THEY LIKED SALMON, BUT WANTED BREAD: PACIFIC NORTHWEST COOKING, 1843-1900[1]
Jacqueline Block Williams
1235 22nd Ave. East
Seattle, WA 98112
(206) 322-4197
E-Mail: jbwill2@mindspring.com
"Food," wrote historian Margaret Visser, "is one of the means by which a society creates itself...food choices and presentations are part of every society's tradition and character."[2] Yet, culinary historian Karen Hess has noted that "no other aspect of human endeavor has been so neglected by historians as home cooking [and]....that this neglect is also related to the ageless depreciation of the work of women."[3]
Knowing what we ate adds an important dimension to the study of pioneer northwest history. Tales from the kitchen, as ordinary as baking a loaf of bread, tell us about the pioneer women's fears and joys, expectations and concerns, as well as providing information about prevailing technology, the production of local foodstuffs, and the introduction of new foods. The unknown woman who expressed anger at her husband's gift of a cookbook when the family lacked food, describes an ordinary person who is sometimes happy, sometimes sad, not the passive helpmate portrayed in Hollywood movies. Pioneer Phoebe Judson's pronouncement that she knew she would be the one to milk the cows, reveals a realist, who accepted the hardships of life in a new land. The tales are what historian Elizabeth Jameson calls "the details of daily survival and human touch [which] dominate our lives....a history of daily life, in which women were important actors."[4]
Drawing on diaries, journals, newspapers, cookbooks, and reminiscences, this article uses the preparation of food to show how Northwest women created a society similar to the one they left behind. In particular, it looks at the techniques of creative adaptation and substitution developed by women seeking to overcome food shortages in their new homes.It demonstrates how the women changed or modified older cooking techniques and recipes to provide meals according to family tradition. The paper also explains why the settlers did not adapt Indian foodways as a means of creative adaptation, even though they often relied on the natives to provide the food.
The article follows the settlers from the time they unpacked the all-purpose provision box, carried in the covered wagons, until the Pacific Northwest catches up with the rest of the country. As the pioneer women move from baking bread over an open hearth and pouring water from a pail, to furnishing a kitchen with stove, sink, and icebox, their stories tell us about the realities of daily living in the years when limited supplies made creativity a requirement for continuing the families customary foodways. Their experiences are part of the age-old battle between change and continuity, where the latter looms especially large in a journey across the continent to a land so far from the pioneers' roots.
ADAPTATION
Adaptive cooking has always played a particularly important role for households wanting to use traditional recipes, but lacking the necessary ingredients. For example, when Europeans settled in North and South America they quickly learned to use maize, (Zea mays) or what they called "corn," the proper term for grain whether it was wheat, oats or barley.[5] In New England, English colonists substituted corn for oats and prepared their everyday hearth-cakes or what later became known as johnnycakes. Contrary to popular thought, the cooks did not copy a Native American recipe. They simply recognized the importance of Indian corn and integrated it into their traditional recipes.[6] Such a substitution is a typical response when people settle in unfamiliar lands.
In the Pacific Northwest, the same situation occurred among the first settlers who frequently lived close to native villages. Because the pioneer families lacked the native's knowledge of the country and its natural bounty, they depended on indigenous people for supplies of fish, game and berries.[7] "We have strawberries, raspberries, dew berries, Salal berries, salmon berries, cran berries, whortleberries, and wild grapes...picked by the Indians and brought in by the barrel," Reverend David Blaine wrote his parents in 1853.[8] However, relying on others to gather the food is different from adapting new foodways.Though food shortages called for adaptive techniques and food substitutions women cooked as they always did.They had no desire to try out an Indian recipe. Pioneer families wanted a familiar cuisine, and mothers and wives, sisters and aunts resolved to provide it.Phoebe Judson, who came to the Oregon Country in 1853, wrote that the Indians "dressed and dried the salmon, dug the clams and oysters,....[and that] game was mostly roasted on sticks before the fire," but told this as a curiosity, not the way she, with a fireplace and a stove, would have cooked.[9] The settlers preferred to put dried berries in a pie filling or preserves rather than mashing and molding them into dry cakes, a practice followed by many of the Sound Indian tribes.]10]
Further, by the 1850s when large numbers of immigrants established homes in the Pacific Northwest, there was a fair amount of American cookery literature and recipes available.For women raised in their mothers' kitchens and accustomed to cooking, most of the adaptations and substitutions they would use came from women like themselves. Ideas such as using bran as a coffee substitute had been tried out and perfected in earlier frontier communities.
