'…delightful fryed chicken and splendid ham, and nice biscuit, rolls and cakes...'
Georgia cuisine in the 1860's
My maternal grandmother, Augusta (Gussie) Whitehurst, who lived on a small farm with her husband in Dublin, Georgia, where they raised beef cattle and pecans, was a real down home cook. Born in 1894, the seventh of eight children, she grew up in the country near Penfield, Georgia. In a memoir of her childhood, likely a pretty fair description of self-sufficient homesteads during Nate and Loulie's time, my grandmother recalled:
' …for many years we produced on the farm nearly everything we needed to eat. We all had our duties to perform, but all in all it was a happy life. We raised pigs, goats, sheep, cows, turkeys, chickens and one time geese from which food was derived and feather beds were made from the feathers. We had twenty gums of bees that gave us honey throughout the year and had honey and beeswax to sell. My father made insecticide from cedar limbs boiled in a big wash pail and sprinkled on vegetables and especially Irish potatoes. …..Our peach orchard was kept free from borers in the lower part of the tree trunk by using oak ashes around the base of the peach tree. I remember the time when we were independent of bought groceries with maybe the exception of coffee, sugar, spices and small incidentals. We bought green coffee beans and parched and ground them at home…..She (Gussie's mother) found time to see that her family was well nourished by canning vegetables, fruits and berries, drying fruit, saving dried peas and beans, seeing that potatoes and rutabagas were hilled up for winter use and onions stored away. When hog killing time came there was meat to can, souse meat and liver pudding to make, sausage to grind, and meat salted away for winter use. When a cow or pig was slaughtered there was nothing wasted. There was the lard to render, beef oil and tallow to make, even the tripe and chitterlings were used for food.'
My grandmother's recipe for white icing (she was locally famous for her fancy decorated wedding cakes) was included in a cookbook published in 1974: 'Monga Ma's Legacy, Ole-Time Cooking in Georgia' by a good friend of hers, Cherry Clements. Monga Ma was Mrs. Clements' grandmother, a farm cook just like my grandmother and her ma:
'Monga Ma put on a sunhat, always, and picked peas, butterbeans, okra, squash, tomatoes, cucumbers, and beans in staggering amounts….The yard was full of chickens, fryers for delicious platters of fried chicken, and hens for baskets of eggs. There was always a cow in the 'lot' for milk and butter. Beef was slaughtered for roasts and steak, and pigs were killed about three times each winter when the weather was 'cold enough'. These occasions yielded homemade sausage, pork loin, backbone, pork chops for immediate consumption, and cured side meat and hams to be used throughout the year. So, very little food was bought.'[1]
When my grandmother made fried chicken, she would go out to the yard, pick out a plump hen, and quickly dispatch it with an ax (something I watched once as a young girl, and yes the bird does run a couple of steps after being decapitated). Then there was plucking, disemboweling, cutting into parts, dredging each piece in seasoned flour, and frying in hot lard in a cast iron skillet. After the chicken was done and golden crispy, most of the grease was poured off for re-use and my grandmother would make a flour and milk gravy from the remaining fat and crumbs in the pan, which could be served over mashed potatoes or biscuits.
These vignettes highlight the fact that in the middle of the 19th century, just as during my grandmother's youth, most food was locally produced. There was no refrigeration; meat was put up for later use by salting, as in salt pork, or salting and smoking; hams and sausages were cured in small outbuildings over slow hardwood fires. Fat was rendered for oil and lard. Fresh milk was churned for butter, and old milk was left out on the counter to separate into liquid whey and fermented solids called clabber, which could be eaten or used as leavening for bread. Corn kernels, hard beans and peas were dried for storage. Potatoes and onions were kept fresh in cool underground cellars. Fruit was sliced and dried, or used to make preserves. While some commercial foods were available in tin cans, early versions used a lead alloy to seal the can, leading to lead poisoning of the contents. Putting up boiled fruits and vegetables in glass containers sealed with paraffin and/or a vacuum-tight lid was (and continues to be) the safer, and still standard, method of food preservation on the farm.
