Baking with the Beast
Privy to Table
 |
| The Allaire Bakery. Photo by David Burnett. |
Resting in the tree lined park that now is the Historic Village at Allaire in Farmingdale New Jersey, stands a quiet village. Once this was an industrial town of such a scale as to maintain five hundred employees and their families. The town was dedicated to the production of iron. Now the din of the village is a pale comparison to that of its past roar. Across the main walk from the blacksmith shop sits the bakery between the mill pond and the manager's house. The bakery is perhaps the most popular building on site for its array of dish sized cookies, apple cakes, and other treats. However, only once a year is bread baked in the historic oven.
 |
| The author within the bakery oven and Bill. |
The baking process is rather long beginning early in the morning since the bread is baked with residual heat from the bricks and not directly with a fire. The day began around seven or so in the morning with me climbing inside of the bake oven in order to lay wood and re-stack the pile. Inside the close space, 8x8x3.5, I felt like the witch from Hansel and Gretel. I joked with my friends beyond the mouth of the oven not to lock me in. They assured me it would not be so. But the dark thought clung to my mind as a crawled around inside the beast of the oven.
After the wood was staked, it was lit. This process took a little while to get all of the stacks lit in the back of the fire. The fire was to burn until around 2pm. Smoke would occasionally fill the room as the wind increased throughout the day. The chimney was placed on the outside of the fire door, so the draft was controlled by a small door in the base of the oven and a door on the outside of the building. At one point the wind gave a mighty roar and blew out the fire. Carbon dioxide began to build as I struggled to adjust the draft. With another mighty roar the fire burst again to life and belched flame and smoke into the room. Content now with its feast, the beast of an oven purred away happily as the fire burned beautifully for the course of the day.
As the fire burned, the bread was made and allowed to rise in bread boxes or in bowls covered with cloth. It grew like a set of grand mushrooms that were a mix of white and brown. For some of those growing bubbles were designed to be white bread and cinnamon raisin. The recipes for the bread were from the 1800s.
Time ticked on slowly as the afternoon approached. The fire burned down from over seven hundred degrees to around four. This was determined by using the age old method of placing you arm into the oven's mouth. If you could hold it there longer it was cooler. (Having been employed for as a blacksmith, I tended to give a very different temperature from the rest of the bakers). The public crowded into the bakery to watch and hopefully steal a bit or two. Then suddenly the time had come. I raked the charcoal down into the trap below the oven. Bread was placed into the fire. A few minutes later it was pulled out and allowed to sit. The bread had a dark crust that looked almost burned, but white and soft within. The raisin loaves were sweet and hot about the raisins. The bread was generally sliced in half and placed flat side down on the table to keep for the night. Sometimes the crusts could be cut off and used to thicken soup.
 |
| Abby and the author taking bread out of the oven. Photo by David Burnett. |
Historically, after the bread was baked it would have been time to place in pies and meats. At the end of the day fruit would be loaded into the oven on boards along with the wood for the next days burn, so that both could dry. Perhaps next year I'll make a few pies and see how that baking process goes.
Privy to Table
 |
In
2006, the Peace Tavern-Woodruff family home was demolished to make
way for “The Savoy,” a Dornoch-Rahway redevelopment project. In the process of this demolition, two
privies were revealed, one dating from the early-19th century and associated
with the tavern’s operation and the other from the latter part of the 19th
century
when the building served as a private home. That is what we in the
vernacular call ironic. The Peace Tavern-Woodruff home was originally
constructed in 1800. It served as a tavern until 1847 when it was
purchased by Johnathan Woodruff. Woodruff was a bank president and
successful carriage merchant. As a well-to-do member of the community,
the Woodruff's saw many goods and important people pass through their
home and some of their purchases, inevitable ended up in the trash.
The
privy associated with the occupation of the home produced 5,488 artifacts offering insight into the many aspects of 19th-century
material culture. Located near the Rahway River, the deposits
were waterlogged and exhibited outstanding preservation of organic materials. Through
excavation and flotation a wide variety of faunal and floral material were retrieved,
these artifacts offering insight into the dietary preference of this prominent
family. Mostly cow vertebrae and ribs, sheep rump and
hind quarters, and pig feet bones were recovered. Animals were consumed at the optimum age when
the animal had just reached adulthood; though some veal was consumed. The fact that the meat tends to represent
only parts of an animal reflects the patterns found at many other urban sites
suggesting that these animals were not kept as livestock but purchased already
butchered at market. Pork, beef, and mutton made up the majority
of meat consumed. These patterns of
animals use and consumption follow trends seen in other privies and refuse pits
from the middle to late 19th century such as those documented by Nan
Rothschild and Darlene Balkwill in Manhattan and the Greenwich mews.
