I need some input

[Delmonico]

I have a question for the folks here, I have been researching the foods of the latter 19th century for about 20 years and I'm trying to get my knowledge of such down before something happens to me. I;m doing this to help others so they don't have to do as much research. It goes beyond the Civil War to the settling of the plains, but I need some opinions, this is the lead up to the listings of the fruits and vegetables of the time, it's just a draft so I know I need to clean it up a bit.

With modern cultivators and modern storage and transportation, we have it made at times, but if we want to split hairs it also harms us being period correct. The decisions have to be made by the individual but does this sound like I'm pretty close to the idea with out hopefully offending anyone and calling them a hard core or a farb. (Yes I got called both a few years ago by the same guy on a forum board a few weeks apart. I felt it was a compliment and means I'm doing the best I can and still using common sense, always my goal.)

Vegetables and Fruits

We are living in good times as far as being able to go to the store and buy fruits and vegetables fresh, modern storage and modern transportation assures us that even the little stores in the small towns are going to have a decent supply of potatoes, carrots, onions, cabbage, plums, apples, peaches and other common fruits and vegetables, others are going to be there also, depending on how big the store is and the season.

The fruits and vegetables of the time period were different in some ways than the ones today, first of all there has been a lot of changes in the cultivators grown today for the commercial market, cultivators simply means the type of plant grown in the species, a bit like breeds in dogs or other animals. I am not going to get into whether modern farming methods are better or worse than the old methods, modern farming produces a lot of food on less ground and with less labor than the old methods and cultivators did.

These modern farming methods do require different types of crops than of old; simply because they need to have the majority ready at once and they need to be of a more uniform size to allow easy harvest and being able to harvest the whole field at once, whether by hand or machine.

Also we now as I mentioned have fresh fruits and vegetables all year around, because of better climate control and better transportation, often from countries in the Southern hemisphere that have seasons opposite of us here in the Northern hemisphere. Our fresh produce is less seasonal now than in the 19th century.
So as a Living History cook, what does that mean? Simply we have to make some choices first to be totally correct, we have to understand the differences.

First of course, we have to understand the times when certain items could be obtained in the period we depict. This will vary with the time period and the region of the country we are in. Once a rail road was built near an area, the transportation problem was solved to a point, fresh produce could be shipped into an area that was still in the grips of winter from the Deep South as well as California, and a lot of it was. The transportation costs were much higher than today, as an example, today it costs less to ship fruit in season by air from Australia to the northern Great Plains than it did to ship the same from Florida or California in the 1880’s by steam train.

The second problem is that very few of the items we can buy in the produce section of the store are exactly as they were in the 19th century thanks to modern plant breeding. New improved cultivators tend to be larger, and much more perfect than in the past. Also the exact varieties are much more limited, more on this will be covered on the specific item, but even as old types are gaining in popularity and sometimes show up in the produce aisle of large modern grocery stores, you will seldom see carrots in any color but orange.

The third problem in doing period cooking is that often especially in the vegetable section, a lot of the ones which had more popularity are not seen outside of very large grocery stores or local farmers markets and when they can be found, they are often very pricey compared to the modern standards; these will also be covered later in this book.
Like many things, we have to make choices on how period correct we can be or want to be, cost and availability being the key here. The simple solution is to do the best you can for the situation at hand, the other option is to grow the old time cultivators, many are still available to those who want to grow them, today the popular term is “Heirloom Fruits and Vegetables” a recent term for older, often non-hybrid cultivators. This means one has to have land enough to grow them as well as the time and the place to properly store them, something few of us can do.

I do the best I can, I do grow a fairly large garden and I do take some of these items on trips to share with friends, but the amount is small compared to the modern ones I buy at the local stores. I have found few folks really know the differences and no one ever complains if they do when it comes to the meals being served, it’s just a concession we have to make to the modern times we live in, just like the modern vehicles we go to events in and transport our gear in.
 

[Ol Gabe]

Del, Kind Sir,
Just to make sure we understand what you are seeking, are you looking for verifiable old-line family recipes in-print that can be copied for your future book or are you looking for the same as a research item only?
Many readers on this forum have had the blessing to chat over a family holiday meal about how "...hard it was..." during whatever period of time to put food for the family on the table, this  is a given. Passing these old stories on to the younger folks is part and parcel of what a grandparent can do, sort of a rite of passage in the kitchen, so to speak.
For example, my Aunt, who I had the pleasure of being in her care when my folks were farming during the 1950's, often told me of the food the old family grew on the Homestead in Iowa from the 1860's on up through the Depression. They raised hogs and cattle and butchered what they needed every Fall to carry them over the Winter til whenever the next batch of grub was available. These family oral history stories gave me an insight to how they survived as farmers, literally living from hand-to-mouth as the next meal may only be a slab of cornbread, ground corn from the field, with a layer of hog lard on it, washed down with weak tea made from whatever was available, sometimes Sumac from the river banks. Nobody ever went hungry, but the table fare was not always what we, today, would think as palatable.
After butchering a hog in the Fall, they would render down the fat to lard, then layer lard, half-fried chops/slabs of pork belly/head meat and what ever was left in a meat-lard-meat fashion in a large crock. The crock was in the cool part of the basement or root cellar and kept the meat in a semi-cold environment, not what we would be able to get today as the food police would shut it down, but then it was what was the only method available in some areas.
When it came time to use the meat it was simply a process of scraping back the lard, taking what you wanted and then scraping back the lard on top of what was left to keep it ready for the next use. My Aunt told me of going to the basement to get chops for a holiday meal and how the lard didn't smell right, but when she fired the chops they were the best they had and everyone raved about how good they tasted. This was during the Depression and meat was a special treat.
Please feel free to use these comments in your research.
Best regards and good cooking!
'Ol Gabe