Without refrigeration, spoilage was a constant problem, particularly in the warm coastal regions:
"Witter did not send for his box till day before yesterday so his chickens were spoiled before he ate them." #24 Jan 28 1862
" I received the fruit you sent me by Mr. Tison and the darling letter which I could not read. All the fruit rotted and ruined the clothes and defaced the letter so much I could not read it." #43 Sept. 19, 1862
Many of the foods mentioned in the letters continue to be mainstays of southern cuisine:
"I had a delightful visit at Mrs. Pope's - eat like a plow man, for I actually have not seen anything (until then) but old tough beef since I left home. So you can imagine how I made the delightful fryed chicken and splendid ham, and nice biscuit, rolls and cakes fly, yes they actually flew down my throat." #34 July 9, 1862
"We are better fed up here than we have been since we left St. Simons Island. Our rations are bacon, hard bread, meal and ……. and then very nice bakers' bread. The people are the best I have met. They give us as many vegetables as we want such as peas, beans, Irish potatoes, squashes, cabbages, corn, tomatoes, and any quantity of …….corn, watermelons, and apples. They do not sell these things but give them to us. Of course, the vegetables do not eat so well as they do prepared at home, but they do very well." #47 July 15 1864 (Nate in Tarboro, near Atlanta)
One of Loulie's describes a self-sufficient larder like my grandmother Whitehurst knew in her childhood:
" … pa will furnish us with our rice and potatoes, and won't you be willing to furnish us with the other provisions? You see we can get one or two of our cows from White Oak, and make our own butter and milk and if you agree to all this when your father comes out to kill beeves and hogs for the Winter you can stop some of the meat for our use." #41 Sept. 15, 1862.
Insight into the crops that both whites and blacks planted for their home kitchens comes from the book ‘God, Dr. Buzzard, and the Bolito Man’ based on remembrances of Cornelia Bailey growing up in the Geechee community on Sapelo Island. The Sapelo people, like many of the blacks on other coastal islands and on the mainland, descended from West African slaves brought to low country cotton and rice plantations in South Carolina and Georgia. Cornelia recalls:
'Some of the food we planted was brought over by the early slaveholders after they realized we couldn't adapt to their diet. We always planted collard greens, rice, onions, sweet potatoes, white potatoes, corn, peanuts, okra, squash, pumpkin, red peas and lima beans.'[2]
Other foods were luxuries, not readily available. In the 1860's, oranges were a winter fruit that was a special treat, often given as a gift at Christmas:
" I am very, very much obliged to you my precious love for the delightful oranges you sent by Tom. I have eaten but two, and I assure you I enjoyed them exceedingly and I expect to enjoy the others just as much, for they were delightful." #23 Jan 16 1862.
Florida groves just over the border from Camden County were the source of the oranges. Citrus fruits were a notable part of the Columbian culinary exchange between the Old and New World that occurred during the Spanish exploration and colonization of Florida, Caribbean islands, and Central and South America in the 16th century. In fact, Columbus himself brought orange seeds from Spain in 1493, and Spanish colonizers later planted orange trees around St. Augustine.[3] These soon naturalized in local forests, and by the 1800's farmers were cultivating orange groves along the St. John's River. Large scale commercial production of citrus fruits began soon after the end of the Civil War.[3]
Because of the Columbian exchange, the foods that Southerners relied on in the 1800's, and enjoy as part of a cherished cultural tradition today, are a true fusion cuisine.[4] Some staples were introduced from Europe by way of the Middle East and Asia: beef cattle and milk cows, hogs, chickens, wheat, rice, sugar cane, apples, peaches, citrus, melons, coffee, tea, and spices. Even the Florida Key Lime is not native, but originated in Southeast Asia.[5]
Other indispensible components of southern meals were adopted from Native American crops. Corn (properly known as maize, a Spanish version of a native word for the plant) could be eaten fresh on the cob or as creamed corn, or dried and ground, then baked into cornbread, hoecakes, hush puppies, or spoon bread, or cooked as mush or grits. Corncobs and stalks were fed to hogs and cattle. The crop was developed in Mexico thousands of years ago from a big-seeded grass, teosinte,[6] by native farmers. Maize culture eventually spread to tribes all over North America. When Columbus landed in the Caribbean, most of the natives he encountered planted and harvested maize.[7]
Of course European settlers, familiar with Old Country hard liquor, quickly invented another use for the Indian corn that was loaded with fermentable sugar and starch. Homemade stills were put to use distilling alcohol from aged mashes of corn, barley, and water. The famous 'Whiskey Rebellion' of 1791[8] was sparked by the new U.S. government's plan to repay its Revolutionary War debt by taxing small-hold farmers, many of them veterans of the war, for the grain and corn spirits they relied on for barter and cash. The rebellion was forcefully quashed by federal militia. This, of course, instilled lasting bitterness toward the U.S. government. Passed down though generations by families in the Appalachian Mountains, their anti-federal sentiment boiled over again when backwoods moonshine stills proliferated Prohibition.
