4 meals in this book
“In old, flush times in the steamboat business, pastry cooks generally planned to give a surprise to the passengers on each up trip of the steamer. I remember one such, when no less than thirteen different desserts were placed in front of each passenger as he finished the hearty preliminary meal. Six of these were served in tall and slender glass goblets--vases, would more nearly describe them--and consisted of custards, jellies, and creams of various shades and flavors; while the other seven were pies, puddings, and ice creams. The passenger was not given a menu card and asked to pick out those that he thought he would like, but the whole were brought on and arranged in a circle about his plate, leaving him to dip into each as he fancied, and leave such as did not meet his approval. It was necessary to carry an extra outfit of glass and china in order to serve this bewildering exhibition of the pastry cook's art, and it was seldom used more than once on each trip.”
1175. PUDDINGS AND PASTRY, familiar as they may be, and unimportant as they may be held in the estimation of some, are yet intimately connected with the development of agricultural resources in reference to the cereal grasses. When they began to be made is uncertain; but we may safely presume, that a simple form of pudding was amongst the first dishes made after discovering a mode of grinding wheat into flour. Traditional history enables us to trace man back to the time of the Deluge. After that event he seems to have recovered himself in the central parts of Asia, and to have first risen to eminence in the arts of civilization on the banks of the Nile. From this region, Greece, Carthage, and some other parts along the shores of the Mediterranean Sea, were colonized. In process of time, Greece gave to the Romans the arts which she had thus received from Egypt, and these subsequently diffused them over Europe.
Recipe from The Book of Household Management of 1861.
“As soon as breakfast was out of the way, the menu for dinner was prepared and handed to the chief cook. Shortages in provisions were remedied at the first landing reached, and stocks of fish, game, fresh eggs, and fresh vegetables were bought as offered at the various towns. While there was a cold-storage room on all first-class packets, its capacity was limited, and with a passenger list of two hundred and fifty or three hundred in the cabin, it was often found necessary to lay in additional stocks of fresh meats between Galena and St. Paul. Often, a dozen lambs could be picked up, or a dozen "roaster" pigs, and these were killed and dressed on the boat by one of the assistant cooks. Live poultry was always carried in coops, and killed as wanted. Perhaps the poultry killing, if witnessed by the passenger, would come as near curing him of the dinner habit as anything else he might see about the cook's galley. A barrel of scalding hot water, drawn from the boiler, stands on the guard. A coop of chickens is placed near the master of ceremonies, and two or three assistants surround the barrel. The head dresser grasps a chicken by the head, gives it a swing from the coop to the barrel, bringing the chicken's neck on to the iron rim of the barrel. The body goes into hot water and the head goes overboard. Before the chicken is dead he is stripped of everything except a few pin feathers--with one sweep of the hand on each side of the body and a dozen pulls at the wing feathers. The yet jerking, featherless bodies are thrown to the pin-feather man, who picks out the thickest of the feathers, singes the fowls over a charcoal grate-fire and tosses them to one of the under-cooks who cuts them open, cuts them up, and pots them, all inside of two minutes from the coop. A team of three or four expert darkies will dispose of one hundred and fifty chickens in an hour. Are they clean? I never stopped to inquire. If they were _dead_ enough to stay on the platter when they got to the table that was all any reasonable steamboatman could ask.”
Put into a saucepan three ounces of good butter very smoothly blended with a quite small teaspoonful of flour, and add to them a large wineglassful of cold water, half as much sharp vinegar (or very fresh, strained, lemon-juice) a saltspoonful of salt, and half as much cayenne in fine powder. Keep these shaken briskly round, or stirred over a clear fire, until they form a smooth sauce and boil rapidly; then stir them very quickly to the beaten yolks of four fresh eggs, which will immediately give the sauce the consistence of custard; pour it hot over the salad, and place it on ice, or in a very cool larder until it is quite cold: if properly made, it will be very thick and smooth, and slightly _set_, as if it contained a small portion of isinglass. A dessertspoonful of parsley,—or of tarragon,—can be mingled with it at _pleasure_, or any flavour given to it with store-sauces which is liked.
Recipe from Modern cookery for private families of 1845.
“Serving such a variety of delicacies, of which but a small portion was eaten by any person at the table, would seem like an inexcusable waste; but the waste on river steamers was really not as great in those days as it is in any great hotel of our day. Each steamer carried forty or more deck hands and "rousters". For them, the broken meat was piled into pans, all sorts in each pan, the broken bread and cake into other pans, and jellies and custards into still others--just three assortments, and this, with plenty of boiled potatoes, constituted the fare of the crew below decks. One minute after the cry of "Grub-pile"! one might witness the spectacle of forty men sitting on the bare deck, clawing into the various pans to get hold of the fragments of meat or cake which each man's taste particularly fancied. It certainly wasn't an appetizing spectacle. Only familiarity with it enabled an onlooker fully to appreciate its grotesqueness without allowing the equilibrium of his stomach to be disturbed. It usually had but one effect upon such lady passengers as had the hardihood to follow the cry of "Grub-pile"! and ascertain what the thing really was.”
Put four tablespoonsful of fine fruit-jelly into a basin, and stir to it gradually twelve spoonsful of beaten egg; if the preserve be rich and sweet, no sugar will be required. Line some pans with paste rolled very thin, fill them with the custard, and bake them about ten minutes.[131] Footnote 131: Strawberry or raspberry jelly will answer admirably for these.
Recipe from Modern cookery for private families of 1845.
“The only item besides passengers to be depended upon on the return trip, was wheat. There may have been some potatoes or barley, or, if fortune favored, some tons of furs and buffalo robes from the "Red River train", or some flour from the one mill at St. Anthony (now Minneapolis), or perhaps woodenware from the same point. There was always a more or less assorted cargo, but the mainstay was wheat. We will assume, in order to simplify this illustration, that there was nothing but wheat in sight at the time. There was no question about getting it. Every boat got all the wheat it could carry, and the shippers begged, almost on bended knees, for a chance to ship five hundred sacks, or a hundred, or fifty--any amount would be considered a great favor. Wheat was shipped at that time in two-bushel sacks, each weighing a hundred and twenty pounds. Three hundred tons, dead weight, is a pretty good cargo for a two-hundred ton boat. Wheat is dead weight, and a boat goes down into the water fast, when that is the sole cargo. We get five thousand sacks, all of which is unloaded at Prairie du Chien. The down trip foots up somewhat like this:”
all the gluten found in wheat, the outer husk of kernels only being removed, the remainder ground to different degrees of fineness and left unbolted. Such flours are sold by the different health food companies, who have agencies in the large cities. Franklin Mills, Old Grist Mill, and Health Food flours are included in this class. =Gluten=, the proteid of wheat, is a gray, tough, elastic substance, insoluble in water. On account of its great power of expansion, it holds the gas developed in bread dough by fermentation, which otherwise would escape.
Recipe from The Boston cooking-school cook book of 1896.
Sources: Every passage above is quoted verbatim from Old Times on the Upper Mississippi: The Recollections of a Steamboat Pilot from 1854 to 1863, free to read in full at Project Gutenberg. The recipes come from cookbooks of the period, also free in full. All are in the public domain in the United States. The binding is ours — slate cloth, sheaf stamp.