I have started cooking at events for 6th Ohio. I am trying to keep it very close to period correct. Tin pots , correct utensils and every thing over the fire. (no grills and such. No plastic or stainless steel. One hidden cooler in a canvass cooler cover)I have looked at all the perid pictures I could find on the web and I am holding closs to what I have seen.
I have done a small amount of research on food and it's preperation.
My questin is: Does any one have a good one pot(tin)recipe for period type food for modern day tastes?( for about 12 to 20 soldiers)
I was thinking(In my limited capacity)about such things as a chicken and sausage jumbelia, or black beans and rice, or a beef stew.
Coffee I have mastered.I don't think I want to do too heavy a breakfast meal. I dont think I want to do eggs and pancakes and such. To heavy a breakfast slows a soldier down.I don't want to get up at 4 am and start cooking either.
Any and all suggestions are welcome. I am aiming at feeding the troops and there tastes , but be correct in appearance for the public.
Thank you for your time and interest.Keep Your Powder dry.The Union Forever!!  

Pvt Dan Girton (Sink Rat) Company A , 6th O.V.I. Regiment.

Dan,

You'll find many of the period concoctions are copied over and over again in different publications. Most have a connection with Alexis Soyer, who was evidently quite the character. Maybe he was the Emeril of his day, and I don't say that in jest, either.  Take a gander at this website, and check out some of the receipts (recipes):

http://www.royalengineers.ca/recipes.html

This forum does an autolink without highlighting, so just click the url.

This barely scratches the surface, but it will give you some ideas.

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One hidden cooler in a canvass cooler cover)

No need for that. Aside from it not being necessary for period foods (unless you're reproducing beef on the hoof in less-than-steer quantities), I personally find it scary to bring foods to events that are so close to spoiling, a difference of 30 degrees is enough to cause sickness.  

For meat, the cheapest thing I know is salt pork. Linda and I just purchased 20 pounds of pork for $23, which along with the minimal cost of salt, will be the cost of meat for 30 people for two days (two meals with 1/3 lb. meat each, plus two breakfasts without meat). Can't beat 80 cents a person for meat for an event. To salt it, put it in brine in the refrigerator for a few weeks, and it'll keep in 90 degree temperature.

Next more expensive is bacon, the real smoked country bacon by the slab. It too will keep in the heat, but isn't so easy to make at home, so people typically order it from places like Scott Hams or find it at a good local butcher.

Another possibility is country ham, same as the bacon.

You can also corn beef at home with salt and Morton's Tender Quick, but it's not quite as good for keeping in very hot weather, and a bit stringier in texture too. The storebought corned beef is not made to keep unrefrigerated.

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My questin is: Does any one have a good one pot(tin)recipe for period type food for modern day tastes?( for about 12 to 20 soldiers)

If people insist before you even cook it that the food must be adapted to modern day tastes, the problem is that they'll already be convinced they won't like period foods, no matter how good they are. I'd just make period recipes, and wait until they complain.

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I was thinking(In my limited capacity)about such things as a chicken and sausage jumbelia, or black beans and rice, or a beef stew.

Charles already mentioned Soyer's influence, and that's the best place to go for army cooking.

I probably shouldn't even touch on the issue of how and where you were supposedly trained to cook in the period, and therefore, whether you'd tend to cook only army recipes because you only learned to cook in the army, or whether you were a restaurant or hotel cook before the war and therefore would try to cook in that style when you had the ingredients and facilities.

There are dozens of period civilian cookbooks online, all searchable, for other ideas. Try going to Google Books or Making of America and searching for things like "cookery," "receipt," or "housewife" in the title to get to the books, and then search within the text for ingredients you want to use or dishes you want to make.

Any combination of salt pork and vegetables is simple and requires one pot and no refrigeration: pork and beans, peas, sweet potatoes, potatoes, onions, carrots, parsnips, green corn, etc. depending on the period availability and the season. Pepper (red or black) and onions can keep it from being too bland.

To get fancy, even if you only have one large pot plus a small sauce-pan or deep little frying pan, you can separate the meat from the vegetables after they're boiled, make a separate sauce for each in the smaller pan, and serve them separately with their sauces, but that's my period hotel-cook background showing through.

For breakfast, hasty pudding or mush is, well, hasty. You can also keep pork and potatoes hot overnight on a low fire and it'll be soft and tender enough to stew down into hash in a hurry. Soaked hardtack is also good in the hash.

Anyway, those are some quick thoughts. There's also the issue of what was being eaten at the time and place being portrayed at each event, both seasonally, and situationally. At the particular battle, do period accounts talk about the soldiers raiding fields for green corn? Or complaining of only bacon and hardtack for days? Is it winter and time for parsnips and cabbage, or summer and time for tomatoes and green beans?

Hank Trent
hanktrent@voyager.net

In a word: SAMP.

Yep, that staple of colonial america is just fine for ACW one pot reenacting cooking......coarse hominy is, of course, Samp.....to which add corn, onions, whatever else is lying around....how about some salt pork or leftovers from the meal before? Some cheese? Cook for 4 - 12 hours.....

mmmm, good.

stews are easy... just takes some time to cut everything up and keep the fire going.

i took a roast and cut it up (unit is mainstream and we also keep a hidden cooler), threw it in the hot dutch oven until it was almost cooked all the way threw. then took potatoes, carrots, onion (anything i could figure out what was grown in a ladies garden) and threw those in when the beef was almost brown, covered all that with water, it cooked for quite a long time (not having anything to keep time... i have no idea how long... i would say 4 hrs.. but then i also had people that kept lifting the lid to see what i was cooking...). the meat didnt need any chewing. i also noticed this same recipe is also in the link that is listed above. i also served homemade bread with it. all that cooking qualified me as camp cook for the unit. all the men are happy to have some good cooking by a woman!!

