowly. Take up the head, and add to the gravy a lump of butter, rolled in flour, some browning and walnut catsup. Pour this over the head, which should be brown. If the shoat is not very small use bread and butter instead of the liver. ~ Mrs. R.

Makes a Happy Meal at McDonald’s sound almost palatable, doesn’t it? Maybe that was TMI. Sorry. Well try this one on for size. It’s a recipe that was written by a housekeeper who had been a slave. All the misspellings are from the original recipe:

Resipee For Cukin Kon-Feel Pees

Gether your pees ’bout sun-down. The folrin day, ’bout leven o’clock, gowge out your pees with your thum nale, like gowgin out a man’s eye-ball at a kote house. Rense your pees, parbile them, then fry ‘em with som several slices uv streekt middlin, incouragin uv the gravy to seep out and intermarry with your pees. When modritly brown, but not scorcht, empty intoo a dish. Mash ‘em gently with a spune, mix with raw tomarters sprinkled with a little brown shugar and the immortal dish ar quite ready. Eat a hepe. Eat mo and mo. It is good for your general helth uv mind and body. It fattens you up, makes you sassy, goes throo and throo your very soul. But, why don’t you eat? Eat on. By Jings. Eat. Stop, never while that is a pee in the dish. ~ Mozis Addums

The advertising for my reprint from the 1960s indicates that perhaps the slave wrote this down. I have my suspicions. I don’t think someone who had no spelling skills would think to put an apostrophe when they dropped a vowel (as in ’bout for about). Somehow, I think Mrs. Tyree took some liberties; the white folks wrote the dialect.

Mostly, I was reading for amusement, but I did find one passage that spoke to me as I waited for a plumber to re-work my kitchen sink:

In cases where you cannot have cold and hot water conveyed into the kitchen, always keep on the stove a kettle of hot water with a clean rag in it, in which all greasy dishes and kitchen utensils may be washed before being rinsed in the kitchen wash pan. Always keep your cook well supplied with soap, washing mops and coarse linen dish rags.

By Jings, I’m going to remember that if this ever happens to me again! I do not like “roughing it,” and I would not have been a good housewife in Old Virginia. Instead, I’d have been a saloon girl … or a pirate … or both!

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Tagged as: History, household, recipes