We're Martha and Dick Hartley.

We're volunteer docents at Fort New Salem Historic Living Museum.

We are food historians.

We are hearth cooks and we enjoy sharing with people what the pioneer life was like in the ways the family lived, especially with the foods that they ate.

Welcome to the old kitchen at Fort New Salem.

This is typical of a pioneers early home life on the western Virginia frontier.

During the beginning of this new country was often a struggle, a for survival.

Many of their daily tasks dealt with food, clothing, and shelter.

There was land to be cleared for crops and livestock, as well as hunting, fishing, and gathering of foodstuffs in the woods and nearby clearings.

Many families during this settlement period did not have very much cooking equipment.

We did a study of estate sales and inventories.

We found the most common equipment was the Dutch oven, called a baked kettle.

Often the iron pot and the three legged spider.

Skilled.

We're going to make a very simple John cake.

First of all, we put cornmea and corn would have been ground at the local meal or by more primitive methods.

We'll add a little bit of salt.

And salt was a very essential item.

Sometimes it came from down in the Kanawha Valley and sometimes i the central part of the state.

I'll have some butter.

Now put in.

We have some bottom here.

We're going to mix this and till it's stirred all around.

If you would bring me the water, please.

Restaurants around the pioneers hoped to have a dairy cow.

So the butter and the.

Mixing.

This all around, making it better with it.

So corn was used for many, many things.

But this is one of the most common devices on kids.

Were going to put it out.

Going to pat this down.

Now we're going to put it up against the stone by the fire, and it will bake off the radiant heat.

We did our cornbread and the Dutch oven.

I think it's probably ready the way it smells.

Right.

Let me bring that.

So we have cornbread yeast.

Right.

We'll cut your piece.

Put it on our plate over here.

This is made with yellow.

Many settlers prefer white cornmeal.

So cornbread was on of the most common ways to use.

Other things could be made, including mush.

Could be made with cornmeal.

Corn was one of the foods that was commonly used by the pioneer.

Another thing that was commonly grown was pumpkin.

Pumpkins were one of the three things that our Native American neighbors gave to us.

Beans, corn, and pumpkin.

So we are going to make a pumpkin pudding.

So what I have here I've already cooked the pumpkin and it is it is settled here in the bowl bashed up.

Now I'm going to add some eggs to it.

You hope to have enough eggs from domestic poultry, but if you didn't, you would use ducks and geese eggs to.

And that's the reason you wan to stop the eggs a little bit.

We're going to mix that into the bowl.

We want to store that around.

We're going to add some sugar sweetened to this.

And then amongst the sugar I have some spots.

If I could afford to buy spots it was available at the local store.

So what a stirring this up to make a pudding.

Now we'll add a little milk.

Again, the pioneer hope to have dairy, cow or milk.

It's not used water.

Yes, we'll have some butter.

Got some butter right here.

Thank you.

That would be another luxury.

But it was often used as a cash crop.

You could sell your butter and use that money to pay your taxes, which was very important for these ideas when they came here to develop our country.

So now we will put in grace pudding dish.

He has preheated the Dutch oven back here.

The Baikal with coals o top of it or coals underneath.

And I'm going to set it right down on the wing in the bottom.

This is how that we would be cooking this.

Another way which the common vegetable, the pumpkin could be used would be to use it as a casserole to stuff it.

And this was very commonly done.

What would we have today?

A pumpkin which has been the top taken off of i and the seeds taken out of it.

We're going to give it a stuffing.

This stuffing is going to crumble crumbled.

Maybe last night's leftover cornmeal.

We're going to add some sausage made in it.

As we said, portals are very commonly.

The sausage is seasoned with which we grew rosemary and sage and tom.

We will put this some of this into our meat.

To stir that in.

And I'll have a little button, please.

Stir this in to be stuffed with whatever you had.

This is of course, it's stuffing a cornmeal.

We're going to put it inside the holiday pumpkin.

Then we will put this up to the fire, turning it frequently s the pumpkin cooks on all sides and the stuffing is heated through.

Now we're going to put the lid on.

Here we have one that is already finished.

We will take the lid off.

You can see the stuffin inside the wonderful piece out on our plate.

We mentioned one pot meals today.

What we have made is venison stew.

What we did.

We took the chunks of meat along with some awkward and browned it in this iron stew pot.

Ready to serve.

A little parsley as a nice touch.

As one explores pioneer time, one begins to appreciate the hardships, the determination, the hard work, and the faith that our ancestors endured for the next and futur generations of West Virginians.