Food in the 19th century when the Cottonwood Ranch was settled and other times was a very important thing as it is now.

But it took a lot of labor intensive activities not only to harvest the food, but to process it, to cook it, and very much important because if you didn't have food, you couldn't do the work.

And if you couldn't do the work, you couldn't survive.

So today at Cottonwood Ranch, we have Emily Heim Campbell from Hoxie, Kansas, that is also the proprietress of The Elephant, which is a well-known restaurant in the area.

And she has volunteered.

We have fired up the old wood burning range, and she's looked at some recipe that we had in a box by Hilda Pratt.

Okay, Emily, I know you're a native of Hoxie.

So what?

And I know you were gone for a while.

What did you do between leaving Hoxie and coming back?

I worked in the accounting field for about five years, and then my husband, Doug Campbell, who is also a native of Hoxie, his job took us up to the Seattle area.

And at that point decided to totally switch career paths.

We went up to Seattle.

I enrolled in culinary school at Le Cordon Blue there and worked under some really renowned chefs and learned a lot.

Especially in the Seattle, Washington area, there's so much farm to table.

It just got me thinking, you know, we can do that in Kansas.

And just like the settlers here.

And they had to do that based on what they had and what they could source and what they could raise.

And looking through Hilda's cookbook.

I think chicken pot pie was something that they probably made, you know, some sort of version of instead of making a traditional pie crust, I'm going to top that chicken pot pie with corn biscuits.

But a lot of the homesteaders out here lived on cornmeal a lot.

I ran across a reference where a couple were being married and supposed to be one of the first marriages in the county.

And so for their wedding dinner, they had ham and beans and cornbread because.

Very different than we do nowadays.

Everybody liked it and that's all they had.

Well, I know you had also mentioned that they would also not just have chickens, but pigeons or squab or, you know, other poultry as well.

And wild fowl.

I didn't quite have the pigeon in my back yard, so I opted for chicken today.

But in addition to that, we are going to do a creamed cabbage as a side to go along with that.

And then tea, I assume, was a big thing back then.

And so I found a very good recipe in Hilda's cookbook, Russian Tea, and I was blown away by it.

So I'm almost ready to put it on the menu at the restaurant.

Yes.

Yes.

We did have cabbage and turnips and other stuff.

They grew root crops, but storing them in the cellar was important too.

What's very important as a homesteader was a self subsistence of your farm.

And so you raised garden stuff.

The fresh vegetables from the garden you would eat those during the summer, but you'd also find some way to preserve whether it was corn.

A lot of times you take corn off the cob and dry it and it'd be like dried beans today, like you buy a bag of pinto beans.

They'd have to rehydrated and cook and stuff.

What are we doing to start with?

Sure.

So the most important thing is getting the biscuits made so they can rest a little bit and to keep them cold, because the colder the butter, the more flaky are the biscuits.

So we will start with our biscuits by first adding one and the quarter cups of our all purpose flour, and then we will go with three quarters cup of our cornmeal.

Then we'll add a little bit of sugar, about two tablespoons, one tablespoon of baking powder as our leavening agent and a little bit of salt.

So what we want to do is just make sure to whisk this up really good.

So they are all mixed together and then we will add our cubed butter.

Again, very important to have cold butter.

And of course, back then your best tool was going to be your hands.

And so you're going to break up the butter until it's about little pea sizes, mixing it up, and then we're going to add our buttermilk to it.

The acid in the buttermilk will also lend to a tender biscuit.

And they would have had their own butter.

They had usually one milk cow and two at the most.

But it was a family of four.

We'll grab a fork and slowly we'll pour in the buttermilk.

Thank you.

Incorporating it just enough so it binds.

And talk about refrigeration too, and how much space they had for.

Not very much refrigeration, basically two cubic feet in your icebox because the ice went to the top.

And now we have refrigeration.

You have an ice maker.

You know, you think about when did... when could you get ice around here, especially in the summertime.

So you had to think ahead of time when the streams froze in the winter.

So you had to harvest the ice to put into an ice house.

Your refrigerator was called an ice box because it wasn't a refrigerator.

A refrigerator has to have power to keep it cold.

Some of the stuff was not refrigerated because one of the popular stories is they would kill an animal, say a chicken and draw it, or for us, gut it.

And let it hang in one of the buildings for the meat to mellow before they cooked it.

And they'd let it hang for two or three days without refrigeration.