Due
to the high level of preservation a wide degree of floral materials were also recovered. Peach,
cherry and apricot pits, coffee beans,
peanut, chestnut, and walnut shells, and raspberry, apple, pumpkin and
grape
seeds were recovered primarily through floatation (running excavated
soil through very small filters with water to obtain small artifact
normal lost in a 1/4 inch screen). For
Victorians, fruit was extremely popular both fresh and preserved, depending on
the season. There
were no vegetable remains found in the privy features, which given the
Victorian diet and the nature of vegetables is not terribly surprising. Most vegetables are consumed in their entirety
and do not contain seeds or pits that are left behind. Moreover, the Victorian diet did not
emphasize or highlight vegetables.
Cookbooks
were published frequently starting in the 1700s and rapidly increasing number after
the Civil War. Cookbooks, such as
Catherine Beecher and Harriett Beecher Stowe’s The American Woman’s Home, became printed household guides offering
instruction on how to prepare tables with lavish decorations, and on nutritional
theories, family living, social responsibilities, suggestions for kitchen
design, religion, homecare, and consumerism. Basically, these books were a lifestyle
guide. According to Ross in her review
of health and diet in the 19th-century “these cookbooks
provided a
major vehicle for the popular dissemination of nutritional theories".
They reflected the tension between economic classes and dietary
practices. The middle and upper classes
proffered the best of European cuisine while cookbooks for the lower classes
emphasized simpler fare. Queen
Victoria may have set the tone of the era bearing her name, but food had to be
French in order to be fashionable, and cuisine in America was just as lavish as
its French counterparts.
Many of the dishes found in cookbooks were given French names to add a
touch of elegance. This manifested in
menus filled with classic American dishes with complicated titles such as
“porterhouse steak au onion, apple fritters glassé au rhum (apple fritters with
rum ice cream), and Hamburger steak au prué (which sounds particularly
appetizing to me).
Menus often tended to show off the excesses of the Victorian diet. Every meal had multiple courses and took a
number of hours to eat. An average day
consisted of four meals: breakfast, luncheon taken about 5 hours later, dinner
served in the afternoon and tending to be the heaviest meal, and supper served
between 6 and 7 in the evening or later if there were festivities. In
a single day the hotels along the New Jersey seashore, once the playground of
the rich and famous and now the playground, held very lavish meals consisting of
17 courses of meat and/or fish, 9 servings of vegetables and fruit containing
primarily of potatoes, 2 courses of poultry, and 3 servings of dessert (Bishop and
Simpson 1983:4-6). For breakfast, the
meal would begin with fruit, followed by clam broth and then hot cereal though
it later became fashionable to serve it cold, three or four types of fish,
grilled steak, lamb chops, liver, eggs, creamed codfish or beef, ham and bacon,
potatoes, hominy, fried mash, and griddle cakes served with hot chocolate,
coffee, tea, milk or malted milk. That
is a total of 10 dishes, if anyone was attempting to count.
So
while working on this paper, as one generally does when writing about food, I
got hungry. Then I started wondering if
the Victorian taste of food was considerably different from our own. Thus in an attempt to better understand
Victorian foodways and the Woodruff family, I have recreate part of a meal from
the time period. Given the breadth of an
average Victorian meal and the limits of my wallet, I propose to prepare one
dish of each: meat, vegetable, soup, and dessert. I reproduce the dessert again and brought
samples of it to the conference for the audience to participate in a typical
Victorian dessert. The dishes recreated
were selected based on the archaeological remains found in features 8 and 11 of
the Peace Tavern/Woodruff family site. The
recipes ingredients were compared to the archaeological remains and historical
documentation to guarantee crossover. Recipes were selected partially for their
novelty based on their names. While many
people have tried corned beef, few people I image have had Gâteau de Portugal.
For
the meat dish to best represent the Woodruff family I have selected a rib roast
as beef ribs were found in the privy.
The roast was very good but a little under seasoned for my taste since
the recipe did not call spices other than a light dusting of salt and pepper.
Oxtail
soup was made because cow vertebrae were found in the privy and given the
popularity of soups and stews might have been made into one. Oxtail soup was classified in most cookbooks
as a portable soup. I had no idea what
this meant, so out of curiosity I decided to try it. The soup took about six hours to make from
cutting the ingredients to serving.
