Readings. 65
The writer observes that at Onovas she saw two Mayo Indians with fair hair, red beards, and light blue eyes, resembling Swedes, and found that they were descendants from the survivors of a Danish ship wrecked on the coast, who had been kept as captives.
Traditionary American Local Dishes. — In the " American Kitchen Magazine," November, 1899, Mrs. F. D. Bergen takes occasion to give an account of peculiar dishes confined to a limited territory, and in popular use here and there in the United States. After making mention of " apple- butter " and " peach-butter," as made in Ohio, she adds : " Many years ago, while living in that part of the country, I was familiar with pear, plum, grape, quince, and tomato butter, and most of these were very palatable, As a rule, all were sweetened with sugar, though occasionally, for economy's sake, sweet cider was substituted.
" An uncanny substitute for butter, where garden and orchard fruits were far from plentiful, was a dark, smooth sauce made of common field pump- kins. ... I do not know whether elderberry-butter still holds its place in the larder in Ohio and westward, but twenty years ago many families, by no means poor, during every year consumed gallons of this unsavory sauce, made by boiling elderberries in sorghum molasses. Jelly, too, made from elderberries and flavored with lemon, was accounted a delicacy.
" The ' pie-belt ' is generally supposed to be best developed in New Eng- land, but I doubt if in quantity or kinds of pies any State therein can quite equal some of the Middle States. Marvellous ingenuity has been shown in the invention of certain pies that are more or less local, and that in a few more years will doubtless have become absolutely unknown. It is only in locali- ties too remote from railroads to have a variety of foreign fruits brought at all seasons of the year, that such recipes as some I am about to describe will survive. In farming districts, where pie is considered a necessary article of diet in at least two out of three meals, when the season of small fruits has passed, housewives have only apples and dried fruits to fall back upon with which to make pies. So it is not strange that some recipes quite unknown to urban families should have been devised. There, too, in pies as in preserves, variety is counted of consequence. In localities where elderberries are made into jelly and marmalade, they are also used for pies. Even in the summer, when other more palatable fruits abound, quantities are stewed for this purpose. They are also dried or canned to use in the same way in winter and spring. The odor of the fruit was to me always nauseous, and I knew without tasting that I should dislike the flavor.
" Pies made of dried apples, stewed and mashed, are common in spring- time in various parts of the United States, but, as far as I can learn, it is less customary to make them of a mixture of dried-apple sauce and green currants. As a little girl, many a quart of green currants have I picked and stemmed, some for plain currant-pie, others to sprinkle in the dried- apple pie filling, and others to stew for sauce. Where fresh fruits, save apples, are rare or unknown, any acid flavor, I suppose, is grateful after a long winter. I have been told that the sour leaves of both wood and field
vol. xiii. — no. 48. 5
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