Imbibing corn liquor was a problem among idle troops during the Civil War:
"Col. Styles has ordered that Capt. Stockwell shall vacate the premises of the Light House because he sold whiskey to the men. I am very glad that he did it; I hope now that the infernal excuse of getting drunk will now be stopped." (#9, Nate, Fort Atkinson Sept. 12, 1861).
Potatoes were also a starchy vegetable adopted from native crops. White, or 'Irish' potatoes as Nate called them, came from Incan growers who cultivated hundreds of varieties of the starchy tuber at various elevations in South American mountains.[9] When Spanish Conquistadors looted the Incan Empire of its gold and silver in the 16th century, they brought this nutritious new food to Europe along with the precious metals. A favored large-tubered and white-fleshed variety flourished, particularly in Ireland where the soil and climate was highly agreeable to an Andean plant. Potatoes are packed with protein and vitamins as well as carbohydrates, and the Irish came to rely on this easily grown tuber for the bulk of their food. The 'Irish' potato variety was later brought back across the Atlantic as a staple food for European colonists. [As an aside, NASA has identified potatoes as a suitable crop for space colonists; in the book and 2015 movie 'The Martian' the marooned hero cleverly subsists on potatoes grown in his habitat until a rescue ship arrived.] During the Irish Potato Famine of 1845-1850, widespread potato blight disease caused crop failure and starvation, leading to mass emigration from Ireland to the U.S. Many poor Irish emigrant men signed up for, or were drafted into, the Union Army during the Civil War. [10]
When I was a graduate student, my thesis project depended on sampling at sea from a research vessel, Eastward, stationed at the Duke University Marine Laboratory in Beaufort, N.C. The ship cooks were steeped in southern tradition, and sweet potato pie was a favorite shipboard dessert (enjoyable as long as one wasn't heaving over the side). The pies were actually whipped up from yams, a golden-fleshed tuber native to Africa, and brought to America with the slave trade. Yams are not related at all to Irish potatoes, but instead are actually monocot plants like lilies and grasses. To make things even more confusing, true sweet potatoes are not kin to either Irish potatoes or to yams, but are tuber-producing plants in the morning glory family. Both Irish potatoes and sweet potatoes originated from native crops in Central and South America; the former cultivated in the mountains, and the latter in tropical regions. Never mind, Southern cooks in the 1800's, just as today, happily grew and consumed all kinds of potatoes: Irish, yam, or sweet.
A bunch of other Native American foods were grown by European settlers. Traditional native planting included three main crops, known as the Three Sisters, which were clustered together in mounds spread along rows. Climbing beans snaked up corn stalks, while squash or gourd plants sprawled below. From these, colonists got new varieities of peas and beans, as well as pumpkins and winter squash to add to their tables.[11]
Pecan trees, in the hickory family, are native to North America; their nuts provided a dependable staple food for hunter-gather tribes living along inland rivers. The natives savored the sweet, high-energy pecans, as did colonists in the 1700's, who began planting pecan trees in their yards. The nut became a traditional part of Southern fare as pecan pie and praline. Nate and Loulie almost certainly ate pecans, although these were not mentioned by in their missives.
A second famous Southern 'nut', the peanut or groundnut, came from native farmers in South America.[12] This is not a tree nut like the pecan, but a legume related to peas and beans, in which the edible, oily seeds develop in shells sprouting from underground roots. Portuguese colonizing Brazil brought the peanut to Africa, where it was readily adopted, and then was brought back across the Atlantic to North America with the slave trade. Negro slaves introduced the African custom of boiling fresh, or green, peanuts in salty water. (When my husband, who hailed from New York, first heard of this as a graduate student in Athens, Georgia, he thought the locals were saying 'bald peanuts'.) Boiled peanuts are the official snack food of South Carolina.[13] Alas, Loulie and Nate did not enjoy peanut butter, which was not invented until the end of the 1800's.