Also, it is worth noting, by this time the Native Americans had been exposed to non-native foods, such as the potato and wheat, which they incorporated into their diet, and in the case of the potato, frequently sold to the pioneers. Thus, the new settlers had access to a well-liked staple until harvesting such food from their own gardens, and another reason to ignore Native cooking.
Because the potato resembled the camas, a native root, the Indians prepared potatoes by the ancient routine of steaming and roasting. To roast them the natives placed a pile of potatoes in dirt or sand heated with fire, then covered them with more hot sand.For steaming, a container with a small amount of water was heated with hot rocks and then covered.[11] Some tribes peeled the cooked potatoes and dipped them in oil before eating, others ate them plain.]12] Settlers, on the other hand, usually boiled the potatoes, then mashed them with butter and milk or stirred them into a potato salad. It is a classic example of each group of people adhering to its own foodways.
COPING WITH SHORTAGES
The pioneer families who entered Washington and Oregon territories in the 1850s found forests teaming with game, rivers and lakes filled with seafood, and bushes covered with berries.But splendid as the land was, it did not fill all the newcomers' needs. Weary from the six-month trip across the prairie and plains, the new settlers were glad to have salmon, clams and oysters, venison, and duck, but they also wanted wheat to grind into flour, butter to spread on their bread, sugar to sweeten the pies, and real coffee beans to roast and grind.
Arriving in the promised land with all its bounty did not mean an end to challenges. In many instances, depending on the arrival year and proximity to markets, the struggle to provide pleasing meals continued during the first years of settlement. Some women found themselves kneading dough made of bran instead of flour or baking a cake without eggs.Others filled pie crusts with cooked beans or wild greens in place of fresh fruit.When meals depended upon what you trapped, shot, picked, or grew, the ability to adapt creatively made daily living easier and more pleasant.
Several factors contributed to the scarcity of kitchen supplies. Merchants offering goods for sale had little control over the sources of production or the price. In the early years of settlement, when large numbers of emigrants arrived in the Pacific Northwest, prepared or processed food had to be imported from the states and foreign ports. A bad economy on the East Coast caused factories to produce less, which decreased or delayed the number of ships carrying goods. This in turn might mean that vessels only stopped at ports where the owners expected to do large amounts of business. In 1852-53, when the census showed that 170 persons lived in King County, pioneers noted that "few vessels visited the Sound for several months, and as a consequence it was a time of great scarcity, amounting almost to distress."[13] Merchants often reaped higher profits by shipping goods to California mines."[I]t is rather hard times for emigrants that have come in here with nothing. Provisions are so high there is such a call from the mines that it has raised provisions to a high rate flour is worth 12 dollars a hundred," Martha S. Read wrote from Salem, Oregon Territory in 1852.[14]
This desire for a bigger profit and rapid population growth in Oregon and Washington territories meant that shopkeepers had trouble keeping up with the settlers' food demands."So many people have come into Oregon during the last six months that provisions are very scarce and very high, in fact there is scarcely anything to eat in the country," wrote Thornton McElroy in 1853.[15] Such a constantly changing economy meant that anyone opening a business faced an uncertain future. "The undersigned were compelled to box up their goods and suspend for a time, but are now pleased to notify their good patrons, that they are now reopening," merchants J.D. and W.C. Holman announced in a notice to The Oregon Spectator on June 27, 1850. At other times stores might be open and supplies available, but settlers did not have money. The settlers "can get anything here if only the cash is forth coming," wrote Alice Roberts who lived in Spring Valley, a town near Spokane.[16]
Local tradesmen complained that companies such as Hudson's Bay and Benson & Brothers in New York "fix the price of their merchandise and that of our surplus produce, to suit an insatiable thirst for gain, whilst our indigent families and unoffending [sic] women and children must pay the penalty."17 In one case the merchant M.M. McCarver stated that unscrupulous business men had raised the price of salt from 62.5 cents to $2 per bushel.[18]
Furthermore, even in a good economy, merchants never knew for certain if the merchandise ordered would appear. Goods coming by ships faced many hazards. Orders were mixed up or lost, storms blew vessels off course, and poorly crated goods arrived damaged.
