Settling back for fall in the Rocky Mountains

Now that it's officially fall, let's take a short break from (mostly) terrible recipes and check out a few cozy fall-appropriate recipes from Mountain Makin's in the Smokies: A Cookbook (The Great Smoky Mountains Natural History Association in 1957). Better get a kettle heated up over an open fire before we get started....

That picture makes me think of a small festival held in our area (even though I am definitely not anywhere near the Smoky Mountains): Apple Butter Day. The book offers the area's own version made with molasses.

Of course, the batch is so small that you wouldn't want to try to make it in a big kettle over an open fire! I also like that the recipe observes that "This kind of butter can be made with sweet potatoes and pumpkins in place of apples," so it's really a recipe for three different types of fruit/ veggie butters, and a way to preserve various crops the family may have grown. You just better have an idea of which spices you want to add and what level will be appropriate to make it noticeably spiced, but not "Am I eating a Yankee candle?" spiced! This recipe isn't about to go into that much detail. 

If you have pumpkins left over after making the pumpkin butter using the previous recipe (or if you just want something a little different), you could try the recipe for Pumpkin Chips.

It sounds like a lot of work to peel a pumpkin and then to cut it "into chips about the thickness of a dollar." Then there is the overnight soak and boiling lemon rinds, then boiling the pumpkin chips in the lemon rind water "until pumpkin chips look clear." It's hard for me to imagine what the pumpkin chips would taste like. (Lemonade, maybe? They're flavored with lemon and sugar, not traditional warm spices.) I'm also not really how one would eat them or what they would be used for. (A snack? A side dish? Part of a dessert?) They're a bit of a mystery, and definitely a departure from the types of pumpkin dishes we usually see now.

Fall is also the time when persimmons come into season, so here's a recipe for Persimmon Pudding.

I love the instructions for this one! No measure of the flour, just enough "to make a medium stiff batter," after which the concoction should "Bake in slow oven until done." You better know what "done" looks like! Similarly, "Serve with a sweet dip," but no word on what the dip might consist of. The upside is that the recommendation suggests the end result should be solid enough to be able to dip it in something. That's the power of context cues!

And finally, for hunting season (and also because no selection of dishes from this book would be complete without a cornmeal-centric recipe), we have Hunters' Cornmeal Cake. 

It's written for people with limited access to resources while hunting, so "Add baking powder if you have it; if not, bake without." Just be sure to put the dough on a "clean board, oak or birch" and "place before open fire and bake." 

I'm sure it was often a cold, uncomfortable, monotonous job to go out on a hunting expedition, and probably more than a bit nerve-wracking if the family depended on the hunter for food and it was a slow season. Still, a description like this is almost enough to make me want to see what a day of cooking in a hunters' camp would have been like.

It's hard not to get a little nostalgic in the fall, even if the old recipes here may be more of a reflection of the need to prepare to survive through a hard season than the cozy celebrations we tend to have today.