The Way We Ate: Pacific Northwest Cooking, 1843-1900

by Jacqueline Williams

Overview

Probing diaries, letters, business journals, and newspapers for morsels of information, food historian Jackie Williams here follows pioneers from the earliest years of settlement in the Northwest—when smoldering logs in a fireplace stood in for a stove, and water had to be hauled from a stream or well—to the times when railroads brought Pacific Northwest cooks the latest ingredients and implements. The fifty-year journey described in The Way We Ate documents a change from a land with few stores and inadequate housing to one with business establishments bursting with goods and homes decorated with the latest finery.

Like she did in her earlier acclaimed volume, Wagon Wheel Kitchens: Food on the Oregon Trail, Williams has in her latest book shed important new light on a little-understood aspect of our past. These tales of a pioneer wife bemoaning her husband's gift of a cookbook when she really needed more food, or preparing sweets and savories for holiday celebrations when the kitchen was just a tiny space in a one-room log cabin, show another side of the grim-faced pioneers portrayed in movies. Here we encounter real American history and culture, one that vividly portrays the daily lives of the people who won the West—not in Hollywood gun battles, but in the kitchens and fields of a world that has disappeared. Interlacing a lively narrative with the pioneers' own words, The Way We Ate is truly a feast for those who believe that "much depends on dinner."

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780874221367
Publisher:	Washington State University Press
Publication date:	11/18/1996
Pages:	240
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.62(d)

About the Author

Jacqueline Williams researches and writes about the daily life of those who traveled the Oregon Trail and settled in the Pacific Northwest. She is the author of Wagon Wheel Kitchens: Food on the Oregon Trail and co-author of the cookbooks, No Salt, No Sugar, No Fat; Hold the Fat, Sugar, and Salt; and Lowfat American Favorites. Williams lives in Seattle where she collects early Pacific Northwest cookbooks.

Table of Contents

Contents

Foreword, by Ruth Kirk

Preface

Acknowledgments

Chapter One: First Homes, First Kitchens

Chapter Two: Water: One Unfailing Luxury

Chapter Three: We Have a Cook Stove

Chapter Four: Flour: Staple of Subsistence

Chapter Five: Improvising in the Kitchen

Chapter Six: Dried, Preserved, and Pickled

Chapter Seven: The Barnyard Provides

Chapter Eight: In the Midst of Plenty

Chapter Nine: Parties and Special Days

Appendix: Pacific Northwest Population 1849-1890

Endnotes

About the Author

Index

Editorial Reviews

"An extraordinary adventure in learning how settlements were transformed not only by human ingenuity and industry, but by adventure, manufacture, and transportation."

—Western Historical Quarterly

"Through this well-researched and well-written work, readers are provided with a rich portrait of the early Pacific Northwest inhabitants."

—Choice

"The most comprehensive work about the foodways of Western emigrants."

—Sandra L. Oliver, Editor and Publisher, Food History News

"It is rare to find a book I can praise so highly. Truly an invaluable work about the daily life of Pacific Northwest settlers."

—Karen Hess, author, The Taste of America

From the Publisher