Barbara Swell, Log Cabin Cooking: Pioneer Recipes and Food Lore (Native Ground Music, 1996) Barbara Swell, Old-Time Farmhouse Cooking: ~ Rural American Recipes, Wisdom, & Farm Lore~, (Native Ground Music, 2003)
From a historical point of view, Log Cabin Cooking and Old-Time Farmhouse Cooking go together nicely to tell the story of rural North American cookery in the 19th and early 20th centuries.
In Log Cabin Cooking, Barbara Swell takes us back to the first subsistence settlements, when women struggled to keep their families fed with limited supplies and even more limited cooking facilities. She describes typical domestic arrangements, food sources, cooking methods and daily life in general. A healthy serving of folklore is thrown in for good measure.
The people in Old-Time Farmhouse Cooking have a much easier time of it. They have access to stores, they cook on stoves instead of open hearths, they may even have electricity. (This latter amazes me. My corner of the northern Appalachians only got electricity in the 1960s.) The recipes are proportionately more complicated and include more "store-bought" ingredients, liked canned goods.
Log Cabin Cooking gives recipes that would be useful for campers today, such as hoe cake and hunter's cake (similar, but baked on a board instead of a hoe), and fruit cobbler in a Dutch oven. There are also recipes for sourdough and salt risin' bread (neither of which use yeast), instructions for dipping candles and plenty of folk remedies for ailments like diarrhea, frosted feet and corns. The section on uses for ear wax is not to be missed.
Old-Time Farmhouse Cooking is a few pages longer than Log Cabin Cooking. Along with toothsome recipes for cranberry pot roast, sweet corn puffs, Ethel's nice tomato cookies and the like, it has even more vintage poems, sayings, jokes and articles from various farm publications dating from the early to mid-1900s.
Both books are copiously illustrated in black and white. Barbara Swell uses old photographs, many from collections such as those of the Library of Congress and of various universities and state historical societies (mainly from North Carolina in these two volumes), as well as a great number of pictures from the old books and magazines she quotes.
Both books have indexes, but instead of a bibliography they have "credits".
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.
