The Importance of Corn to The Early Settlers
published by smokychristine on Jun 13, 2012
When flour was hard to get, corn became indispensable.
Corn and cornmeal became most important to settlers from the time they first came to the frontier until after the turn of the century. Corn was very easy to grow, making it easily available and used in place of flour almost without exception by many frontier families. The cobs were used to provide fuel in the cooking and heating stoves.
After the mature corn was ground at the local mill, the cook sifted out the hulls with a wide-rimmed shaker sieve. No matter how hard they tried to come up with different ways to prepare corn meal, no matter how hard the effort to disguise it, as one old timer put it: “it was still corn.”
A young schoolteacher who lived with a family in the area where she taught in frontier Nebraska wrote of her experience in eating on the frontier:
“Their manner of living is so different from ours that it just about used me up. For breakfast we had corn bread, salt pork, and black coffee. For dinner, greens, wild ones at that, boiled pork and cold corn bread, washed down with ‘beverage.’ For supper we had hoe cake, cold greens, and pork with coffee. The ‘beverage’ was put upon the table in aa wooden pail and dished out in tin cups. When asked if I would have some of the ‘aforesaid’, I said ‘yes’, thinking it perhaps was cider, but found out it was vinegar, brown sugar and warm creek water.”
When we think of wanting to live in “the good old days,” how many of us have any concept of how it actually was?
# 1 by h20ho
June 13th, 2012 at 10:39 pm #
Corn is still important but now you don’t even know that everything you eat in America has some product of corn in it.
# 2 by sabanawaz
June 13th, 2012 at 11:52 pm #
great info
# 3 by KittyK
June 14th, 2012 at 12:09 am #
A most humbling story for each of us to ponder…
# 4 by RemieRyan
June 14th, 2012 at 1:44 am #
corn is much cheaper than rice. Every time my mama cook corn as substitute to rice…I would always ask her “Ma, are we that poor?” We are poor but not to the extent that we should eat corn.I have tasted corn but I prefer eating rice.
# 5 by Sunjhini
June 14th, 2012 at 6:16 am #
wonderful share
# 6 by realityspeaks
June 14th, 2012 at 7:46 am #
Excellent share.
# 7 by Lisa Marie Mottert
June 14th, 2012 at 4:12 pm #
Great article…and in those days they worked harder, and probably never complained. Probably a whole lot smarter, because they used their minds instead of machines.
# 8 by Martin Kloess
June 14th, 2012 at 5:19 pm #
Thank you for this
# 9 by Chris Bailie
June 15th, 2012 at 7:12 am #
Great article, thank you very much.
# 10 by jennifer eiffel01
June 15th, 2012 at 9:46 am #
That beverage with the vinegar and the rest of the food did not sound so well either
# 11 by momofplenty
June 16th, 2012 at 7:39 am #
Wow, how interesters