Some OLD recipes (and old problems)

Mountain Makin's in the Smokies: A Cookbook (The Great Smoky Mountains Natural History Association) is from 1957, but s lot of the recipes in the book credibly claim to be much older than that, starting with the recipe on the first page: Ash Cake.

You can tell the book was well-loved, given the stains. (I suspect the original owner used the cornbread recipes on verso of this page and that's why this is so stained, but who knows? Maybe cooking food right in a fire was still something people did in the late '50s if their homes were really rural? Though I suspect they wouldn't be the type to spend money on cookbooks like this if that were the case...) The idea of putting food directly in contact with ashes makes me really nervous as a modern person, though-- seems like a good way to eat whatever pollutants the firewood absorbed when it was a tree... Still, the illustration makes cooking an ash cake seem like such a cozy thing to do on a cold winter's day.

The book also connects some of its recipes to the area's history, as this "Indian Bean Bread."

Essentially balls of cornmeal and beans boiled together, these sound very bland, but they would be a good mix of carbs and protein when resources are limited. (Plus, they might be flavored by whatever else they were served with?) 

The Chestnut Bread is similar, though it seems like this version is supposed to be cooked like tamales (at least, if I am understanding the recipe). 

I wonder how similar these are to actual native recipes...

There's also (perhaps) a glancing mention of slavery in the Hoe Cake recipe.

The mention of the "workers" may be a sanitized reference to enslaved people, but given that this book was published 90+ years after the end of the Civil War, I could be reading too much into this. The other terminology is obviously outdated, but I was a little surprised to see this discussed at all. Groups that aren't well-respected often get ignored entirely. 

There are some slightly higher-end recipes, like the Stack Cake, given to the contributor by "Mrs. Dolphus Kerley... who died January 6, 1948, two months before reaching 90 years of age" and who got this recipe from her mother.

It's a rare-for-this-book recipe that doesn't call for cornmeal, but it is sweetened with molasses-- widely used at the time-- and filled with applesauce for a relatively cheap and healthy-ish treat.

The book also includes some home remedies, a reminder that people didn't always have drug stores stocked with aisles and aisles of over-the-counter remedies on every other corner.

And I am sure today's parents are glad not to have to try to use cloth to wrap mashed roast onions "to the hollow of the child's feet" whenever the kids have a cold.

But who knows? Distrust of vaccines and pharmaceutical companies could mean that the Whooping Cough Syrup recipe becomes newly relevant.

No matter how unsavory history may be, looks like we can be drawn back whether we like it or not.