Locally, the weather determined production. Too much rain caused wheat to sprout before mills could grind it into flour.An early frost delayed planting; a late frost prevented harvesting.In the harsh winter of 1862, freezing temperatures killed thousands of cows and pigs, causing prices to soar. "When pork was killed in the fall it sold for 4¢ per pound; it is already 25¢ [February] and the prospects are that it may be 50¢," Catharine Blaine wrote her family.[19]
Finally, one good year did not indicate an end of shortages. Nor did a good year for one family imply that everyone in the Territory had a full larder. In 1854 the Blaine family, who lived in Seattle, found ample amounts of food selling for moderate prices. A year later they complained of shortages and higher prices. Willis and Mary Ann Boatman, who lived in the Puyallup Valley, saw 1855 as a year of improvement as they "managed to get grain and vegetables enough to do us the coming year."20 They had been living on potatoes with pea or wheat coffee.
Settlers, in order to have control over their food supply, immediately planted a garden and sowed wheat. "Mr. Judson plowed the garden, turning the wild grass under the gravel on top, without fertilizing, for we had nothing to fertilize garden seeds we had brought with us," wrote Phoebe Judson.21 Unfortunately, Judson had to admit that the garden only produced a crop of sorrel, necessitating a move to better land and a better garden.
Others had better luck. "Our garden is doing as well as we can expect. We shall get a few cucumbers for pickles, a little green corn, and if the vines bear well a great many tomatoes, besides potatoes, beets, onions, and cabbages. We sowed those carrot seeds you sent and have four nice carrots growing from them," Catharine Blaine wrote her family.[22]
Settlers frequently requested seeds from plants growing in their former homes.Catharine Blaine asked her family for "a few grains of different kinds of wheat...I would like to see some of our wheat growing here."[23] Louise Swift requested red pepper seeds but wrote, "P.S. all seeds are accepted." And Abigail Malick asked for "cantelope seads, musk-mellone, greap, cabage, parcely, and lettus, an shougar peas and enney sort of seades you have."[24]Taking root in freshly dug soil, the emerging plants connected families to those left behind. Malick, who lived near Fort Vancouver with its well stocked stores, did not need seeds from home, but she wanted to recreate a garden similar to the one in Illinois.
Pioneers missed a loaf of bread more than any other food. "As it [bread] was not rained down from heaven, some of the emigrants were obliged to go hungry for the 'staff of life,'" wrote pioneer Phoebe Judson.[25] Just two weeks without bread proved a hardship for the Masterson family."We had everything in plenty except bread...we felt awkward trying to eat without it. The children cried for bread, and mother cried because she had none for them."[26] They agreed with Arthur Denny who observed that though "some substantial life-supporting food can always be obtained on Puget Sound,...it is hard for civilized man to live without bread."[27]
Making a plea for more flour,The Columbian, a newspaper in Olympia, Washington Territory, printed this letter, August 13, 1853.
| Our market is almost bare of this indispensable article. Our traders should know that from the present time onward the demand for flour will be very much augmented. If the merchants of San Francisco wish to know what they should ship to the SOUND we tell them flour and other staples of subsistence, but flour more particularly than anything else. |
In the mid-nineteenth century people purchased flour that varied from unbolted, coarse ground wheat (shorts) to superfine. Superfine, the closest to pure white flour, cost the most.When low bank accounts and/or a scarcity of grain prevailed, Northwest cooks mixed and kneaded the cheaper grinds such as shorts and middlings, an even coarser grain containing large amounts of bran and frequently used as animal feed. "We first used our flour, then made bread of the middlings, then came the shorts and we expected to have to use the bran for bread," a pioneer recalled.[28] "That first winter in Oregon [1852] we lived on shorts bread", said Lavina Flora Hamilton.[29]
Looking forward to the day when she could quit using bran, an exhausted, irritated homemaker bemoaned her husband's gift of a cookbook:
| Our family was subsisting on bran, and were all sick, when my husband had the good fortune to find employment.I naturally expected that with his first day's wages he would bring home some nourishing food, but, what was my indignant disappointment, when in the place of food, he handed me a cook book...No doubt expecting [me] from those receipts to manufacture a variety of delicacies out of bran.[30] |
Culinary historian Karen Hess suggests that people's likes and dislikes about using a different ingredient "depends on the ease with which it can be substituted for a familiar one in traditional recipes."[31] Certainly bran illustrates the case of a poor substitute. Wheat flour produces such good bread because it contains gluten, which along with yeast makes bread rise. Bran has no gluten. One can make a type of bread from bran, but it will be a boring, flat, dense bread. Pioneers used it, but longed for the real thing.
