Cooking Plain, Illinois Country Style

Cooking Plain, Illinois Country Style

Cooking Plain, Illinois Counby Style With a few exceptions, the early arrivals in southern Illinois brought a bare minimum of cast-iron cookware: a pot for soups, stews, vegetables and puddings; a skillet, and a dutch oven for baking bread, cakes and roasts. Cooking and eating utensils were often carved from wood; the hunting knife doubled for carving. Tin bread pans and other tinware were added as the family's fortunes improved; a 10- or 20gallon iron kettle for use in butchering hogs, rendering lard, making soap was purchased or bartered for, or used in common with relatives or neighbors; still later, as orchards matured, a treasured copper-lined kettle for apple-butter making and a cider mill were acquired in joint tenancy by several members of the family, to be passed around as needed (this was the case among my own forebears). The cooking was done in the fireplace, and possibly in an oven built into the wall alongside the fireplace. The fire was kept going the year-round; the careless housewife who permitted it to die out found it necessary to send one of the more responsible younger offspring to the nearest neighbor, often several miles away, to borrow coals for starting the hearth fire anew, It was several decades before new arrivals brought cookstoves to the settlements. A few experimental models were in use in New England and Pennsylvania, but I find no records of cookstoves being manufactured in the U.S, prior to 1830. Local history records that one Col. James Gill brought a cookstove to Grand Tower in 1806, which was an article of such great curiosity that people for miles around fabricated reasons for calling on him, to look at the wonderful invention . Perhaps he obtained one of the experimental models in his native South Carolina, or imported one from England. At any rate, the southern lllinois housewife, who had mastered the art of simple, and sometimes not-50-simple cookery with the use of her primitive equipment faced a challenge in adjusting to the cast-iron contraption. She learned to test oven temperature by sticking her hand inside. If a blast of heat hit her in the face, her hand jerked back involuntarily , and she yelped in pain, she had a "brisk" oven and it was 3 4 Cooking Plain time to set the yeast bread, biscuits, and pies inside. By holding back on the wood fuel she allowed the fire to die down slightly and could replace the biscuits with a cake. When the thick juice oozed from slits in the pie's top crust and the bread loaf made a hollow sound when she thumped it, she removed them and set the com bread in to bake. With a clock, she devised a timetable for oven-testing by hand. For instance, if she could hold her hand in the oven for twelve seconds (or twelve ticks of the clock without burning it, she had a hot oven (450 degrees), and so on: Time 12 seconds 18 " 24 II 30 II Over 30" Degree of Heat 450 Hot 400 Quick 350 Moderate 300 Slow -300 Warm, or low As wheat flour became more plentiful after the 1840s, she developed a less painful oven-testing method-spreading a couple of tablespoons of flour in the tin pie pan and setting it in the oven while she counted. By timing for 3 minutes she could arrive at the heat by observing the color of the flour: black, dark brown, medium brown, golden, and pale tan. Later in the century as improved stove models came on the market the manufacturers thoughtfully included manuals which not only gave instructions for cooking but included recipes, housekeeping hints, and home remedies. Unlike the inhabitants of the early French settlements, the first "Americans" lived off the land, with wild game, fish, fruits, nuts, and edible weeds supplementing the cornmeal and hominy. Hickory nuts, and black walnuts were fairly plentiful in southern Illinois when the first settlers arrived. Pecan trees grew in profusion along the southern and southwestern rim of the state; butternuts in the extreme south. Hazelnut bushes bordered the forest trees. The 22 hickory trees on our homeplace provided us with excellent additions to cakes, cookies, and candy, as well as casual eating throughout the winter. Their flavor is not quite as pronounced as that of the black walnuts . Perhaps because pecans were less accessible, we regarded ourselves as fortunate and did not seek out these two latter...