Flavors of the Civil War South

The "Confederate Receipt Book" was the only cookbook published in the South during the Civil War.

A slim volume printed in 1863 — the same year crowds of starving women descended on the Confederate capitol in what became known as the Richmond Bread Riot — it promised in its subtitle that it was "Adapted to the Times."

There were recipes for apple pie without apples and curing bacon without much salt, directions for ersatz coffee made from roasted acorns and using egg whites in place of cream.

And so, when Helen Veit went to gather the cookbooks that would be excerpted in "Food in the Civil War Era: The South," she drew on volumes from the decades before and after the war, from Mary Randolph's "The Virginia Housewife," first printed in 1824 and often considered the first regional American cookbook; from the post-war volumes that promised the flavors of a vanishing plantation life.

"If you go in these books looking for Southern food, you'll find plenty of recipes for gumbo and hoppin' John and succotash and watermelon pickles and collards and okra, all sorts of things you'd expect to find," said Veit, a historian of food and nutrition and a professor at Michigan State University.

But what struck her wasn't the distinctiveness of Southern cuisine at that time, but how much it shared with Northern cooking.

"People were making watermelon pickles in the North at this time," said Veit, the editor of an Michigan State University Press book series on the history of American cooking that draws heavily on the university's stellar collection of historical cookbooks. "They were making gumbo. They were making vegetables cooked to death."

The flavors we've come to associate with South, she said, are in many ways the flavors of the 19th century.

"Certain kinds of preserved foods, liquors or fruit syrups or sausages or things that have been salted or smoked, those were 19th century cooking styles because they had to be preserved," Veit said.

She came to believe the war itself and the ways it was memorialized served to turn certain foods of the era into the foods of the South.

"One reason we have canonized certain Southern foods is because they're from this era," she said.

And it's a process that began almost immediately. In the years after the war, there was a hunger, Veit said, for "this lost world, the world that two generations later would be called 'Gone with the Wind.'"

"That was all the more poignant because the cooks of the plantation South with hardly any exceptions had been enslaved African-American women," she said, "and those women, for the most part, had gone or had not committed those recipes to print and so it really was a style of cooking that disappeared."

"Food in the Civil War Era: The South" draws not only from cookbooks, but periodicals of the era and from one previously unpublished manuscript, written down by hand by an unknown author in Maryland who was sympathetic to the Confederacy.

Three of the book's recipes, adapted for modern kitchens, are below:

Jumberlie—A Creole Dish (Jambalaya)

Prep time: 45 minutes. Cook time: 35 minutes. Total time: 1 hour, 20 minutes

Serves 8

1 small whole chicken

1 cup white rice

4 14.5-ounce cans diced tomatoes, or 6 large tomatoes, blanched and diced

1 pound honey ham steak, diced

1 teaspoon salt

1 teaspoon pepper

Cut the chicken into ½-inch chunks, being sure to separate all the joints and remove as much skin as possible. Do not remove bones from the legs or wings; discard the ribcage. Put the chicken into a large stockpot.

Add the rice, tomatoes (including juice), ham, salt, and pepper. Mix well.

Bring to a boil over high heat, then reduce heat to medium-low heat and cook, stirring occasionally, for 35 minutes or until chicken reaches an internal temperature of 165 degrees.

Corn Oysters

Prep time: 45 minutes. Cook time: 6 minutes. Total time: 51 minutes

Serves 8

10 small ears of corn

2 eggs, beaten together

2 tablespoons flour

¼ teaspoon salt

¼ teaspoon pepper

1/ 8 cup milk

2 tablespoons butter

Cut through the grain on the corn, slicing each kernel open but leaving it on the cob. Scrape down the side of the cob with a spoon to remove the pulp. This will be a messy process; it might help to put down a cloth. Reserve the pulp in a bowl. It should make about 4 cups of pulp.

Add the eggs, flour, salt, pepper, and milk to the pulp and mix well.

Melt the butter into a skillet over medium heat. Drop in tablespoons of the corn batter and fry until golden brown on both sides.

Serve immediately.

To Make Pickle Lily



Prep time: 10 minutes. Total time: 10 minutes

Makes 2 1-quart jars

6 cups white vinegar

2 tablespoons salt

1 teaspoon peppercorns

1 teaspoon whole allspice

1 teaspoon whole mace

½ teaspoon whole cloves

Heat the vinegar over medium heat until very hot, but do not let it boil.

Remove from heat and add the salt, peppercorns, allspice, mace, and cloves. Divide the mixture into jars.

Store the jars in the fridge and add whole or sliced vegetables. (Vegetables were pickled as they ripened.) Cucumbers, radishes, green beans, and onions work well with this recipe.

Source: A Selection of Modernized Recipes from Food in the Civil War Era: The South, edited by Helen Zoe Veit, adapted by Jennifer Billock.