Wow.

I've heard of dry aged beef, but I'm not sure I've heard of dry-aged chicken before.

Aged beef was the same way.

They were aging the beef because of the microbes in the meat tended to tenderize.

So even with the meat in the summertime, when it gets hot, meat will spoil.

Of course, in the winter it could be frozen, but it wasn't in a deep freeze or refrigerator.

You put it out in the shed to cool the carcass and then freeze it.

You might butcher a beef in the summertime because you needed the meat and you would let it cool at night and then you would wrap it in a tarp in the daytime to keep the flies and stuff off of it.

You might keep it in a building where it was darker and then cut off what you needed.

But people's probably their system was different than we are now.

They could eat stuff that we would turn up our nose and run away because it would make us sick.

But they were used to it and the enzymes in the digestive system could do it.

A lot of food was stored in the cellars and you can do that with meat too, in a very good way was to can it in jars.

You'd go and cook the meat and can it and have fairly sanitary conditions, just as you can have vegetables and fruits.

Well, so you're getting ready to saute vegetables, you know, the onions, the carrots, the turnips and stuff like that could be stored in straw in a cell or even in a barn.

throughout the winter, because they did that with squash, pumpkins or a lot of things like that.

Obviously we have onions and carrots in here, but any root vegetable, I mean, I think that's kind of the best basis for a pot pie is root vegetables.

So right now we are sautéing our vegetables in the butter.

We're going to let them get nice and translucent.

So have a little bit of a bite to them because they are going to finish cooking in the oven when we put the biscuits on top.

But we are going to add some fresh herbs to this.

And you can tell me, I'm sure that they had probably the hard winter type herbs like rosemary, sage.

And that kind of stuff.

So spices, herbs, I think they could get quite, quite easily.

I mean those are... that's an ancient thing to do.

So the fresh chives, probably they would only be able to grow these in the summertime.

But I think this just adds a nice little bit of freshness to the dish.

The vegetables are getting nice and tender right now, so we're going to add a little bit of flour, equal parts flour to equal parts of the butter that we put in there before to create a roux.

And this is what is going to thicken the pot pie.

So it's not like soup underneath the biscuit topping.

So you always want to make sure to cook out your flour.

You're going to have that raw chalky flour taste to it.

You want to be careful not to burn the flour, which can very easily happen.

You know in a lot of dishes like gumbo, you do want that very intense, deep roux because that's what creates a lot of flavor.

But since this is more of a lighter chicken dish, we do want the roux just to be a nice light to roux color, and we'll let that cook out for a couple of minutes before adding our chicken stock and our milk.

So as I'm sure they did quite frequently back then, roasting the whole bird and using everything from the meat to the skins to the bones for flavor.

We are going to take this whole roasted chicken.

We'll share the meat up.

What I find the most satisfying and flavorful is the skin on it.

And when it's nice and crispy, you can almost crunch that up and use it as a topping to sprinkle on like breadcrumbs or something.

But then, of course, the bones.

What we'll do with those is we'll take those and boil them with some aromatics, some of the root vegetables we talked about before, the carrots, the rutabagas, parsnips, any hard herbs that we can find and make a chicken stock out of it, which is what we'll be using in the chicken pot pie as well.

Now I know from the chicken stew gravy that they used the feet.

They's sking the feet and boild the feet.

You know, it's a white white sauce gravy, but it's good.

So they were using even even the feet.

Actually all the collagen and everything from the feet and the chicken bones was very healthy and a natural remedy to a lot of illnesses.

Use everything but the sqwalk.

Right.

So the flour has fully cooked out.

You want to make sure there are no chunks left and then you want to start to add some sort of a liquid, so either a chicken stock, milk or even water.

But the more flavor you can impart on the dish, the better.

So I'm adding about one and a three quarters cup of chicken stock and then we'll add about a half a cup of milk just to give it that nice and creamy flavor.

We're going to let this roux cook until it becomes a very thick gravy like consistency.

So about 7 to 8 minutes.

Now, like times like this, when I want to get the pan hotter, what do I do?

We have to have more work.

Okay.

We need to do a little bit harder for.

Yeah, maybe a little bit.

Cooking on a stove such as this is like, I guess the comparison would be if you had an electric stove, modern electric stove or a modern gas stove and you had the burners on it.

So you put a griddle on top of that and then put your pan on this.

