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| Food (continued) Boiled Corn Bread- (Mohawk name-kaha 'gu' gwa) Take corn meal add boiling water to make stiff paste- stir first then knead with your hands. Add dried blueberries, or strawberries, blackberries, walnuts. Roll into several small balls. Place in a kettle of boiling water a cook for 1 hour. The cakes should float when finished. Eat hot or cold with a meat broth or maple syrup. Jerk- Making jerky (18th c. "jerk") is quite easy. There are many ways to make jerky, but here's mine: as you can already guess, the end result is only a fraction of what you started with. For this reason, I always buy discounted steak (days before expiry date, but still good). Ask the meat department to slice it up thin for you (they're normally more than happy to help out). Try to trim off all fat (this will make it last much longer). Also, try to keep the pieces thin. I stick with simple period seasonings (sea or kettle rendered salt, garlic, and cayenne (often called just "Red Pepper"). Go real easy on the seasonings, especially the salt. My first batch was so salty that I wound up with a bag of "soup-only" jerk (not half bad for this, but not for eating along the trail). I generally do only one type of seasoning on a piece, and only on one side. If, like me, you don't have a dehydrator, the oven works fine. I set it for around 150 degrees and hang the slices from the top rack in the oven. Make sure to lay the pieces out flat and to leave space between them. Proper air circulation is crucial to drying. Crack the oven door open to help the air circulation and just leave the meat for approximately 6-8 hours (sooner if your meat is sliced really thin). Parched Corn- Making parched corn is fairly simple, two step process. First, you need dried corn. This can be as easy as pulling back the husks on a few ears and setting them to hang from your garage rafters, dehydrating some, or by spreading some thawed frozen corn out on a cookie sheet and drying it in the oven (110 degrees for around 8-10 hours with oven door cracked). Once you have the dried corn, you're ready for step two. To actually "parch" the corn, I'd recommend using a iron skillet. A well seasoned skillet should have enough grease to do the job alone. If not, add some very sparingly as it will cause your corn to go bad/rancid fairly quickly. Warm the corn up until it starts sounding like it's popping. They'll turn various shades of brown, but keep moving them around and continue until you no longer hear the popping. You've now successfully driven out any remaining moisture inside and what's left is "parched corn!" Rockahominy is a good period mix where pounded up chunks of walnuts, and maple or muscavado sugar is added. No set recipe, season this as you like. If you don't have time to parch your own, check with your local health food store. Mine sells lightly salted parched corn under the brand name "Glad Corn." Not cheap, but your eyes will fool you… a little goes a long way! Johnny Cakes- Fry ups a few cuts of salt pork. Open your corn meal sack, make dimple in top and add a drop of water. Stir this up with a stick and take the result (small cake) and throw it in the hot bacon grease. Fry until golden brown on both sides. Generally Useful Information: Walnut Dyeing- I put my hulls in a heavy canvas bag and break them up fairly fine. I then put them in a thin cotton, drawstring bag and then soak this in boiling hot water for about an hour. After this, I remove the bag and wring it out. (It helps to wear rubber gloves!) After the bag has cooled, I dump the sludge back into the canvas bag and pound it to crush the hulls as fine as possible to release even more of the dye. If dyeing leather, remember to let your bath cool down from the boiling point. When I made my first pair of braintan (yes, the real expensive stuff!) leggings, I made the big mistake of impatiently shoving them in right after it had come to a boil. To my horror, I watched as they began to instantly shrink before me eyes. I hauled them out, making quite a mess of the kitchen, slopped them in the sink and began dousing them with cold tap water. I then spent the next half hour restretching them and then wearing them in the shower until I they weren't dripping wet. I wore them all day until they dried out. Talk about being "form fit!" (grin) I had luckily caught them before they were too damaged, but they were never quite the same (lost a couple inches in length, but not too bad). A hard lesson learned, I now know to do a warm dye bath for anything leather. Another really important thing to remember is to use a mordant (stain-setter). It's a bummer to see a nice, "two week soak" brown fade out after a light soap wash. You can also use apple cider vinegar, ammonium alum or even urine. All work well, but of the three I have the most success with alum. You can buy it in the canning section of your local grocery store. Urine seems strange, but works well also, and has a long history of use as a mordant. One particularly gruesome recipe for dye, found in Scotland, specifies that the urine must sit in the sun for seven days and be stirred daily before being used! The minerals and salts in uric acid, as well as the ammonia it contains, makes it a very good mordant as well as producing a number of different coloring effects when used with various dyes. Remember to wash it all when done to take off the excess dye, or the excess dye will color your skin if the cloth gets wet. I use very, very little soap in my wash. Can your dye and reuse it later, as it works over and over. Lastly, since walnut dye is organic, it will mold. You can pour in a bottle of alcohol to prevent that for a while. (In his book Travels in North America, Swedish observer Peter Kalm, notes (pg. 78) "They use urine instead of alum in dyeing, and boil the dye in a brass boiler, because in an iron vessel it does not yield so fine a color.") Water Purifiers- Unless absolutely certain that natural water is from an underground spring, I'd recommend never drinking water that has not been boiled at least 2-3 minutes at a rolling boil. Yes, in Scouts we were taught 20 minutes, but once that "rolling boil" is reached organic contaminants die (they don't hang on for another 5-10 minutes!) Remember that boiling will not get rid of chemicals or heavy metals! If you're anywhere near farmland, chances are some rivulet fed a stream that carried some type of chemical (be it a type of fertilizer, mercury, selenium, etc) into the river you might think of drinking from. For this reason, I highly recommend using a water purifier. Discreetly used, and stored (say in a linen pouch), it really won't affect your historical accuracy of your kit, but it quite well might save your health/life. |
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