Someone must have had a lot of time on their hands to make this dish or
prepared it the day before serving. The
soup was particularly tart tasting, which faded away as on the second day. As the soup cooled it began to take on the
characteristics of a jelly or headcheese.
So if it had been poured into a mold or a cup, the soup could have very
easily been moved or carried. 
For
a vegetable, I prepared potatoes cooked in cream, which yielded a very heavy
dish. According to menus
and recipes from the time, the most commonly consumed vegetable was the potato. As late as 1874, food writers were praising
the potato for its nutritional virtues though its kinship to other deadly
plants caused it to be regarded with suspicion. The
average person was consuming about one hundred pounds of potatoes annually
between the years of 1835-44.
The Woodruff family certainly dined on the tuber and probably in the
fashionable form, which was fried or baked with sugar and cream.
The
dessert was gâteau de Portugal, a citrus cake served with apricots that was a
popular dessert at the sea-side resorts.
On my first attempt making the cake, I melted the butter to make the
icing which caused a thin crystalline layer.
They second time, I did not melt it, and thus the icing was
thicker. (When I presented this at the conference, I had cake for people
to try but since this is over the internet, there won't be any cake for
you.) The Woodruff family was able to enjoy a wide
range of dietary fare. The frequencies
and consistency with which these faunal remains appear suggest common dietary
preference and less of an emphasis on wealth.
Meat was an important part of the Victorian diet and played a prominent
part at each meal and was generally considered healthy (Ross 1993). In comparison to meat, vegetables and fruits
were consumed to a lesser degree.
Potatoes, sugar, meat, and fats were consumed at a much higher quantity. The Victorian Age saw the development of new
ways of growing and transporting food that increased the variety of items seen
on a family’s table. French food or at
least French sounding food was à la mode.Using
the artifacts from a 19th century privy it is possible to develop an
idea of what one family might have been eating.
The assemblage has allowed a taste of the past which has increased
awareness of Victorian life styles.
Food for Thought: Experiments in Acorn Detoxification
Food is marginally important to us. Its not as though we allow people and corporations to dictate what we eat and how we feed our children or anything like that. In the past food was a central concern for people when hungry could not just pop over to the grocery.
The foodways of the Native Americans is less well known than we as archaeologists would like. There diet was far more complex corn, beans and squash and varied considerable with the season and climate. Most of the information archaeologists and historians possess about the foodways of the Americas comes from ethnographers and explorers. Archaeology provides some clues but do to differential preservation and acidic soils, little is known about the Mid-Atlantic region of the East Coast. The best and most complete information comes to archaeologists and ethnographers on the West Coast. One of the most interesting foods devoured by the First People were acorns.
 | |||
| A Hupa woman, of California processing acorns photo from hastingreserve.org |
Throughout prehistory and history
people have been using acorns as a food source.
There is much debate about the use of acorns in the prehistoric
diet. Many
scholars
view acorns as a
famine food; a resource only turned to when other sources are gone
(McCorriston, 1994, 99). These people
cite the difficulty and intensity of labor required to remove the tannic
acid
from the acorns as the reason for its marginal subsistence status.
Other researches and archaeologists, such as Errett Callahan,
believe
that there
are much easier and less labor intensive ways to extract the
tannic acid and make the acorns palatable.
If tannic acid could easily be leached from an acorn, it is likely that
prehistoric populations relied heavily on acorns for subsistence.
The eating of acorns is known as
balanophany (McCorriston, 1994, 97). Acorns have tannic acid, an allelochemical
that deters animals from consuming them; this increases the chances of more
nuts surviving to germinate and grow.
Acorns contain tannic acid, water soluble chemical defense against
herbivores (Steele et al, 1993, 235).
Tannin causes a very bitter taste and large amounts of tannin can cause
toxic side effects, reduced digestibility, reduced protein availability or
palatability of the plant material (Steele et al, 1993, 235). The amount of
tannin varies depending on the type of oak tree the acorns come from. White
oaks have very little tannic acid, while red oaks have more. Most of the information about balanophany comes from
ethnographers in California and their accounts have influenced our
understanding since. This unfortunately
does not inform researchers about acorn use through past time periods. The ethnographers recorded a population
struggling to exist on the edge of an encroaching European population. This marginalized existence influenced how
researches have viewed balanophany.
