This site requires Javascript to be turned on. Please enable Javascript and reload the page.

Making the Frontier Home: Stories from the Steamboat Bertrand

"Apples: to Bake Steamboat Style": Recipes for Living on the Frontier

Away from the comfort of hired and enslaved help, pioneering women often had to learn how to cook, as well as teach themselves other domestic chores. Cooking and guidebooks, such as such as Dr. Chase's Recipes, or Information for Everybody (1864) served as a reference for both men and women on nearly any practical subject necessary to thrive on the frontier. Other, gender-specific tomes, such as The American Woman's Home (1869) by Catherine Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe served as a vital instructor for becoming the ideal Victorian woman.

Importance of recipes and health during the Victorian period--civilization reflected in types of food consumed--role of wife in establishing home through kitchen--improvement in transportation leading to shipping of exotic foods (i.e. tamarinds, pineapple)
Cookbooks

In contrast to the coarse and redundant suppers of overland travelers, steamboats brought edible luxuries to isolated mining towns. Goods such as pineapples, tamarinds, and oysters alleviated culinary monotony and diversified the daily diet.

This page has paths:

Contents of this path:

This page references:

Dr. Chase's Recipes, Or Information for Everybody An invaluable collection of about eight hundred practical recipes for merchants, grocers, saloon-keepers, physicians, druggists, tanners, shoe makers, harness makers, painters, jewelers, blacksmiths, tinners, gunsmiths, farriers, barbers, bakers, dyers, renovaters, farmers, and families generally to which have been added a rational treatment of pleurisy, inflammation of the lung, and other inflammatory diseases, and also for general female debility and irregularities: all arranged in their appropriate departments.