What would a picnic on a steamy summer day be without a cool watermelon? Various melons were cultivated by the ancient Egyptians in North Africa. Horticulturists are still not sure which of these eventually became the green rind, red meat variety so popular today.[14] The Greeks took the fruit from Africa to Mediterranean civilizations, including the Romans, who introduced melons into Europe. Eventually, watermelon seeds got passed along to American colonies, where the sweet, juicy fruit became a symbol of Southern summers. Nate mentions the troops getting watermelons along with other fruits and vegetables from local farmers around Tarboro in his letter to Loulie of July 15 1864.
Peaches are the tree fruit so identified with Georgia that 'the Georgia Peach' appears on state license plates. This yet another transatlantic import, since peach (and related almond) trees are natives of Asia. In her letter of July 26, Loulie lamented that she wasn't getting any ripe peaches during her summer stay in Marietta: "My dear aunt Molly has the greatest quantity of nice peaches, sends them around to all the big fish but your poor little wife gets 'nary' one. Mamie did bring a few from there that she begged for the other day, but aunt Mollie has not sent one to me although Annie promised to send some to Loulie." About peaches from the New Georgia Encyclopedia: "Franciscan monks introduced peaches to St. Simons and Cumberland islands along Georgia's coast in 1571. By the mid-1700s peaches and plums were cultivated by the Cherokee Indians. Before the Civil War (1861-65) increasing numbers of home orchards also were planted. Raphael Moses, a planter and Confederate officer from Columbus, was among the first to market peaches within Georgia in 1851 and is credited with being the first to ship and sell peaches successfully outside of the South.'[15]
Rice, originally from Asia, had a special place in Nate and Loulie's world. There were many rice planters along the Georgia Coast before the Civil War. Loulie's father came to Camden County from South Carolina where rice cultivation began in the Americas. According to a history of South Carolina rice plantation:
'During the Colonial Period, coastal South Carolina was the largest producer of rice in America. The crop arrived in the area around 1685. A brigantine ship, captained by John Thurber and sailing from the island of Madagascar, encountered a raging storm, perhaps a small hurricane, and put into Charleston Harbor for repairs. With the ship in dry dock, Captain Thurber met Henry Woodward, the town's best known resident, who had the distinction of being the first English settler in the area. Thurber gave Woodward a bag of rice. Some say a peck, others say a bushel. Woodward experimented with the rice, which gave him a good crop. Rice was soon on its way to becoming the area's main cash crop.' [16]
Slavery in Georgia was established in the mid-1700's because of rice cultivation. The New Georgia encyclopedia has a good overview of coastal rice plantations:
'Even though rice had already risen to prominence in neighboring South Carolina by the time the colony of Georgia was established in 1733, the cereal was not commercially important in Georgia until the 1750s. Indeed, in their original design the founding Trustees of Georgia hoped to create a colony quite unlike South Carolina, with free white European laborers (drawn from the lower classes) constituting the basic workforce in the colony. The Trustees' original plan—which included a prohibition against slavery—soon fell by the wayside. Many Georgians were aware of the profit possibilities associated with the commercial production of rice on slave plantations in South Carolina, and they realized that under a similar institutional framework coastal Georgia had the potential to offer similar opportunities. At the same time—perhaps even earlier—many ambitious South Carolina rice planters came to the same realization and mounted an aggressive campaign to make Georgia safe for rice and slavery, if not for democracy. By mid-century proslavery Georgians and South Carolinians carried the day. In 1750 the ban on slavery in Georgia was repealed, and with the royal takeover of the colony in 1752, conditions finally became favorable for the establishment in Georgia of a plantation colony based on rice and slaves.
'Few crops are more demanding to cultivate than rice, particularly "wet" rice.
Arduous cultivation requirements, along with high mortality rates in the mosquito-infested swamps of the Lowcountry, made it difficult to attract white labor into the rice industry. That, in addition to Africans' and African Americans' knowledge about rice cultivation, led profit-hungry white planters in Georgia and other parts of the Southeast to depend almost entirely upon black labor, whether slave or free, throughout the entire history of the industry.