Conversely, a few complained about the myriad of ingredients used to fill pie crusts. If anything, the fact that pies could be filled with meat, vegetables, or fruit, and made savory or sweet, made it a universal favorite. Most people would probably have agreed with the cookery writer who said, "if we have a national dish we suppose its name is pie."[32] Pies, however, are not an American invention. Europeans particularly the English whose cookbooks were the first used by Americans, filled pastry long before the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock. In those years meat seemed to be the preferred ingredient. Fruit did not take first place as a filling until the nineteenth century. In American Cookery, published in 1796, and the first cookbook to be published in America, eight out of thirteen pie recipes used meat; whereas only five call for fruit, three of which used fresh or dried apples.
By the time emigrants arrived in the northwest, fruit pies replaced meat pies in popularity, with apple pies becoming an American favorite. And although most people complained about dried apples, and coined ditties such as "spit in my eyes, and tell me lies, but give me no dried apple pies," Allie Roberts, in a letter to her sister, asked her mother to "tuck in some of those dried apples you had left over. They are 20 cents a lb. out here."[33]
In spite of shortages such as fresh fruit, sugar, butter, and eggs, serving dessert seemed to be important to American women during the last half of the nineteenth century. Most likely this stemmed from the Victorian era's concern with ritual and appearance. Being able to bring dessert to the table announced that you had more than the bare necessities.Moreover, nineteenth-century cookbooks and magazines abounded with recipes for dessert. Though only affluent households had the income to prepare the elaborate, rich dishes, many women living in crude log cabins served dessert. Though many women must have longed to have the ingredients and time to prepare the more complicated cookery ideas. Before moving to the Oregon Country, many had lived in affluent households and had probably learned to make an elegant dessert.
Instead, Pacific Northwest women relied on the tried and true ways of using available ingredients. For example, when baking a pie, cooks replaced sugar with molasses, which was cheap and usually obtainable, and might substitute crackers for apple or vinegar for lemons. Those really in dire straits might have sweetened sorrel (greens) with sorghum and placed that mixture in a pie crust.
Whether women had actually made these dishes before coming West is difficult to know, but they undoubtedly had known about them. Variations of the cracker and vinegar pie appeared in many cookbooks. In 1857, The Washington Republican, a Steilacoom newspaper, printed a recipe for Cracker Pie which came from The Rural New Yorker.Vinegar pie, with its many variations, fitted in well with the pioneer economy; besides replacing lemons, it called for fewer eggs and sugar.
