Barbara Swell, Children at the Hearth: 19th Century Cooking, Manners and Games (Native Ground Music, 1999)
Children at the Hearth: 19th Century Cooking, Manners and Games is a compendium of just that: recipes, moral and etiquette advice and pioneer games.
The recipes are organized pretty much by ingredient or by course, with chapter titles such as Meats, Vegetables, Dessert, Soups & Stews and Weird & Disgusting Foods. This last includes "foods no modern kid would eat," such as pickled glazed tongue and peanut-butter-and-catsup sandwiches. (My father has been known to eat them, but he's no kid. He puts catsup on his ice cream, too.)
The advice on morality and manners is from a variety of sources and includes subjects like clothing (boys in dresses, going barefoot), courting, obeying your parents and cherishing your siblings before they died and you lost your chance.
There are instructions for playing only a few games, such as house ball and roley hole, but there is a fair bit of information about games and pastimes in general. One bit of game lore that struck me was that slave children rarely played games where someone was "out." They lived in constant fear of being separated from their families, and did not want their games to raise the same negative emotions. This idea is popular again among those working with children, but the modern reason is to protect the players' self-esteem.
There are bits of folklore, too, such as charms to get your wish or find a lost object, and signs you're going to get a whipping. The hygiene and medical advice near the end of the book falls pretty much into this category, too, with its cures for chicken pox, slobbering and hiccups.
Unlike Barbara Swell's other books, Children at the Hearth: 19th Century Cooking, Manners and Games addresses children directly. She maintains the same chatty style as in her grown-up books, though, and her fondness for exclamation points as well. Also, there are fewer recipes than in some of her other volumes, and she occasionally suggests that her young readers get an adult to help with the more dangerous aspects of cooking, such as frying sausage.
Children at the Hearth: 19th Century Cooking, Manners and Games is copiously illustrated in black and white. There are old photographs, many from collections such as those of the Library of Congress and of various universities and state historical societies. There are pictures from the old books and magazines she quotes. The book also has an index, a bibliography and space for the owner's own recipes.
Children at the Hearth: 19th Century Cooking, Manners and Games is an excellent resource for teaching children (and adults, for that matter) about life in generations past.
Barbara Swell is the author of several other collections of old-time recipes and household hints.
They are all published by Native Ground Music which also publishes songbooks,
musical instruction books and recordings related to the southern Appalachians or to railroads.