It is difficult today to appreciate fully the amount of work involved in establishing and maintaining the rice economy of coastal Georgia. Swamps had to be drained, cleared, and leveled to make them suitable for agriculture of any type. For tidal cultivation, an elaborate system of irrigation works—levees, ditches, culverts, floodgates, and drains—had to be constructed (and maintained) to control and regulate the flow of water onto and off of the fields.
Once the fields and irrigation works were rendered suitable for cultivation, the production sequence could begin. After the rice was sown, the fields were flooded periodically during the growing season. Whenever the water was drawn off the fields, a good deal of hoeing had to be done; once the rice was mature, the crop had to be harvested, processed, prepared for market, and transported. Tremendous expenditures of labor and outlays of resources and energy were needed to complete this yearly sequence.[17]
After the Civil War, Loulie's family, along with most other Georgia planters, abandoned their rice fields. Most American-produced rice is now grown in Louisiana, Texas, and Arkansas.
Rice left its mark on Southern cuisine. 'Dirty' rice: rice cooked with onions, bell pepper, celery, and sausage is classic, as are rice and bean combinations. Hoppin' John, a mix of cooked rice and black-eyed peas flavored with pork, is a New Year's tradition in the South. In coastal regions, there is seafood perlow (or perlo), a rice pilaf traditionally made with shrimp.
Chicken & pigs: In the meat department, no Southerner would be without chicken, fried, stewed or casseroled, and pork: hams, bacon, chops, and fatback for flavoring. Both of these stable livestock of farmyards throughout the South were imported from Asia by way of European breeds.
Andrew Lawler [18] has a great summary of how chicken dinners came to the South:
'English settlers arriving at Jamestown in 1607 brought a flock of chickens that helped the struggling colony survive its first harsh winters, and the bird was on the Mayflower 13 years later. But the popularity of the Old World fowl soon faded, as turkey, goose, pigeon, duck and other tastier native game were plentiful. This proved a boon for enslaved Africans. Fearful that human chattel could buy their freedom from profits made by selling animals, the Virginia General Assembly in 1692 made it illegal for slaves to own horses, cattle or pigs. Poultry, though, wasn’t considered worth mentioning. This loophole offered an opportunity. Most slaves came from West Africa, where raising chickens had a long history. Soon, African-Americans in the colonial South — both enslaved and free — emerged as the “general chicken merchants,” wrote one white planter. At George Washington’s home, Mount Vernon, slaves were forbidden to raise ducks or geese, making the chicken “the only pleasure allowed to Negroes,” one visitor noted. The pleasure was not just culinary, but financial: In 1775, Thomas Jefferson paid two silver Spanish bits to slaves in exchange for three chickens. Such sales were common. Black cooks were in a position to influence their masters’ choice of dishes, and they naturally favored the meat raised by their friends and relatives. One of the West African specialties that caught on among white people was chicken pieces fried in oil — the meal that now, around the world, is considered quintessentially American. Slaves laid the foundation for the American appetite for chicken, but it was the forced opening of China by the West in the 1840s that made the modern bird possible. American ships brought specimens of Asian chickens never seen in America. Breeders crossed the large and colorful exotics with their smaller but hardier Western counterparts to produce a bird that could lay more eggs and provide more meat. The results were famous varieties, like the Plymouth Rock and Rhode Island Red, that appeared just as the nation began to industrialize.'
