The Food of a Younger Land (36 page)

they were warned,

Kitchens were accordingly huge in proportion to the ones which city-bred generations know. Much of rural family life was conducted in the country kitchens. Breakfast was generally served about 6 o’clock in the morning, and the meal was barely over before the women plunged into the business of preparing dinner. Dinners, too, were lusty affairs: From the cellar would come squash, rutabagas, cabbage and some canned fruit and pickles. There was fresh corn meal so recent from the mill that it had not yet become infested with weasels. A roaring wood fire in a stove that stood high on four legs, with an apron as a resting place for an iron spider, was the axis around which revolved the kitchen program.

Donation parties were interesting events in the lives of Michigan people who lived at widely separated distances from each other. Everybody brought something. Competition ran in a manner much the same as at a county fair; because all articles were open and labeled with the name of the donor. It was about the only time each person had the opportunity to estimate the contents of the other fellow’s cellar and smokehouse. Great hams, huge slabs of bacon, sow bellies, and sausages of various kinds were strewn here and there on a long table.

Potatoes in huge sacks, apples in rough board barrels, dry beans by the peck and other items from the cellar under the house or the root-cellar—cabbage, turnips, parsnips, and squash. The women came in for their share of attention by presenting handiwork. Jellies and jams, applebutter, pickles, and large jars of canned fruits were exhibited before critical neighbors, who knew from experience just how a pickle should be placed in a jar to avoid display of a white spot, and who knew how to select a cucumber in order to bring out its best qualities. Such neighbors also knew how to counteract the ultimate appearance of wrinkles that enlarge the warts on a pickle or the magnifying effect of glass on the fuzz of pickled peaches.

The men took this occasion to show off the results of their husbandry. Well selected potatoes—not a little one in an entire sack—carefully graded apples, corn, both dry for stock feed or ground into meal, the biggest squashes he grew the summer before, and a variety of other commodities that would excite the envy of a modern storekeeper, were all there—and on exhibition for the information and edification of their neighbors.

This spirit of friendly rivalry was not only an outlet for these people, but incidentally, provided the minister with what it takes.

Michigan farmers years ago used to meet for a turkey shoot, held by another farmer who had a yard full of turkeys to sell and devised this method of disposing of them: A pit was dug from which to fire, and a turkey was placed in a box with only the head sticking out. The object was to shoot the head off at a range of eighty rods, with a price of twenty-five cents for ten shots, on the average. Expert hunters who had proved their marksmanship on previous shoots were restricted to five shots for the same price, but even then they were often good enough with the use of their guns to bag half a wagon load of birds.

At these meets, when it became too dark for further shooting, cold roast turkey, pumpkin pie and cider made a grand supper for farmers to be followed by dancing to the tune of hornpipes and fiddle.

MONTANA—
responsible for the region
WYOMING
IDAHO
COLORADO
UTAH
NEVADA
NORTHERN CALIFORNIA
OREGON
WASHINGTON

T
he Far West region, though it was made up of only nine Writers’ Projects from eight and a half states, including Northern California, represents about a third of the area of the forty-eight states that were the country at the time of
America Eats
. It bundles together two very different cuisines, that of the Rocky Mountains and that of the Pacific Northwest and Northern California.

From San Francisco to Washington State are rich valleys providing some of the best agricultural products in the country and a sea coast whose bounty, while considered not up to the standards of New England, still offered tremendous varieties of fish and shellfish. In fact, the assumption of inferiority to the North Atlantic meant that while New England was already showing early signs of abuse, Pacific catches were still plentiful. Abalone, which is endangered today, was commonly eaten, and Pacific salmon, a threatened luxury today, was sold for a few cents a pound. This was then and remains today one of the better eating areas of the country.

Kenneth Rexroth, like many Californians, was born in Indiana. He was enormously influential in defining the literary role of San Francisco. He was the material of literary legends, supposedly frequenting hobo camps, earning money as a wrestler, and serving jail time for being part owner of a brothel. He moved to San Francisco in the 1920s, wrote original poetry that was a forerunner of Beat, and attracted others who have influenced the city’s writing to this day. He led the Northern California Writers’ Project and was so dominant that after he resigned in 1939 it rapidly failed to function and made no contribution to
America Eats
.

Rocky Mountain cuisine has always been a bit wild and eccentric when interesting at all. It is still the place to eat elk and other game, and entrées such as wildcat, beaver tail, wild duck, and foraged foods in Montana still typify the region. Edward B. Reynolds and Michael Kennedy of the Montana Project, who wrote the long regional essay for the Far West, said of the mountain region: “Here you will find no lacy frills to catch the eye, or subtle nuances of taste and smell to goad the appetite of the jaded and world-weary gastronome.”

