AURORA | Learning how to properly cook a meal on the massive cast-iron stove took time and practice for Priscilla Marshall.
The stove takes up an entire corner of one of the sod homes at the Plains Conservation Center on the eastern fringes of Aurora. It’s a Round Oak Chief model, a piece of equipment manufactured at the end of the 19th century that features plenty of chrome and a thermometer built into the door. That gauge has been broken since the stove came to the Center, said Marshall, a historical interpreter and teacher at Plains.
“Knowing how that stove works, I would argue that it was never accurate. When I cook on this stove, I don’t know what the temperature is. It’s irrelevant,” Marshall said before she referred to several recipes for soup and bread taken from 19th-century cookbooks. “A recipe for soup says, “Cook on a quick stove.” That’s how they designated temperature ranges. They had a slow oven, a moderate oven, and a quick oven.”
For Marshall, who spends her days recreating life on the plains in the 1880s, mastering those general cues is critical. They’re skills she’ll use later this month when she helps prepare dishes for the “Making Hay: A Field Hand’s Supper” fundraiser at the Center on June 10. The event will feature a wide range of authentic meals and sides made from recipes in 19th-century cookbooks. Vinegar pie, dried apple pie, baked sweet potatoes, scalloped tomatoes, yeast bread, corn bread and fried chicken will all be featured on the menu.
Many of the items will come fresh off the Round Oak stove, carefully prepared by Marshall and other Plains staff.
“It’s like learning to drive a car with a clutch,” she said. “You have to learn where it releases, where that gear engages. It’s the same way with this stove. You have to know your equipment.”
It’s a talent that will be essential in preparing dishes like vinegar pie, a dish that requires a functional knowledge of a 19th-century piece of equipment. Marshall will draw on a recipe pulled from a 1906 edition of “The Inglenook Cook Book,” a copy that belonged to Marshall’s grandmother. In addition, she’ll be using republished editions of the 1896 “Boston Cooking School Cookbook” and the 1898 “White House Cook Book.”
“There’s sugar, eggs, butter, cornstarch and this particular recipe calls for a tiny bit of lemon extract,” Marshall said. “The tartness, the flavor is coming from the vinegar.”
The menu will involve much more than knowing the physics and settings of a single stove, Marshall said. “Making Hay” will be all about creating historically-accurate dishes. The staff will only use ingredients that would have been available to a family living on the eastern plains in 1886. Since it’s a seasonal event, they’ll focus on foods that would have been prepared at the time of the harvest and delivered to field hands at the middle of a typical work day.
“The food will be built around dishes that would have been typical at this time of the year and that would have been eaten out in the field. They’re cold foods,” said Marshall. “It’s an attempt to reconnect people back to their food by understanding the environment they live in, how that affected earlier generations.”
For those homesteaders living on the short-grass prairie in the late 1800s, diet was constricted by resources and season. Spices like nutmeg and cinnamon weren’t the luxury items that they were in the Middle Ages, but they many of the flavors and additions that are par for the course in a modern diet were exotic for homesteaders. They relied on preserves they had canned and kept in root cellars.
“There will be a selection of pickled things, one of which will be pickled watermelon rind,” Marshall said. “I’ve got bread-and -butter pickles, pickled beets and pickled hard boiled eggs.”
The dedication to historical accuracy will extend to the beverages – a selection that includes apple cider, and a type of ginger water known as switchel – as well as simpler items like salad greens and cold baked ham.
“In 1887, there was no King Soopers. You’ve got to grow your own food and you don’t have a lot to refrigerate,” Marshall said. “That’s the seasonal connection.”
Reach reporter Adam Goldstein at agoldstein@aurorasentinel.com or 720-449-9707
Making Hay: A Field Hand’s Supper
5 to 8 p.m., June 10
Plains Conservation Center, 21901 E. Hampden Ave., Aurora
Cost: $95 (members); $115 (non-members)
Reservations: 303-693-3621; plainscenter.org
Try a traditional Vinegar Pie Recipe
Folks in the Midwest and west didn’t always have access to fresh lemons for a lemon custard pie, so they made-do with what they had: vinegar. This recipe is from the “Inglenook Cook Book — Recipes from the Sisters of the Brethren Church.” The cookbook was published in 1906 in Elgin, Illinois. This pie will be served at Making Hay — A Field Hand’s Supper, June 10 at the Plains Conservation Center.
Note: Recipes from this era often lack the kind of details we now expect because it was assumed that the women readers knew, for instance, how to “prepare a single pie crust.” Approach making this recipe with some caution.
Vinegar Pie
Prepare single pie crust and place in pie pan
1/4 cup melted butter
2 eggs, beaten
1/2 cup white sugar
1/2 cup brown sugar
1/4 cup flour
dash of nutmeg
3 tablespoons vinegar
1 cup water
Mix all dry ingredients together. Add vinegar, eggs, butter and water and mix well. Pour into pie pan and bake in quick oven until done.