Just about everyone appreciated the raspberries, strawberries, dew berries, salal berries, salmon berries, currants, and huckleberries that grew in profusion in the Pacific Northwest."The strawberries are white with flowers. The raspberries are full of buds...If you are fond of strawberries and cream make your visit right soon and Oh! What a delightful time we will have," Sarah McElroy wrote her brother.[34]
It goes without saying that gathering ripe fruit kept the family busy. One day Catharine Blaine "got 10 or 12 quarts of raspberries" which she dried in sugar, and the next day she planned to "get some for jam, jell, and wine." Blaine intended to combine some of the raspberries with dew berries and make wine, which "will answer a better purpose for sacrament purposes than the poison we buy."[35]
More often than not, eggless cakes and puddings puffed up over the fire, but again the cook had to "make do." Acquiring a sizable chicken population took time. Even if families had chickens, egg baskets stood empty in the winter, because hens do not lay eggs in dark, cold, unheated places. Until hen houses had heat and light in the winter, cooks substituted, used preserved eggs, or went without. They did not give up cakes and puddings."Catharine makes very good cake without eggs & milk," the Reverend David Blaine wrote his family.[36]
When the faithful hen did lay eggs, women used them judiciously. Smart cooks, such as the women in Fourth Plain, a community near Vancouver, Washington, added them to the batter "after all the other ingredients were thoroughly mixed, [so that] two would go as far as three."[37] Some most likely followed the advice of popular nineteenth-century cookery writers such as Sarah Hale. Hale wrote that a spoonful of yeast could be substituted for two eggs, and suggested that "two large spoonfuls of snow will supply the place of 1 egg, and make a pudding equally good."[38]
THE WEST CATCHES UP
Shortages began decreasing when the railroads connected the West with the East. Also after the Civil War manufacturing exploded to produce large numbers of new products. In the urban areas of the Pacific Northwest prosperous families no longer had to engage in creative adaptation and substitution. Desirable new goods on the market, and out-of-season foods kept fresh with refrigeration, meant that the burgeoning middle-class could furnish its kitchens and pantries far beyond the bare necessities. "The California Market is beginning to supply us with vegetables. We had cauliflower and new cabbage and could have had asparagus and lettuce but it looked wilted," Gilbert wrote to her family in February.[39] Merchants, such as Wilson and Dunlap from Olympia, and Schwabacher Brothers & Co. in Seattle had well-stocked stores. Women who set up housekeeping could find an ever-increasing number of prepared foods, including tomatoes in syrup, preserved Louisiana figs, Christmas plum pudding, brandy peaches; bottles of ketchup, mustard, and Worcestershire sauce; canned fruit, vegetables, meat, and oysters; preserves and sweetmeats, condensed milk, and roasted coffee; plus a variety of china and glass dishes, Mason jars, and assorted cookware.[40]
The introduction of canned goods and roasted coffee added novelty and variety to everyday meals.Middle class housewives could serve foods once available only to the wealthy.Though women still took pride in having a full larder, they no longer had to spend hours and hours shredding cabbage for sauerkraut or churning cream into butter.
Although one might expect that the end of creative adaptation and substitution meant women spent less time in the kitchen, it did not. The increasingly large number of cookbooks published after the Civil War contained recipes that required a great deal of time and labor.Fancy, molded desserts, such as Oranges Filled with Jelly, a recipe that appeared in The Washington Standard, an Olympia newspaper, had a multitude of steps.41 Instructions to cut vegetables into decorative shapes before adding to soups, or how to serve color-coordinated, multicourse dinners, made cooking complicated.[42]
Bemoaning the "good old days," The Washington Standard wrote: "In these times of canned fruit we seldom hear of preserves, and very rarely do we taste sauce 'put up' as our grandmothers used to prepare it."43 Responding to the array of goods in Spokane, Adelaide Sutton Gilbert wrote her family, "I bought many cakes - pies, bread, and fruit, & only cooked meats and vegetables." Sarah McElroy's handwritten recipes, such as peach pudding with canned peaches, fruit salad with fresh oranges and canned pineapple, and tapioca pudding, reflect the use of prepared foods and new ideas.[44]
The newspaper writer's complaint notwithstanding, Gilbert, like many other women, took pride in "putting up food," and did continue to pickle and can. "We are getting everything now in market and all sorts of fruit and vegetables...[M]y sewing and fruit canning are going to drive me for a while."[45] When adapting and substituting was no longer necessary, cooks could concentrate on upgrading meals with "superior" home-made products. "I made 14 glasses of strawberry jam and about as many of currant jelly also four bottles of cherries and four of peaches....It is nice cool weather now for that sort of work," Gilbert wrote her folks at home.[46] By this time, the cook had no trouble finding the proper ingredients and containers to hold the jam. Though she still had to stir fruit over a hot stove, it was easier to put up preserves in clean, glass Mason jars than re-used coal oil cans.
In her letters home Gilbert often complained about cooking and the lack of labor saving machines. "I wonder how long it would be [before having a machine] if men had the housework to do," she speculated.[47] Yet she bragged she could make as good an apple pie as her mother, filled her letters with what she served for dinner, and seemed pleased when the guests "made a great fuss" over supper.
