Frontier Fridays: Pioneer Recipes

here are a few recipes our pioneer ancestors might have had...this week -  breads

Corn Meal Gems
2 cupfuls of flour
1 cupful of corn meal (bolted is best)
2 cupfuls of milk
2 teaspoons of cream of tarter
1 teaspoon of baking soda
1 egg
1/2 cupful of Sugar
1/2 teaspoon of salt
stir the flour and meal together, adding the cream of tarter, soda, salt and sugar.  Beat the egg, add the milk to it and stir into the other ingredients.  Bake in a muffin pan 20 minutes.

Brown Bread
1 cupful of Indian Meal
1 cupful of rye meal
1/2 cupful of flour
1 cupful of molasses
1 cupful of milk or water
1 teaspoon of soda
Put the meals and flour together.  Stir in soda into molasses until it foams.  Add salt and milk or water.  Mix all together.  Bake in a tin pail with cover for 2 1/2 hours.

Bannocks
1 cupful of thick sour milk
1/2 cupful of sugar
1 egg
2 cupfuls of flour
1/2 cupful of Indian Meal
1 teaspoonful of soda
a pinch of salt
Make the mixture stiff enough to drop from a spoon.  Drop mixture, size of a walnut, into boiling fat.  Serve warm with maple syrup.

Fried Bread
After frying pork or bacon, put into the fat slices of stale bread.  As it fries, pour over each slice a little milk or water and salt to taste, turn and fry on the opposite side.  This is a very appetizing dish.  (doesn't sound to appetizing with water?)

Graham Bread
3 cupfuls of flour
3 cupfuls of graham meal
3 tablespoons of sugar
1 tablespoon of lard
1 teaspoon of salt
1 yeast cake
Mix flour and meal together and rub in lard, sugar and salt.  Add yeast cake which has been dissolved in 1/2 cup of cold water.  Mix with warm water at night.  Set in a warm place to rise. In the morning stir and let rise to twice its bulk.  Knead and put in baking pans.  Raise again and bake 45 minutes.

Nut Bread
2 1/2 cupfuls of flour
3 teaspoons of baking powder
1/4 teaspoon of salt
1/2 cupful of sugar
1 egg
1 cupful of milk
3/4 cupful of walnut meats
beat egg and sugar together, then add milk and salt.  Sift baking powder into the dry flour, and put all ingredients together.  Add the nuts last, covering with a little flour to prevent falling and make in moderate oven for one hour.