When Critical Food Shortages: A Melting Pot of Pioneer Recipes

Pioneer women who had to decide what few precious things to carry across the plains surely made one choice in common—their own individual collection of “receipts,” as recipes were then called. For them, these were reminders of a security left behind and a hope for the abundance of the future. In the interim, they simply did what they had to do to keep their families alive.

Many early memories of pioneer food concerned the frugality with which the Saints lived: “We lived on cornbread and molasses for the first winter.” “We could not get enough flour for bread … so we could only make it into a thin gruel which we called killy.” “Many times … lunch was dry bread … dipped in water and sprinkled with salt.” “These times we had nothing to waste; we had to make things last as long as we could.” ^*

No doubt the “receipt” books were closed during these times, and efforts were given simply to finding food and making it go as far as possible.

Saving our forefathers ways starts with people like you and me actually relearning these skills and putting them to use to live better lives through good times and bad. Our answers on these lost skills comes straight from the source, from old forgotten classic books written by past generations, and from first hand witness accounts from the past few hundred years. Aside from a precious few who have gone out of their way to learn basic survival skills, most of us today would be utterly hopeless if we were plopped in the middle of a forest or jungle and suddenly forced to fend for ourselves using only the resources around us. To our ancient ancestors, we’d appear as helpless as babies. In short, our forefathers lived more simply than most people today are willing to live and that is why they survived with no grocery store, no cheap oil, no cars, no electricity, and no running water. Just like our forefathers used to do, The Lost Ways Book teaches you how you can survive in the worst-case scenario with the minimum resources available. It comes as a step-by-step guide accompanied by pictures and teaches you how to use basic ingredients to make super-food for your loved ones.

But slowly, even out of this deprivation, recipes grew. The pioneer women learned to use any small pieces of leftover meat and poultry with such vegetables as they might have on hand—carrots, potatoes, corn, turnips, onions—to make a pie smothered with Mormon gravy.

Thrift fritters were a combination of cold mashed potatoes and any other leftover vegetables and/or meat, onion for flavoring, a beaten egg, and seasonings, shaped into patties and browned well on both sides in hot drippings.

One Danish immigrant mother made “corn surprises” to brighten up the scanty diet of bread and molasses. To corn soup, made with ground dried corn, she added anything colorful or tasty that she could find: bits of parsley or wild greens, carrots, sweet peppers, chips of green string beans, chopped whites or yolks of hard-cooked eggs, or a little bit of rice.

While the first few companies of pioneers were comprised mostly of New Englanders, other states were sparsely represented, as were Canada, England, Scotland, Wales, the Isle of Man, Scandinavia, Germany, and even Spain and Australia. Within the next five years thousands more from other European countries poured into Zion. And with them came their favorite national recipes.

By the time these immigrants arrived, the critical food shortages were somewhat alleviated, with most families having access to milk and cream, butter and cheese, beef, lamb, pork, chicken, eggs, flour ground from their own wheat harvest, molasses and honey, and a little later, sugar.

Undoubtedly recipes passed from hand to hand. Recipes for steamed Boston brown bread were probably exchanged for those for Oklahoma graham gems, while German Saints taught the Welsh how to make their spiced red cabbage and learned in return how to make Welsh currant bread. Truly, the cooking pot of the early pioneers was a melting pot for many kinds of cooking from many countries and ranged from the simplest and most humble of recipes to elaborate and elegant dishes from the kitchens of European kings.

Early diaries are filled with happy reminiscences of work and fun: salt-rising bread mixed in mother’s “baking kettle” while traveling in the wagon, then baked over the campfire at night; bacon and sour-dough pancakes cooked over campfires; molasses taffy pulls made possible by generous dippings from the skimmings of molasses boilers; peach preserves cooked in the last of the molasses batch and stored in big barrels; fruits and vegetables dried for winter storage; buffalo pie and wild berries; raspberry and currant and gooseberry bushes planted near the house, yielding fruit quickly and easily.

Chickens were brought across the plains as early as 1847. A favorite among early recipes was velvet chicken soup, brought to the valley by an early English convert.

A short list of Pioneer Recipes