Gilbert exemplified the conflict between pure domesticity, doing work as their mothers, considered by some people to be an abiding virtue, and domestic science, a new profession, that promoted a household run efficiently under the guidance of a trained technician.This new scientific movement considered old-fashioned, uneducated housekeeping to be "drudgery." Led and trained by founder Ellen Richards, who started The Woman's Laboratory at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1876, the domestic scientists worked on "underscoring the dignity and respectability of home tasks."48 Through cooking classes at the Boston Cooking School, articles in national magazines, and cookbooks, includingThe Boston Cooking-School Cook Book, often known simply asThe Fannie Farmer Cook Book, domestic scientists dispersed information about nutrition and the use of new household appliances as well as the uses of spices and condiments, and how to make a dish attractive with special garnishes.
As settlers became residents they may have accepted the fact that the Pacific Northwest was home, but they learned about homemaking from eastern publications.Godey's Lady's Book, published by cookery expert Sarah Hale,The American Woman's Home by Catharine Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe, women's magazines such as Ladies' Home Journal and New England Kitchen Magazine, and numerous cookbooks could be purchased in Washington and Oregon or ordered by mail from the East.[49] It is not until 1885 that The Web-Foot Cook Book, considered the first Pacific Northwest cookbook, appears. And though the recipes are submitted by women from the First Presbyterian Church of Portland, Oregon, the book has only one recipe (To Fry Small Olympia Oysters) that highlights a special northwest flavor. The rest are old-time favorites like clam chowder, biscuits, and baked beans. However, a check of ingredients and advertisements in this cookbook and the few others, including, A Feast of Good Things (Spokane, 1895), and Saint Peter's Cook Book (Pomeroy, 1887), published before the twentieth century does make clear that in the kitchen, the West had caught up with the East.
By the last quarter of the nineteenth century, except in new, sparsely settled areas such as Washington's Okanogan County, cooks no longer had to search for flour or use molasses instead of white sugar. They could buy fresh bread, fresh butter, ground coffee, and even fresh salmon, which by now appeared in elegant dinners. By observing women in the kitchen as they moved through the period of shortages that demanded creative adaptation and substitution to the period of plenty that allowed them to choose new and appealing foods and equipment, one appreciates and understands the importance they placed on cookery and mealtimes. This commitment to cherished foodways, even when modified, supports women's role in effecting the balance between continuity and change.
Notes:
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1. This paper is based on an article, "Much Depends on Dinner," that will appear in Pacific Northwest Quarterly, Spring, 1999
2. Margaret Visser, Much Depends on Dinner.New York: Grove Press, 1986, 12.
3. Karen Hess, Martha Washington's Booke of Cookery . New York: Columbia University Press, 1982, 3.
4. Elizabeth Jameson, "Women as Workers, Women as Civilizers: True Womanhood in the American West," in Susan Armitage and Elizabeth Jameson, The Women's West . Norman, Oklahoma: University of Oklahoma Press, 1987, 161.
5. Betty Fussell, The Story of Corn.New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1992, p. 17.
6. Karen Hess, The Carolina Rice Kitchen.Columbia, South Carolina: University of South Carolina Press, 1992, 124-125.
7. Alexandra Harmon, "A Different Kind of Indians: Negotiating the Meanings of 'Indian' and 'Tribe' in the Puget Sound Region, 1820-1970" (Ph.D. dissertation), University of Washington. 1995, Chapter 2.
8. David Blaine to Family, Dec. 6, 1853, Box 1/3, Blaine Family Papers, Acc. 4611-001, University of Washington Libraries/Manuscripts and Archives (UWL/MUA)
9. Phoebe Goodell Judson, A Pioneer's Search for An Ideal Home.1925; reprint, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1984, pp. 112-113.
10. Hermann Haeberlin and Erna Gunther, The Indians of Puget Sound. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1939, 22-23.
11. Ibid.
12. James G. Swan, The Indians of Cape Flattery, at the Entrance to the Strait of Fuca, Washington Territory.Washington, D.C.: Washington Smithsonian Institution, 1870, 26.See also, Jacqueline Williams, "Potatoes: A Washington Tradition," Columbia: The Magazine of Northwest History 10:3 (Fall 1996).
13. Arthur A. Denny, Pioneer Days on Puget Sound . 1888 reprint. Fairfield, Wash.: Ye Galleon Press, 1979, 51.
14. Kenneth Holmes, ed. Covered Wagon Women. Diaries & Letters From the Western Trails, 1840-1890, ll vols. Glendale, Calif., 1983. 5:249.