So it takes a lot of heat and a lot of fuel to cook through these layers.

of steel all the way through.

Okay, it'll now be 350 for 20 minutes.

Nice.

All zoned in.

Okay, so we pulled the biscuit dough out of the refrigerator.

After sitting in there for about 20 minutes.

We're going to very lightly roll this out into a little less than an inch thick, and we're going to fold it one time over to create that nice flakiness and see those nice little pockets of butter in there.

So again, we're not completely mashing the butter in to the biscuit dough.

We were just simply wanting to crumble it up enough so it gets throughout all the biscuits and then we are going to cut these biscuits out into about a two inch to two and a half inch circle.

And you know, back then I'm sure they had to use whatever they could find in their kitchen for tools.

So the lid of a mason jar works just great for this.

So we're going to punch out those rounds to make it look pretty.

Now, you know, if you want to, you could just simply put the entire thing over top of the pot pie mixture, maybe poking a few holes in the top to release the steam.

But we're going to do a little bit of a presentation with ours and create the biscuits.

It also makes it easier when you're wanting to serve it to several different people and they all can have their own biscuit.

You know, with your biscuit cutter, I've seen people use an empty tin can.

My grandmother had a biscuit cutter, it was brass and it was from a telescope from the Civil War.

The telescope had gone bad, so it was a telescope.

And of course, because we don't want to waste it, you can always portion those little scraps back together lightly and cut out a few more biscuits.

In the meantime, Don, I will have you stir that filling, if you will, and we'll get ready to add the rest of the chicken and everything else to it.

So to give that nice glossy sheen to the top of our pot pie, we are just going to whisk up an egg and dilute it with a little bit of water so it's easier to spread and then we'll simply brush it onto our biscuits.

Well, our roux is now thickened with the milk and the chicken stock that we put in there.

So we're going to add our chicken that we pre-cooked earlier and the broth that we made with the bones.

And we don't want to add the chicken too early, otherwise it will get overcooked and rubbery.

So this is going to be a very healthy portion of chicken in our pot pie.

And after that we want to top it with the biscuits right away, so those biscuits, the butter and the biscuits remain cold and we can get that flaky crust.

And this is going to go into the three...

This is at 350, right?

350 degrees in the oven?

Okay.

It's going to go into a 350 degree oven for approximately 30 to 40 minutes.

And hopefully come out nice and golden brown.

Yeah, food was always a big draw for everybody because people had the so-called pot luck.

Everybody brought some sort of food enough for their own family, but that was shared with everybody.

So there was a big variety and so there were a lot of starving settlers out here in the younger years, and some of them were successful and so they would share the food.

Janice Richmeyer, childhood neighbor of the Cottonwood Ranch, recalls the social aspect of food centered fundraisers.

Okay, the box suppers.

The girls and the women decorated boxes, and it was full of good food.

Some people would have a boyfriend who would think they were bidding on their girlfriend's box.

And that kind of happened to me because I had a sister who lived in Denver and she was a really good looking gal, and she came to the box supper and she had her box and I had my box and of course I would rather my box had gone to my my boyfriend, but he happened to get hers.

I wasn't very happy about that.

If a boyfriend was bidding on a box, he wasn't supposed to know.

But I'm sure some might have told.

I should have told, everybody else started their bidding.

I mean, they read hi.

It might they might have had to pay two or $3 for a box.

And that was just the way you made some money.

And it was fun.

As we talked about they did have a lot of cabbage back in the day.

And we're going to make a side dish of cream cabbage.

Well, I was reading up on some of Hilda's recipes and one called for salted pork, I believe is what they called it or salt pork.

And so I had to research.

What's the difference between salt pork and bacon?

And both mainly come from the belly of the pig, but salt pork is very heavily cured.

So they could store it at room temperature, maybe a little bit more of the fatty part of the belly versus bacon has a little bit of the more of the meat in it.

And am I wrong?

You are right on that.

But no, you rendered the lard and the people wanted big fat hogs because they use so much lard in their cooking all the way through.

And I'm assuming that, you know, meat wasn't probably the biggest part of their meal sometimes.

And so we're just adding a little bit of the pork to our creamed cabbage to give it that flavor, have a little bit of protein with it.

But the main substance of this is going to be the cabbage.

And again, we're going to be making a roux with that bacon fat that's rendering out and a little bit of butter that we put in there.

Okay.

This is known as a vegetable cutter or kraut cutter commonly.