Thank you all for the helpful information.

Thanks Mr. Heath-- I checked out Alexis Soyer's "receipts"
Thanks Mr. Trent -- good tips on salt pork and bacon and cooking.
Thanks Mr. Samp -- For Samp -- I must confess, I am a North  ern boy and I have had homony only one time in my 57 years. ( And frankly that was enough)
Thanks Dulcie-- beef stew sounds right up my alley. A tin plate of stew and a chunk of home made bread is hard to beat.

Now to practice on the troops...(who knows, I may get my own Civil War Cooking show. I would call it "Dysentery with Dan".)
Again thanks. Pvt. Dan Girton (Sink Rat)  

--Last edited by Sink Rat on 2007-07-15 23:23:31 --

Dan, you realize of course that hominy is basically corn, right?

Robert,

Cornhuskers like corn:

http://xroads.virginia.edu/~HYPER/HNS/domwest/food.html

This post made in honor of the 1st Nebraska Infantry Regiment.

Don't have any suggestions, but if you have leftovers, call the 51st over and we'll help you out.  

if anyone is ever at an event that i have to cook at...your more than welcome to clean up the leftovers.... if we have any! im always stocked up on homemade bread, and i think i may put my children to work on making homemade butter during events

for the beef stew...you can also throw rice or noodles in it (egg noodles are period correct... though fresh would be best... would you really want to roll them out there?).

ill help you with your show... you could always use an assistant and i dont like hominy either... there is a difference in texture.

Check the Drill Network, click the link to Scott's Military Dictionary, and look up the entry for "cooking."  A lot of it will probably duplicate the information on Soyer in the reference Charles gave, but I think it may have some additional material.  

I echo what others have said about preservation.  Something else that keeps for a weekend is beef boiled in a mix of three parts water to one of apple cider vinegar.  Get the cheapest cut of beef you can find.  The vinegar tenderizes it, but also seems to preserve it.

For hominy, I've had good luck making it before the event (takes about three hours to cook dried hominy), then redrying it by laying it out on a pan in my old gas stove overnight.  In the field, after 20-30 minutes simmering in my boiler, the re-dried hominy is ready to eat.  You can have this with the aforementioned beef, or salt pork, or bacon, or greens.  I confess to having cheated and thrown in onion flakes, dried pepper, and sundried tomatoes.

Charles made a stew at Bull Run last year using slab bacon, hardtack dumplings, canned tomatoes, and apricots (or was it peaches?) with some vinegar.  May sound a little odd to modern tastes, but it was great.

Some folks find it challenging to duplicate their normal fare at an event.  Others have fun discovering foods that the soldiers might actually have eaten.  I've experienced both, and tend now to favor the latter as both easier and more interesting.  But you have the responsibility of providing for your company, so it might be best to gradually introduce them to historical dishes.

One thing I had at the Picketts Mill LH earlier this year that I absolutely loved was stewed tomatoes with dumplings. Very tasty and the dumplings added the filling part to the equation.

Cupcake,

Those were dried peaches. I never thought peaches and tomatoes would go well in the same pot, but the hardtack dumplings must have tied it all together. Pharoah's fabled locusts couldn't have cleaned out the contents of that kettle any quicker. That was a pleasant surprise all in all. Sometimes we just get lucky with the ingredients scattered on the ground.  

--Last edited by Charles Heath on 2007-07-16 15:19:35 --

I wrote: "For meat, the cheapest thing I know is salt pork."

Just occurred to me, I probably ought to clarify that, because many folks only think of salt pork as those all-fat little chunks in plastic wrap.

Period salt pork can be about any cut of meat, and therefore is partly lean to almost all lean.

I was at a reenactment where I was cooking some for me and a friend, and another reenactor asked what we were making. I said salt pork, and she said, "Ew, I bet that's awful."

The friend, who had also never eaten it before, tried some just then, as it was just done, and said, "No, actually, it's pretty good."

If parboiled or soaked enough, the result is very similar to fresh pork, and as well as eating it plain, it can be used in most period "made dishes" where fresh pre-cooked pork is called for like pies and hash.

My wife likes it less salty than I do, so I'm happy just parboiling it quickly in the frying pan before frying it, but when she makes it, I usually have to add extra salt when it's done, or it's too bland.

Hank Trent
hanktrent@voyager.net

Hank,

I have really and truly come to appreciate the value of desiccated potatoes. Lightweight, reasonably priced, low storage volume, and easy to prepare. After being bummed out over the demise of a product known as "Potato Buds," I'm happy the commercial food service suppliers have these little morsels in stock. Want a beef or pork hash? This is the ideal product.  While this is a military thing, for the most part, desiccated veggies were mentioned in Capt. Marcy's pre-war work, "The Prairie Traveler."

The troops appear to lap it up, too.  

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hanktrent wrote : I wrote: "For meat, the cheapest thing I know is salt pork." Just occurred to me, I probably ought to clarify that, because many folks only think of salt pork as those all-fat little chunks in plastic wrap. Period salt pork can be about any cut of meat, and therefore is partly lean to almost all lean. Hank Trent hanktrent@voyager.net

I wonder if there are those out there who might confuse salt pork with fatback.  

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I wonder if there are those out there who might confuse salt pork with fatback.

Still having flashbacks from RECON 1?  

if your using cast iron DO NOT cook tomatoes in them... the tomatoes will break down your pans. never ever use anything tomato like in them!

Cast iron in the field?? I'd hate to have that in the knapsack. I use tin or stamped steel.

oops.... thought I read he was using cast iron! my fault.  i do use cast iron, but then again im not out on the field