15. Thornton McElroy to Sarah McElroy, January 11, 1853, Box 1/38, McElroy Family Papers, Acc. #27, 101, 169, UWL/MUA.
16. Allie (Alice) to Sister, April 18, 1884, Box 2 / Alice, MS45, Eastern Washington Historical Society.
17. Oregon Spectator, Oregon City, July 23, 1846.
18. Ibid.
19. Catharine Blaine to Mother, Feb. 16, 1862, Box 1/23, Blaine Family, Acc. 4611-001, UWL/MUA.
20. Weldon W. Rau, Pioneering the Washington Territory. Olympia: Historic Fort Steilacoom Association, 1993, 37.
21. Phoebe Goodell Judson, A Pioneer's Search for An Ideal Home, 1925; reprint, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1984, 105.
22. Catharine Blaine to Family, August 5, 1854, Box 1/14, Blaine Family.
23. Ibid., Nov. 2, 1854.
24. Lillian Schlissel, Byrd Gibbens, Elizabeth Hampsten, Far From Home: Families of the Westward Journey .New York: Schocken Books, 1989, XVI, 29.
25. Phoebe Goodell Judson, A Pioneer's Search for An Ideal Home, 90.
26. Martha Gay Masterson, One Woman's West: Recollections of the Oregon Trail and Settling the Northwest Country.Eugene, Oregon: Spencer Butte Press, 1986, X11.
27.Arthur A. Denny, Pioneer Days on Puget Sound, 1888 reprint. Fairfield, Wash.: Ye Galleon Press, 1979, 51.
28. Told by the Pioneers, 3 Vols. Olympia, Wash.: Works Project Administration, 1937, 3:93.
29. Sarah Hunt Stevens, Book of Remembrance of Marion County. Oregon Pioneers 1840 - 1860.Portland: The Berncliff Press, 1927, 245.
30. Phoebe Goodell Judson, A Pioneer's Search for An Ideal Home, 90.
31. See Karen Hess' introduction in Amelia Simmons, American Cookery (1796: reprint, Bedford, MA.: Applewood Books, 1996), X111.
32. "Concerning Pies," The Household 8:12.(December 1874), 271, cited in Williams Woys Weaver, America Eats (New York: Harper & Rows), 69.
33. Allie (Alice) to Sister, April 18, 1884, Box 2/4, Alice Roberts, MS45, Eastern Washington Historical Society
34. Sarah McElroy to Brother, January 26, 1858, Box 2/7, McElroy Family Papers.
35. Catharine Blaine to Family, July 17, 1855, Box 1/16, Blaine Family Papers.
36. David Blaine to Family, Aug., 1,1854, Box 1/3, Blaine Family.
37. Elizabeth Gedney, "Cross-Section of Pioneer Life at Fourth Plain", Oregon Historical Quarterly 43:1 (March, 1942) :26.
38. Sarah J. Hale, Mrs. Hale's New Cook Book, (Philadelphia: T.B. Peterson And Brothers, 1857), 334.
39. "Special Issue: The Life and Letters of Adelaide Sutton Gilbert, Spokane Pioneer," The Pacific Northwest Forum 5:1 (Winter-Spring 1992) : 39.
40. Foods mentioned appear in Washington and Oregon newspaper advertisements, Financial Records-Invoices, Box 2/11; Wilson and Dunlap Papers, UWL/MUA, and A. McDonald, L. Schwabacher v. William H. Watson, District Court at Dayton, Columbia Country, Washington Territory, Frontier Justice Case Files-Washington Territorial Court Records, Olympia, Washington.
41. Washington Standard, Olympia, July 17, 1869.
42. Laura Shapiro, Perfection Salad (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1986), 47-71.
43. Washington Standard, July 3, 1869.
44. Sarah McElroy, Journals, etc., Box 2-11, McElroy Family Papers.
45. Adelaide Sutton Gilbert, The Pacific Northwest Forum 5:1 (Winter-Spring 1992) : 75.
46. Gilbert, p. 67.
47. Ibid., 11.
48. Laura Shapiro, Perfection Salad, 38-46, 42.
49. Kathyrn Grover, ed., Dining in America 1850-1900 Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press, 1987, 85-113.