Joy McCorriston (1994) states that
an intense reliance on acorns is caused by an increasing population which is
experiencing decreased mobility, territorial demarcations and resource
imbalance (102). She and many other scholars like her (O’Connell & Hawkes
1981:123) argue that the labor required to process acorns is far too intensive
to represent anything other than a food used when all other resources have run
out. To leach the tannin acid from
acorns, the acorns must be placed in water and boiled. Every so often the brownish water will be
poured out and clean water added. This
would continue until the water no longer becomes dirty. The amount of time
required to detoxify acorns in this manner would take many hours. Basgall (1987) predicts that 6 pounds of
shells will require 3 hours of pounding, 4 hours of leaching and in the end
will produce about 46 pounds of wet mush (28).
This would require a large amount of human labor, water resources, and
fuel to produce the acorn mush.
Errett Callahan, on the other hand, argues
that the labor required is far less to process acorns. He contends that by crushing acorns and
placing them under cold running water for about 20 minutes will leach the
tannin acid out (Callahan, 1993, 75).
Reidhead estimated the labor needed as 1.6 hour/kg of finish product
(Semon and Thomas, 2008, 175). He agreed
with Callahan and stated that leaching pounded acorns in moving water would
lower the processing time. Crushing the
acorns is a process known as comminution (Johns and Kubo, 1988 119). It increases the surface area and greatly
enhances the leaching process. Leaching
is when water is used to dissolve compounds, in this case tannic acid, and then
the water is removed drawing away the tannic acid (Johns and Kubo, 1988,
120). In this case the water simply
drains through the crushed acorns drawing the tannic acid out with it. This way of detoxifying proposed by Callahan
is the most feasible processing technique if acorns made up a large portion of
the diet. This was the method I
tested to if acorns could be detoxified in a quick and low labor manner.
I began
my project by gathering materials from my home and around school during the
month of October. The acorns proved difficult to procure. The white oaks on campus were not producing
nuts. I became exceedingly worried about
not being able to find acorns. A couple of red oaks across from campus were
producing some. Unfortunately, they were in someone’s yard and only had small
nuts and yields. Finally, I found the
oak trees down in Chestertown around the war memorials, which were producing a
multitude of acorns. They were only red
oaks, so they will take a little longer to detoxify because of higher tannic
levels. On the other hand these were the
biggest acorns I have ever seen, two inches high without the cap. These were collected in a trash bag and
carried back to campus. These were also
frozen until further processing could take place. This was done to kill any mold on them and
keep insects from ruining the batch.
 |
| Acorn flour before detoxification |
The
hammerstone
and anvil were also used to open the acorns. They were much easier to
get open. Many of these had to be discarded because of
acorn weevil larvae infestations, discoloration, or being dried out.
The acorns that were acceptable were then
placed in a mortar and roughly ground.
These were then deposited in a waiting plastic container. To detoxify
the acorns, I first wanted to
increase the surface area of the acorns exposed to the water. The
process began during when they were
de-shelled and crushed in the mortar. To
continue the crushing process the acorns were placed in a food processor
to
crush the remaining large chucks and create a more even consistency.
The acorn meal was then placed in a fabric
lined colander and cold water was allowed to run through them. Every
fifteen minutes, a small amount of meal
was tasted to see if it still contained tannic acid. After the acorns
were determined
to no longer taste bitter from the tannin, which took about thirty
minutes,
they were dried in an oven. The acorn
slurry was drained of water and placed on a baking sheet or bottom of a
roasting pan. The door was propped open to
allow for air circulation. The oven was at 170 degrees Fahrenheit.
Every ten minutes the acorn mash was moved
around, breaking up clumps, and allowing for more equal drying. Once it
was dry, all of the acorn meal was
bagged together and refrigerated until I decided what to do with them.
 |
| Acorn flour after detoxification drying in the oven |
I
decided to make bread with the flour I had made. I decided to attempt a pumpkin nut bread
recipe. Two small pumpkins which had
been saved from Halloween to make into puree to add to the acorn flour. They were cut in half to remove the
seeds. They were then covered with
aluminum foil and roasted at 350 degrees Fahrenheit for forty minutes or until
soft. The pumpkin was then removed from
the outer skin with a metal spoon. About
5 cups of dried acorn meal was produced but only 3 ½ cups were used to make the
bread. The 3 ½ cups of acorn flour were
placed in a bowl to which the softened pumpkin.
1/2 cup of black walnuts, which had been processed at another point,
were used. Two teaspoons of baking
powder was added to cause the acorn flour to rise. Acorn flour does not contain any yeast or gluten
which causes normal flour to rise. The
baking powder made the final product hopefully less dense. Spices, cinnamon and nutmeg, and sugar were
added to the mixture for taste. Four
eggs, water, vegetable oil were added to improve consistence and to better
match with the tastes of the modern palate.
