July 1, 2010 - In an age where you can have a debate about the definition of "real" food, it's sobering to look back at what even our recent ancestors considered real food. We are told now that to determine if a grocery item qualifies as real we should ask, "Would my grandmother or great grandmother have recognized this as food?"
For some of us, that opens up whole new culinary possibilities, most of which are quickly rejected by the modern palette. That's because those early settlers, after they harvested an animal, ate all of it. Somebody had to sample all of the native plants, or consult with local tribes, to determine which ones were edible or useful and which ones were poisonous or foul. That information, along with the "good parts" of an animal, stayed with the settlers' families until quite recently.
Even after a few enterprising individuals opened mercantile stores in frontier settlements, people could not rely on a trip to the store to supply all their grocery needs. Most of the settlers were a day or two away by wagon, because early settlers didn't always settle in settlements. People were expected to supply most of their meat and vegetables and so these stores specialized in basics -- or luxuries -- like flour, sugar and coffee. Semi-annual trips to the store included purchases of several 100-pound sacks of those items and maybe some salt and pepper. Flour was expensive so cornbread was a staple and flour biscuits were a rare treat until railroads made supplies of flour more plentiful.
Meanwhile, back on the frontier, people were most often getting their meat from domestic animals, especially hogs, and supplementing that with wild game. When they ate, they went what you would call "whole hog." Just about every part of the animal would be served in one form or another, and the fact that a trip to the store was a rough and often dangerous multi-day trip was only part of the reason.
Writer and artist E. Dan Klepper is the son of Dan Klepper, a long-time and highly respected Texas outdoors writer who knew nearly everything about the animals he killed, including how to remove and prepare for the table just about every part of the animal. As a kid, the younger Klepper ate a lot of things that people today would not only describe as inedible, but also with words like "revolting" and "disgusting."
"There is a prevailing misconception that our relatives of centuries past ate the entire animal, including brains, feet, viscera and even eyeballs, due to an overriding sense of conservation. But that wasn't necessarily true. They ate everything simply because it all tasted good," Klepper wrote.
That was probably the case for royalty, too, though their descendants might not admit it today. In Europe, wild game was reserved mostly for the king and his family and friends. Domestic livestock was the common fare for the masses. A cookbook compiled by Martha Washington in the 1700s contained a recipe for "Umbles Pie," which featured the heart and lungs of livestock or game. The umbles that most people ate came from a farm animal, usually a hog. Martha Washington's recipe allows the cook to substitute "ye humbles of a deere" for the livestock.
In time, the name of the dish was corrupted to "humbles," which reduced the pie, at least in a linguistic sense. By the time Texas was being settled, the term Humble Pie was used to designate that or another dish reserved for poor people who had little else to eat. By then, the environment where the wild game lived was changing and the taste of wild game changed too.
"Wild game, fish and fowl were extraordinarily flavorful before humans began to influence environmental factors that changed the way things tasted," Klepper wrote. "The lack of pollutants and pesticides meant that the entire food chain, from seeds, browse and bugs to the flesh of the animals that ate them, retained its natural flavor all the way up the ladder. Whether one was eating the prime cut or the bony foot it once walked upon, everything about the animal proved savory."
If our grandparents gazed upon a modern meat case at the grocery store they might recognize some of what's available there, but they would no doubt wonder about where the rest of the animal, including some of the "good parts," went. Maybe they would figure the king got hold of them before anybody else had a chance.
