Pioneer Cooking Methods & Recipes Can Help You Use Your Food Storage


I have been doing some more research on pioneer cooking. It always interests me because the recipes incorporate many of the foods we have in our storage.  Most of their recipes can be cooked over an open fire or in the kitchen with a cast iron frying pan or a Dutch oven. The recipes are simple and are easy to alter, depending on what supplies you have available.

If our power grid ever goes out for more than just a day or two, knowing how our pioneer ancestors preserved and cooked food will come in handy.

First, a note about the type of bacon that they carried on the wagons. The bacon the pioneers carried in their wagons 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 unsmoked, 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.

Here are some old guidelines from the 1800’s on how they stored meat. Since they did not have refrigeration, they recommended these methods for use during the summer. I do not recommend you try these methods today. They are not that dependable.

  • Cover the meat with sour milk or buttermilk and store in a cellar.
  • In areas where the nights are cool, hang the meat in the open from a tree so any breeze can pass around it. Make sure the meat is brought inside at dawn. During the day, wrap the meat in a tarp and store in a shady place. Make sure the blowflies don’t deposit eggs on the meat.
  • Keep the meat away from rain and damp nights. Any meat that gets wet must be cooked or jerked immediately.

This makes me wonder how many pioneers got horribly sick or even died due to improperly stored meats. The recipes that follow I do recommend!

See also  Making Bean Flour and Cooking with Old Beans

Bacon Pancakes

  • Fry up some diced bacon to where it is crispy and mix it into your pancake batter.  Fry them up as normal and serve with the topping of your choice or whatever you have available.

Fried Apples

  • Fry 4 slices of bacon in a Dutch oven. Remove bacon.  Peel and slice 6 to 8 Granny Smith apples.
  • Put apples in Dutch oven with bacon grease, cover and cook down the apples, but not to mush.
  • Serve topped with butter or cream and crumbled bacon.  They’re great for breakfast or dessert.

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.

One reason the pioneers used vinegar was to add vitamin C to their diet.

Potato Pie

  • Boil one-quarter pound of potatoes until soft, then peel them and run them through a sieve.
  • Add one quart of milk, three teaspoonfuls of melted butter, four beaten eggs, and sugar and nutmeg to taste.
  • Bake as you would a custard pie.

Rough and Ready Soup

  • Crack a shin-bone well, boil it in five or six quarts of water four hours.
  • Take half a head of white cabbage, three carrots, two turnips, and three onions; chop them up fine, and put them into the soup with pepper and salt, and boil it two hours.
  • Take out the bone and gristle half an hour before serving it.

If you can learn how to make a soup using whatever you happen to have on hand and then store ingredients commonly used in soups, you’ll be more than ready for TEOTWAWKI cooking. Add some simple corn pone and it’s quite a large meal.

One thing you will notice as you study pioneer cooking and their recipes is that many things like stew, soup and beans took a long time to cook. If you will learn how to use a good quality pressure cooker, you can shorten the cooking time considerably and save on fuel. Once you’re comfortable using a pressure cooker, try using it outdoors on a campfire. The only challenge to this is maintaining as even a temperature as possible, but it can be done.

Howard

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3 thoughts on “Pioneer Cooking Methods & Recipes Can Help You Use Your Food Storage”

  1. Why is it that I rarely, if ever, find mention of simply simmering whole kernels of wheat or rye in water for about 45 minutes? It makes a very tasty repast even without additions such as butter or dried fruit or whatever else one might have. I feast on it for breakfast several times per week.

    Hangtown Frank

  2. I sprout most of my beans & grains, then I freeze flat 1 cup of beans or grain in each baggie. I usually have 8-12 baggies with the same type beans or grain in a gal bag, with 5 types of beans and 5-6 grains. Almost as easy as canned with just a soak & 2 rinses about 12 hours apart.

    The plan is to have the same amount of grains in the freezer, but I can not keep my husband from snitching my sprouted grains, especially the white wheat and millet. I’ve even caught him with the whole, filled Easy Sprouter (my favorite, works great & very easy to clean) in a shallow bowl as he devours 2+ cups of sprouted grain, plain & raw, and watches TV or reads. *sigh*

    1. Sprouted grains for a snack seem so much better than Cheetos or pizza and beer. Just make more, I guess.
      And he reads? what a guy!

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