No supermarkets. No refrigerators. No pizza delivery. How did our Virginia forebears survive the long, cold winter? With planning, pluck, and a taste for good, hearty food.
By Steve Russell • Photos by Carole Topalian

It’s a frigid day in the dead of winter, and you’re hungry. So you zip up your parka and dash to the grocery store for a rotisserie chicken and green salad fixings. Or maybe you just pad into the kitchen in thick socks and nuke leftover Thai food. Such is life in the 21st century, that even the coldest weather influences the clothes we wear more than the meals we eat.

It wasn’t too many generations ago, however, that Virginians strived to have enough food simply to survive until spring. In fact, the agrarian calendar revolved around that life-and-death goal. No one is arguing that modern society should return to the hardships of pioneer life (we like takeout and Tivo, too), but understanding the way Virginians lived nearly two centuries ago certainly offers us valuable lessons—especially in an era of economic uncertainty—about doing more with less. And since old-time Virginians were also old-time foodies, there’s even something to be learned about how survival can be delicious.

WORK NOW, EAT LATER

“Preparation for winter, by necessity, was a year-round thing,” says Karen Becker, an interpreter at the Frontier Culture Museum, a recreation of historical rural settings that includes two 19th-century Shenandoah farmsteads. Strolling around the wintry grounds near Staunton in full period costume, Becker uses a sturdy 1820s log home to illustrate how its German immigrant inhabitants would have planned for winter.

The first stop is a modest garden plot, now withered under frost. “Once cold weather arrives, there’s nothing much edible out of the garden until March at best,” says Becker, “so these folks had to put up enough food to feed a family and animals for nearly six months.”

Most of us do well to plan what we’re eating for dinner tonight, much less half a year away. So how did they do it? For starters, by taking advantage of the area’s natural bounty. The Valley was once a major breadbasket, producing wheat for much of the world, so filling a few barrels with flour for later wasn’t a hardship. But even as farmers labored to harvest, thresh, and deliver this money crop to market, they also grew a variety of fruits and vegetables for personal consumption.

The diary of Henry Boswell Jones, a Rockbridge County farmer, notes that his land’s former proprietor “had been starved out,” but also frequently records the condition of his own apricots, cherries, grapes, mushmelons, peaches, pears, raspberries, beans, cucumbers, potatoes, radishes, squash, and turnips. The October 10, 1842, entry demonstrates how the balance between abundance and paucity was always in mind: “Friends left this morning. I gathered eight bushels of apples. Fruit is scarce. The dark moon is the best time for gathering.”

As these crops were harvested from spring to fall, excess would be stored or preserved for winter, typically by the farmer’s wife. Root vegetables—potatoes, carrots, turnips—were placed in the cellar, often buried in dirt or sand to keep them from drying out. Cabbages were pulled up and hung by their roots in the cellar. Even eggs could be saved by covering them with ashes. According to Becker, a good cellar could maintain a temperature of 45 to 55 degrees. “Today we sometimes take the food spoiling thing to an extreme,” she says. “A lot of food is okay for quite a while without being refrigerated.”

For foods that did spoil easily, preservation methods were diverse, ranging from the familiar (pickling cucumbers and beets in vinegar, drying beans and fruits) to the not-so-familiar. “You know how we now blanch peas and green beans and put them straight into the freezer?” asks Becker. “Early Virginians did a version of that minus the freezer. They blanched the beans, put them into a crock, and poured melted fat over them. Mutton fat was preferred because it solidifies harder than lard or beef tallow. Things could be preserved for six months that way, so spring peas could be eaten at Christmas.”

Obviously, the pioneer mindset was to waste nothing. Even in winter, a farmer mending fences and tending livestock from sunup to sundown required 5,000 calories a day (women labored hard, too, rendering fat for candles and processing flax for clothes), and ample food stockpiles helped reduce anxiety when winter sickness inevitably spread. Still, Jones’ February 26, 1843, diary entry illustrates how closely the fortunes of farm and family health were linked: “There is considerable illness in the neighborhood. Many children complaining of bilious ammonia and several families down with fever, and very bad colds in every family. The winter has been cold without much snow. Small grains look badly and some of the clover is frozen out. My stock looks fair.”

A WINTER’S MEAL

By the time of the first hard frost, a farm wife strived to have her cellar shelves and barrels laden with fruits and vegetables. Meanwhile, her husband labored to add to their stores. As we learn in John Jay Janney’s Virginia, the recollections of a man raised in the Loudoun County backwoods in the early 19th century, the first requirement for keeping the cook fires crackling was firewood—lots of it: “After the fall seedling was done we went into the woods and, from the down and dead trees, cut and hauled to the woodpile firewood enough to last all winter, not less than 30 or 40 or even 50 cords.”