And here is the scoop on hogs, by Sam Hilliard in his book, 'Hog Meat and Hoecake: Food Supply in the Old South':[19]
'Pork has been the reigning delicacy in the South for a very long time. Before refrigeration, most of the meat in Southerners’ diet was preserved, not fresh. As had been the practices for centuries all over the globe, meat was dried out with salt or, in some cases, pickled in order to safely store it for long periods of time. Southerners much preferred the taste of salted and smoked pork over pickled beef. Superior in preservation and taste, pork took the South by storm. By the eighteenth century, pork was served at almost every meal on most Southern tables and wealthy planters prided themselves on their smoked meat. By the nineteenth century, some estimate that “the per capita consumption of pork during the period at three times that of Europe.” One traveler in the South observed that “the people of the South would not think they could subsist without their [swine] flesh; bacon, instead of bread, seems to be THEIR staff of life.” As historian Sam Hilliard states, “If the ‘king’ of the antebellum southern economy was cotton, then the title of ‘queen’ must go to the pig.” [19]
By the way, the 'bacon' that Nate said was a main food for his regiment in 1864 was likely just salt pork:
'Salt pork was given to soldiers during the war. It was a stinky kind of blue extra salty meat, with hair, skin, dirt, and other junk left on it. It was however, a soldiers main supply of protein. Letters from Civil War soldiers contain numerous references to bacon, but historians believe that the term bacon was used for all salt and smoked pork, not just the strips of meat that we now call “bacon”.' [20]
Sources:
[1] Clements, Cherry Waltrep. 1974. Monga Ma's Legacy, Ole-Time Cooking in Georgia. Eason Publications, Inc. Atlanta, Ga. (out of print, but copies still available on Amazon)
[2] Bailey, Cornelia W., and Christena W. Bledsoe. God, Dr. Buzzard, and the Bolito Man: a Saltwater Geechee Talks about Life on Sapelo Island. New York: Doubleday, 2000.
[3] http://flcitrusmutual.com/citrus-101/citrushistory.aspx
[4] Sam Bowers Hilliard, Hog Meat and Hoecake: Food Supply in the Old South, 1840-1860 (1972; reprint, Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2014)
https://www.amazon.com/Hog-Meat-Hoecake-1840-1860-Southern/dp/0820346764
The Soul of Food: Slavery's Influence on Southern Cuisine by Christina Regelski
http://ushistoryscene.com/article/slavery-southern-cuisine/
[5} https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Key_lime
[6] Sean B. Carroll 2010 Tracking the Ancestry of Corn Back 9,000 Years. New York Times May 24, 2010.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/25/science/25creature.html
[7] http://countrystudies.us/caribbean-islands/5.htm
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maize
The word maize derives from the Spanish form of the indigenous Taíno word for the plant, mahiz.[14] It is known by other names around the world.
[8] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whiskey_Rebellion
[9] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Sisters_(agriculture)
[10] Reader, John, 2011 'Potato: A History of the Propitious Esculent' Yale University Press, New Haven.
https://www.amazon.com/Potato-Propitious-Esculent-John-Reader/dp/0300171455
[11] The History Place: Irish Potato Famine
http://www.historyplace.com/worldhistory/famine/
[12] Beasley, John P. "Peanuts." New Georgia Encyclopedia. 18 October 2016. Web. 28 October 2016.
http://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/articles/business-economy/peanuts
[13] http://www.charlestoncitypaper.com/charleston/a-brief-history-of-the-boiled-peanut/Content?oid=4738834
{14] Strauss, Mark The 5,000-Year Secret History of the Watermelon: Ancient Hebrew texts and Egyptian tomb paintings reveal the origins of our favorite summertime fruit. National Geographic, August 21, 2015
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2015/08/150821-watermelon-fruit-history-agriculture/
[15] Taylor, Kathryn C. "Peaches." New Georgia Encyclopedia. 12 October 2016. Web. 28 October 2016.
http://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/articles/business-economy/peaches
[16] http://www.carolinaplantationrice.com/history/
[17] http://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/articles/business-economy/rice
[18] Lawler, Andrew. 2014. How the Chicken Built America. New YorK Times http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/26/opinion/how-the-chicken-built-america.html
[19] Sam Bowers Hilliard, Hog Meat and Hoecake: Food Supply in the Old South, 1840-1860 (1972; reprint, Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2014), 44.
[20] Civil War Academy: Civil War Food
http://www.civilwaracademy.com/civil-war-food.html
Some cookbooks with recipes in use at the time:
The Table of our Ancestors: Old Time Southern Recipes
http://tngenweb.org/tntable/
The Boston Cooking School Cookbook, 1918
http://www.bartleby.com/87/
Carlton, Jan McBride.1975. The Old Fashioned Cookbook. Vineyard Books, Inc. New York, NY. {I have a copy of this cookbook and like it a lot - used copies available on Amazon for the price of shipping}