This was the view from Montana, not from the coast. Michael Kennedy, a writer of sports and Western stories, was the supervisor of the Montana Writers’ Project for which Edward B. Reynolds (1894-1983) also worked. It is not known why they were selected to write the Far West section, but it doubtless was related to the fact that all the more prominent figures in the region, such as Rexroth and Vardis Fisher of Idaho, had left the FWP.

In any event, the Washington staff seemed extremely pleased with their essay and even told Nelson Algren to look at it to see what was wrong with his own contribution. Kennedy and Reynolds did incorporate the diverse material submitted into a single voice of charm and fluidity. The essay was full of broad observations about the West, such as, “The life of these people is not entirely one monotonous round of fried beans, baked beans, boiled beans, and just beans, varied only by an occasional jack rabbit or two. Not as long as the creative ability of these Western people holds forth. . . . And until you’ve tasted jack rabbit mincemeat pie you have never appreciated the true brilliance of creative ability.” And, “As a result of this tradition of masculine cookery, a man who dons an apron and enters a kitchen or approaches an outdoor fire is not looked upon with scorn in the West.”

To the indigenous peoples of the Northwest, salmon has always been a food staple, a constant cultural image in carvings, paintings, and dance, a symbol of fertility. Barbecued salmon, planked salmon, most of the recipes for cooking salmon on a direct fire, as well as preserving the fish through drying, smoking, or pressing, were Indian traditions.

The first white traders to arrive in the Pacific Northwest marveled at the quantity of salmon. In 1805 the Lewis and Clark expedition struggled to move their boats in the salmon-clogged Columbia River. But the first to commercialize these fish were the Russians, which is why the biological names for all the salmon species of the Pacific Northwest are Russian. The leading species are
O. tshawytscha
, or chinook or king, which are the largest, and
O. nerka
, or sockeye salmon. At the time of
America Eats
salmon were still plentiful, and whether based on earnest gastronomic judgment or just regional snobbery, Atlantic salmon from the more influential Northeast was generally considered of higher quality, and so the Pacific Northwest was still clogged with cheap salmon.

But salmon is highly vulnerable to overfishing because it is at its most desirable as it heads back toward the river of its birth, which is to say, just before spawning—the ones Clark found clogging the Columbia had probably just finished spawning, which is the least toothsome phase. Salmon is also extremely vulnerable to pollution and its life cycle is stopped by the damming or otherwise blocking of spawning rivers. The result is that today salmon has become a luxury item. Atlantic salmon is almost extinct in North America and attempts to farm it have produced an incomparably inferior product. Salmon from the Pacific Northwest have become one of the most high-priced fish in America. In 2008 severe restrictions were placed on fishing Pacific salmon in the hopes of replenishing seriously depleted stocks.

JOSEPH McLAUGHLIN

O
ne day at Yachats we were preparing a huge salmon barbecue, and our local “character” Dunkhorst requested the privilege of preparing the salmon. He said that he had a method that came from Germany and he had never seen it used in this country. Naturally we allowed him the “privilege” he desired because it meant less work for the rest of us. But we all watched the procedure.

First the salmon (five of them) were cleaned. Then “Dunk” dissolved a lot of brown sugar in a big tub of water. The salmon were then “dunked” (in more ways than one) in the sweetened solution. After about half an hour they were removed and placed in the barbecue pit and covered with ferns and grass.

The result of this treatment was a dish that was hard to beat. The salmon retained all its rich salmon flavor but had lost its “fishy” taste. A further result is that all Yachats housewives now wash their salmon in water sweetened with brown sugar before they cook it.

T
he Indians of the Northwest Puget Sound country prepare salmon in a unique way which makes it a very delicious and appetizing meal. In August 1941, the district 4H Leader’s Council held their semi-annual meeting at the Tulalip Indian Reservation where the 4H members and their leaders among the Indians acted as hosts. After the morning session the various delegates visited the Indian council house, a large log and shake structure on the shores of Tulalip Bay, where the Indian women were preparing the salmon. This council house has a dirt floor on which a fire had been built in a rectangular shape; about 8 feet by 4 feet. Around the fire were long strips of salmon on sticks stuck in the ground. The Indian women, in their native dress, were tending the salmon and turning the sticks from side to side so that a slow smoked bake was achieved. We were told by some of the older Indians that this method of cooking salmon had been used by the Indians long before the coming of the White Man.