Indeed, the sound of a falling ax is common at the Frontier Culture Museum, intermingled with the clank of cast-iron cookware as an interpreter demonstrates open-hearth cooking common in the 1820s. Starting with an impressive blaze in the log home’s kitchen fireplace, she rakes red-hot coals onto the stone hearth (no mean feat when encumbered by several layers of flammable, floor-length skirts), then places on top a Dutch oven containing a pan of cornmeal batter. Another scoop of coals covers the lid.

Bread, whether made of cornmeal or wheat flour, was a daily winter staple, but surprisingly, wasn’t baked every day. That labor-intensive chore was undertaken once a week, sometimes communally, yielding up to 20 loaves of bread, plus pies and cookies, per household.

Hominy was a typical winter dish, too, according to Janney: “Every neighborhood had a hominy mortar”—a log with a bowl bored into one end—“that would hold a peck or more of corn.” Corn and hot water would be put into the bowl and pounded with an iron pestle “until the hulls were loose. … It was eaten boiled, or with milk as we ate mush and milk, or when it got cold, fried for breakfast.”

Back at the Frontier Culture Museum, as the cornbread rises, the interpreter pulls a ham from an antique brining bucket and rewraps it in a fresh, clean cheesecloth. Though beef, chicken, and game weren’t uncommon, the winter diet of Shenandoah Valley farmers in the mid 19th century revolved around corn and pork, explains Becker, noting that a butchered hog yielded a more manageable amount of meat for a family, around 100 pounds, than a steer.

Hams and bacon were typically cured in a brine of saltpeter, sugar, and molasses for six weeks, then hung in a meat house. Some people would also smoke meat to create a crusty exterior to further resist insects and mold. Sausages were stored in lard, similar to the beans described above.

Jones’ fall diary entries make frequent reference to pre-winter hog killings, leading to this December 2, 1842, entry: “…We are tolerably well prepared for a long cold winter which has been predicted from the migration of the squirrels. My stock includes some 16 cows, steers, and calves, 10 head of horses and colts, 10 head of sheep, and about 35 hogs. The stacks of straw, hay, and fodder are better than usual, grain is scarce but with economy I may have a plenty.”

Janney, however, didn’t live quite so high on the hog: “We ate very little fresh meat. About Christmas, when the fat hogs were killed for market, we would have the refuse: the livers, the hearts … the heads and feet; and when the hams were cut apart, we ate the part of the backbone between them, the ‘chine.’”

The young Janney did enjoy some delicacies, describing that when his family took hogs to market in Alexandria near the holidays, they’d return with four or five bushels of oysters: “We would keep till used by piling them on the cellar floor, and when we saw any of them opening, sprinkle them well with brine. … We used to roast them on the kitchen fire. … Our method was to lay two sticks of wood about an inch apart on a good bed of hot coals, and lay the oysters on their backs, so they would not lose any juice, and then we had oysters fit for a queen.”

No doubt such treats helped early Virginians outlast long, hard winters as much as did their daily ration of ham hock, cornbread, and molasses. As the cellar became bare and the flour barrel low, the first green shoots of spring must have been a most welcome sight, promising that the table would again soon be graced by fresh produce.

Surviving another winter could make even a busy farmer contemplate new culinary ventures. Jones’ entry of April 1, 1843: “Fine spring day and I put up fence from orchard to the mill. I fixed up the bee bench and will try my luck with honey.” That honey must have tasted especially good in the middle of the next long winter.

HISTORICAL PRESERVATION
Virginia pioneers used a variety of methods to make their food last.

DRYING

Common for: Fruits, some grains. Why: Sun and wind remove moisture, and therefore the host medium for most disease-causing bacteria.

CURING

Common for: Pork, beef, fish. Why: Salt, sugar, or a combination inhibits pathogen growth. As an added bonus, it makes meat tasty!

PICKLING

Common for: Not just cucumbers—many vegetables, fruits, and meats found their way into the pickling crock. Why: Vinegar and spice solutions were an excellent preservative and landed a tangy taste.

FERMENTATION

Common for: Turning cabbage into sauerkraut, a 19th-century Valley favorite, via the simple introduction of salt. Why: Sometimes pathogens are our pals, when their chemical reaction is controlled to boost flavor and longevity.

JAMS/JELLIES

Common for: Apples, peaches, pears, bramblefruit. Why: Heating fruit with sugar destroys pathogens, breaks down the fruit—and livens up a biscuit.

SAND

Common for: Root vegetables. Why: Kept them from touching, which can cause rot. Also provided a damp, cool environment so they wouldn’t dry out.

ASHES

Common for: Eggs. Why: Same theory as sand, but a bit more gentle on the fragile shells.

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