One of my favorite childhood memories was harvest time at my grandmother’s house. After the crops were picked, Mom, my sister Rose and I would rise early, knowing we had a long day ahead of us. But whether it was shelling peas, snapping green beans or peeling apples, we had a good time just sitting and talking while we worked. It’s a good 
memory and one I relive every year when I’m canning various vegetables and fruits out of my garden.
It also got me wondering—how did people back in the 1800s preserve food before canning and refrigeration were widespread?
The type of food helps determine the best way to preserve it. Take corn. It could be shelled, ground into cornmeal, or left on the cob and stored in a corn crib. But what about other vegetables like green beans, cabbage or potatoes? One way of preserving fruits and vegetables in the early 1800s was to run a heavy thread through them and hang them by the fireplace or in a warm, dry room. This helps remove the moisture from them and keeps them from rotting. In order to cook them, you’d treat them the same way we do dry beans today. You’d put them in water overnight to rehydrate, then cook the following day.
Another way to preserve food was by using a root cellar. If you’ve never been in one, it’s basically a small room, very dark and much cooler than the temperature outside. The walls have roots growing out of them and there’s a strong scent of dirt, fresh vegetation, and kerosene from the lantern used to light the room. Barrels filled with sawdust line the walls and inside them are various fruits and vegetables. Green beans and peas are strung
from one side to the other. Root cellars were used up until the mid-1900s when home refrigeration become popular.
We can thank Napoleon for home canning. In 1795, the French emperor offered a reward for anyone who could come up with a way to preserve food for his army. It was fifteen long years before Nicholas Appert unveiled his method of heat processing food in glass jars. Over the course of the next century, improvements to the equipment were made. John Mason introduced a glass jar with a screw-top lid and rubber seal. William Charles Ball and his brothers got into the home canning business and marketed their canning jars across the country, making it easier for families to preserve their own food. And Alexander Kerr developed the wide-mouth jar (praise the Lord!) and the metal ring with a lid that sealed the preserved jar.
Funny story—I went to high school at a former Agricultural and Engineering College built during the 1890s. While I was there, one of the original buildings was torn down. The workers found the A&E school’s root cellar with canned beans, pickles, and squash dating back to 1913. And they still looked as fresh as the day they were picked!
Do you can or freeze food for your family?
Let’s Chat! I’ll give away two print copies of THE HEART OF THE MIDWIFE
The Heart of the Midwife
If Not For Grace by Patty Smith Hall
New York City, 1889
After her friend’s death in childbirth, Grace Sullivan converts her family home into a haven for immigrant families preparing for the birth of a child. But when the city threatens to close her down, her only hope is to ask for help from an unlikely source—her former fiancé, Patrick O’Leary.
Bio: Multi-published author Patty Smith Hall lives near the North Georgia Mountains with her husband, Danny, her two daughters, her son-in-law, and her grandboy. When she’s not writing on her back porch, she’s spending time with her family or working in her garden.
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Years ago, my mother gave me a cookbook reprinted from 1888 that offered all kinds of advice and recipes for the homemaker. One section was devoted to Confectionaries, and I found their selection of candies, sodas, and ice cream fascinating. Who knew they had so many? And yep, they called them “sweeties.”
The author of my cookbook mentions the fortune made by a Mr. Pease in New York with his horehound candy. Ditto with a Mr. H. N. Wild’s candy store on Broadway which must have been a super store at the time, given the description of great numbers of customers (mainly ladies and children) who shopped there at all hours.
tablets were like our hard candies. Flavors were ginger, orange, vanilla, clove, rose, and fruits like currants, strawberries, cherries, and raspberries, cooked and pressed through a sieve for their juice.
What is your favorite snack? In Texas when I was growing up everybody would order a coke for their drink, only to be asked “Do you want a Dr Pepper, root beer, or a Coca-Cola? This shows my age because we went on “coke dates”! Even today we ask if someone wants to stop at a drive-thru for a coke, regardless of what they want to drink.
Depression. He got hooked on the first local version of a fried corn chip…the Frito.
soft drinks in the United States. The unique Dr Pepper mix originated in Waco, Texas at a small town drugstore called Morrison’s Old Corner Drug Store. Most people agree Charles Alderton, the pharmacist at Morrison’s, created the Dr Pepper mixture while working. He spent a lot of time mixing fruit syrups and coming up with new flavors for their carbonated soda machine. He later named his creation, containing 23 different flavors, Dr Pepper.
Px on right of Morrisons Drug: The drink became so popular that the drug store owner, couldn’t keep up with the demand. Every establishment that served soda fountain drinks wanted his Dr Pepper syrup. The period in ‘Dr Pepper’ would later be removed.’ While Alderton was a brilliant pharmacist, he had no desire to take the Dr Pepper drink any further and handed it over to Morrison, the drug store owner, and a man by the name of Robert Lazenby. He was a professional beverage chemist and he and Morrison subsequently worked to improve the drink and take it even further in the market. Due to the drink’s colossal success the two started what we now know as the Dr Pepper Company.
many stages of Dr Pepper’s history. The now nationally known soda started in this unlikely city which still cherishes the drink to this day.
To one lucky reader who leaves a message, I will give you an eBook copy of my newest Kasota Spring Romance on Amazon or a $10.00 Bath & Body Works gift certificate.
We had such a great special week about Spuds and Spurs, and it intrigued me to learn more about the food staple we all grew up on. It’s my go-to starchy vegetable.
A potato disease commonly known as the Potato Blight destroyed potato crops across Europe which led to the Irish Potatoes Famine. In 1845 from 1/3 to 1/2 of the cultivated potato crops were lost. The destruction continued the following year when 3/4 of the crops were destroyed the first report of starvation death came into existence. The effect of the failure of potato crops was felt throughout Europe but it was devastating in Ireland in particular since over three million Irish people were totally dependent on potatoes for food. Fortunately, what caused the fungus that created the blight is now totally eradicated. I’d show you some pictures of what the blight did to the potatoes, but they would have to be blurred out because they are so ghastly. It wasn’t until 2013 that the true strain of the virus that caused the crop failure was identified. It was HERB-1.
To one lucky reader who leaves a comment, I will send you 
I was flipping through an old book about the Oregon desert the other day when a photo caught my eye of a vine climbing up the side of an old cabin.
I’m a coffee drinker, as were many of the folks who settled the west. Pioneers, cowboys, ranchers, farmers, miners and townsfolk all loved coffee, but the process of making it wasn’t as simple as it is today. Green beans were roasted in a skillet over a fire, then put into a cloth bag and crushed with a heavy object. The grounds were dropped into a pot of water and boiled. The roasting beans had to be tended to carefully, because if one bean burnt, the flavor of it ruined the entire batch. Home roasted coffee could be quite foul if the roasting process went amiss.
Arbuckle developed a special glazing process using egg and sugar to preserve the flavor of the beans, and then bought the rights to a patented packaging system and began selling roasted coffee beans in one-pound paper bags. By 1881, his company was operating 85 coffee roasters. His coffee was billed as the “coffee that won the west”.
helped them do that. It also kept their insides warm and helped wash down meals. A camp cook usually kept several pots of coffee going at once, and it wasn’t uncommon to leave the old grounds in the pot and simply add new. One camp cook wrote that he used about 175 pounds of beans a month.