Grate the fresh cassava root. Soak for a couple of hours in salted water. Squeeze out water. Stir grated pulp in any good pancake batter.However, they do sound a tad more appealing than the Golden Cattail Pancakes recipe, which calls for a cup of cattail pollen.
Friday, June 27, 2014
Of haw jelly and cassava pancakes
Friday, June 20, 2014
Pedaling the faith
St. Peter, 1908. Archives of the Diocese of St. Augustine |
It's hard to think about Florida - fourth most populous U.S. state - as once being mission territory. But the archival literature references Fr. Curley as a missionary priest who pedaled and pushed his bicycle for hours from DeLand to New Smyrna, where he got on the train. That's a good 20 to 25 miles. He then pedaled some more, between stations along the coast.
Clergy were spread thin in frontier Florida, and persevered amid challenges. There wasn't a resident priest from Daytona south to Palm Beach. The Rev. Michael F. Foley of Baltimore spent a good portion of 1885 to 1893 ministering to DeLand and surrounding areas, despite being in "broken-down health." After he left, the Rev. John O'Brien of Palatka came to DeLand once a month to offer Mass. Fr. Curley arrived in 1904. A diocesan missionary priest named the Rev. P.J. Bresnahan helped spread the Gospel in "DeLand's vast mission field," as the entire Central East area was called, but I'm not sure how long he stayed after his 1906 efforts. Fr. Curley, described as zealous, devoted the second Sunday of each month to the missions.
Concurrent with mission work, a structured worship schedule took form in the growing DeLand parish. Here's a look at the program in about 1906:
- Sundays, November to May: High Mass with sermon in morning; Rosary, sermon, Benediction of the Blessed Sacrament in the evening
- Sundays, June to October: Low Mass with sermon, followed by Benediction, in morning
- Way of the Cross on Fridays in Lent
- First Friday "faithfully observed"
- Sunday School "never omitted"
Sunday, June 15, 2014
Home on the trail
Bartow cattle drive. State Archives of Florida, Florida Memory |
Dana Ste. Claire, in his book, Cracker: The Cracker Culture in Florida History (Museum of Arts and Sciences, 1998), surprisingly includes canned tomatoes among typical trail cuisine such as bacon, grits, sweet potatoes, cornbread and coffee. He also mentions how fried meat might be packed into tins, and then covered with hot fat for preservation. Not so yum, if you ask me. Both Ste. Claire and Jim Bob Tinsley's Florida Cow Hunter: The Life and Times of Bone Mizell (University of Central Florida Press, 1990), note how a cow or steer might be butchered, salted and smoked at the start of a roundup or drive. Ideally, meals were prepared at a chuck wagon, but the wagons couldn't always reach cowboys on roundups when they tracked cattle across wetlands. The workers had to carry rations in those cases. Food might include syrup cookies that they'd brought from home, and whatever game they hunted.
Home on the trail required resourcefulness. Obviously, on a drive, cowboys slept on the ground. But Florida is famous for its rains. Tinsley writes how, it wet season, cowmen dug parallel trenches, heaped the dirt in the middle, and piled palmetto fans atop the dirt. That became a bed.
One final note: A fascinating example of pioneer ingenuity is in Joe A. Akerman Jr. and J. Mark Akerman's book, Jacob Summerlin, King of the Crackers (Florida Historical Society Press, 2004): Black jack oak provided a salt substitute if the tree was cut green, burned, and left overnight so that a crust would form. The crust had to be scraped off the next morning before the dew dried.
Monday, June 9, 2014
From hominy to ham with champagne sauce
Much of the written records from pioneer Florida reflect the era's socioeconomics. Only wealthy and/or educated tourists and settlers had time and ability to leave behind records of their day-to-day life. The hotels and other businesses that catered to them churned out promotional literature. So we learn a lot about luxury accommodations of the time but don't learn what regular folk had for dinner in pioneer households.
Plant Museum reprint of historical brochure |
An interesting side note: Both former hotels are now centerpieces of well-regarded colleges, Flagler College in St. Augustine and University of Tampa on Florida's west coast. At Tampa, a portion of the historic hotel structure houses the Henry B. Plant Museum, well worth the visit. In St. Augustine, Lightner Museum - another former hotel - is directly across the street from the college, and is also a must-see.
Neither modern dining hall offers the type of cuisine hotel guests expected back in the day. The 2012 issue of El Scribano, the St. Augustine Historical Society's journal of Florida history, has a really interesting article by society research library Chief Librarian Robert Nawrocki about kitchen operations at Ponce de Leon Hotel.
Included is a detailed look at the 11 courses served for dinner on Jan. 31, 1893, the height of the winter season. I'm fascinated by the mix of mundane food and haute cuisine on the menu. Patrons could have hominy or stewed tomatoes with their Granadine of Lamb, a la Soubise. Everyday fruits (bananas, raisins) and nuts were rolled out after people feasted on macaroons and Baba au Rhum.
The scope of the menu surprises me, and I wonder how people ate so much at one meal. Judging from old photos, obesity wasn't a problem back then. I've heard diners ate sparingly of each serving in order to survive multiple courses. Which makes me wonder what happened to the leftovers. Were the local hungry fed? Were servants allowed to take home the extra food? Was it composted? Fed to backyard animals?Wednesday, June 4, 2014
Growing citrus on offal, castor beans and cotton seed
Credit? I've seen this photo both at the West Volusia Historical Society and FloridaMemory.com |
Seems to me citrus trees grew larger in the 19th century, at least in this part of the state. Old photos like the one in this post, of DeLand horticulturist Lue Gim Gong in his grove, attest to what Martha notes on page 10 of her thesis: the trees towered over people. She was told they could reach 30 feet.
Citrus was fertilized with cottonseed meal, a very smelly bone meal, castor bean "pumace," dead animals (buried), offal like discarded organs from an animal butchered for food, and "ground flesh" - not sure I want to know more. All that makes me appreciate my packaged organic fertilizer.Not everyone adopted that early version of organic growing. She notes that an 1888 letter writer told the Florida Farmer and Fruit-Grower he used sulphate of potash, phosphoric acid, and magnesia with ammonia on his grove.
There are enough tidbits in Martha's thesis to write several blog posts, and I may return to it later. But for now I want to mention one more thing. It's the small-world phenomenon, and maybe frontier Florida was a small world.
One of Martha's interview subjects was Barney Dillard Jr., who shared his citrus expertise. Any fan of Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings knows that Florida pioneer Barney Dillard Sr. shared folklore and hunting tales with the writer in the 1930s. The material Dillard shared helped shape the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Yearling.
Rawlings had a couple of thousand citrus trees on her property at Cross Creek. I wonder what she used for fertilizer.
Sunday, June 1, 2014
Four families grow into a parish
(Photo courtesy St. Peter Catholic Church) The first Catholic Church in DeLand could seat 60 people. |