Once combined it was all placed in a bake pan and baked for 50 minutes
at 350 degrees Fahrenheit to make a seasonally appropriate and delicious
prehistoric pumpkin nut bread. The final
consistency was spongy but it crumbled lacking the internal structure that
would have been provided by gluten.
My
results
supported the argument made by Errett Callahan by showing that it is
quite simple and easy to make acorns palatable.
Running cold water is affective because as it flows through the acorn
meal it draws the tannic acid out of the acorns and away from them. If
the acorns had been boiled they would have
sat in tannic water which would have slowed the process. By placing the
acorn
meal in a t-shirt lined colander, the process was done quickly in about a
half
hour. This did not vary between the
different size measurements. It was
still thirty minutes for both one cup of acorn meal and two cups. This
proved to be the more efficient way of
detoxifying. If detoxified using cold running water then
acorns could have presented an easy food source for prehistoric
populations. Acorns would not take hours
of boiling in water and required extensive amounts of fuel. In order to
further the investigation, a
similar experiment would be necessary to see if acorns could be
detoxified with
a handmade mat and stream instead of a colander and a kitchen sink. I
would also like to look at archaeological remains between materials from
the West Coast and the East Coast to see if morphological
characteristics are shared between the two cultures. This could suggest
a similar pattern of detoxification and resource use.
Please
do not attempt this on your own. There
have been medical cases where people have poisoned themselves with acorns,
resulting in having their stomach pumped.
Don’t be stupid. I had a trained experimental archaeologist and good friend overseeing my project.
Yesterday, 20 May 2013, I was watching television with a show called "How Beer Saved the World." Apparently the pilgrims made beer from acorns. Perhaps that will be one of my new courses of study.
Stone Tool Butchering Techniques
Some of you, if you cared to look closely at
my profile picture have probably wondered what I was doing; for those
who haven't see the infamous picture, here it is. This picture has long
been my profile picture for facebook, emails, and other various media.
The picture is of me butchering a deer with stone tools. This was part
of an experimental archaeology class I took in the fall of 2010. The
goal of the class was to have the students produced our own stone tools
and experience using them in a real world task. This was one of my
first experimental projects and I fell in love with the hands-on
learning and experience. The deer used in this experiment were donated by local hunters. They were used for our class project and a senior's thesis project, as well as many dinners. Students were not forced to participate and choose their own level of involvement.
Growing up in the woods, I was accustomed to deer walking through my front lawn. Venison, deer meat, was not foreign to our dinner table. However, apprehension filled my stomach when the garage was opened to revealing four large deer lying on the floor on a warm fall day. Students in the class had prepared stone tools several weeks before. I made a corner notched projectile point from flint. I had intended to use it for this project. While grasping it in my hand at that moment, I cast a look at my classmates. They looked about as frightened as I felt. What I was experiencing was what anthropologists call culture shock. It happens when you are confronted with something unusual which often causes feelings of uneasiness or even disgust. We get our meat wrapped up in plastic and Styrofoam. Prior to this experiment I didn't think that very strange. Now, buying meat at the grocery is the strangest experience. For 2.5 million years our ancestors processed their own food with their hands and stone tools. It has only been in the last 50 years that we have been disconnected from our food. This project also began my interest in foodways.
To begin butchering the deer we had to remove the skin from body and
legs. This was going to act as a protective layer separating the meat
from the dirt and grass. Once I got to work, the feelings of culture
shock and apprehension melted away. The stone tools were much sharper
than a knife and easier to handle. This is a picture of my projectile point making
some of the first cuts on the deer. That
little point skinned one side of the deer and removed much of the meat
without dulling. If it had dulled, I could have sharpened it or more
likely dropped it on the ground and made a new tool. Many of the
artifacts people find were discard as trash by past people. I did cut
myself twice, but these
cuts were clean and healed in a few days, much faster than if they were
made with a steel knife. 
99% of a deer is edible, this is excluding the fur and parts of the lower digestive tract. Some parts of a deer while edible, were generally used for other purposes by Native Americans; the sinew was used for bow string and hooves for rattles and glue, just to name a few. Meat only makes up about 30-40% of an animal. Think how much of our animals we are wasting today but just consuming the meat.
If you would like to learn more about this project, visit the Washington College page on the link below. There is a video there too of this process.
http://news.washcoll.edu/events/2010/10/experimentalarchaeology/
No comments:
Post a Comment