And so here's a nice little box here.

So it's kind of a safety deal.

So with this, we'll have to start on this edge.

Because these are only edged on one side and the blades on these are hard to adjust.

But underneath we get the cabbage.

We can use different sizes.

And so you could have course sauerkraut, fine sauerkraut or chunky stuff, but you can slice turnips in this, you can slice carrots in this and probably even celery.

Beautiful.

How much more do you need?

The whole thing?

Probably the whole thing would be good.

I might have to have you throw on some more wood.

Okay.

So once again, we're going to be making a roux with the bacon fat and the butter that was in the pan.

The bacon is now almost rendered to crispy, so I'm sprinkling a little bit of flour in here to thicken up that fat, and we'll let that cook down for a couple of more minutes before adding our cabbage, which will go very quickly because Mr. Don here has sliced it nice.

and thin and so we're going to mix that in with sour cream to give it a bit of a creaminess and a tang.

And that will be our finished product there.

So as we kind of talked about, we have Hilda's famous cookbook.

Well, as I was flipping through this, you know that she became a very good cook or knew what she was doing because a lot of the recipes, there's no measurements.

I went to go look at her cream cabbage and it just says, cut the cabbage, add some rich cream and a little butter.

Well, one recipe that did strike my interest was the Russian tea recipe in here.

And it does have a lot of fruit and fruit juices.

And I know you said that they were it wasn't very prevalent out here.

Obviously, we didn't have lemon trees growing all over the place.

So maybe it was it only served during Christmas time when they could get the fruit.

The British, as we know, were big tea drinkers.

There are so many varieties.

You just get the different flavors.

Now we have them already ready made, whether they have lemon in them or some sort of brewing and they're pre-sweetened or something like that.

No, you did it yourself.

So the Russian tea, I do not know where the recipe came from, where she obtained it, but I'm sure they were going for any varieties of teas they could because they were buying teas, tea in five pound boxes.

Mm hmm.

Well, I would have to say that this is way better than the instant powder that we get nowadays.

Putting fresh fruit in there, cinnamon stick, and just doing it all from scratch.

So I think that's what we're going to make right now.

We are going to start with about two cups of water and about a half a cup of sugar.

We'll get a lot of the other sweetener from our fresh fruit and juice that we put into the tea.

We're going to throw one cinnamon stick in the pot as well.

And then about one and three quarters cup of pineapple juice.

Now, not only is the juice good on the outside of citrus, but also the peel provides a lot of flavor.

And so in this tea, you're going to steep some of the orange and the lemon peel to impart even more of that citrus note to it.

One thing I don't know if people are aware of, but you always want to try to get the least amount of white on your peel because the white part is the bitter part.

So with the orange peel and lemon peel, do you have any idea, can those be dehydrated?

Because, could those be sold as spices?

Or powders?

100%.

Yeah, I know.

A lot of times even today, people will dehydrate them and turn them into a powder and use them to flavor things, use them as toppings to sprinkle on as a finishing.

And so this is all going to steep together until it's brought up to a simmer and the sugar is dissolved and then you pour in some of the regular tea.

And to this.

Our pot pie is done after being in the oven for about 40, 45 minutes.

Of course, you always eat with your eyes first, right?

So we're going to top it with a little bit of our fresh chives.

Give it that nice green on top and wait for it to stop simmering slightly so you don't burn your tongue while you're trying to dive into this.

And in the meantime, we're going to be adding our sour cream to our cabbage mixture.

And I think this is ready to go as well.

And I assume that they probably only made what they needed to eat for the meal because they didn't really have a lot of way of preserving the leftovers.

I think that's right.

Yeah, not a lot of leftovers.

We can't forget our drink for the meal.

So I'm going to add some of the tea that has already been steeped to the mixture.

And this is just a nice, sweet and light refreshing drink.

They drank it hot.

I'm sure it can be drank cold as well for one of those hot summer days.

If it had the ice.

If they had the ice.

That's true.

All right.

You can shut the oven off now.

Okay.

Looks excellent.

Thank you.

Place setting is beautiful.

Bon appetit.

I'm going to try it.

Well, I would have to say, even back then, their flavor and style food is still delicious.

What do you think?

Yes, very good.

So now you can put on your resume you've cooked over a 100 year old, basically a hundred year old wood burning stove.

Is this going to change anything at The Elephant?

I think we'll stick to our techniques there.

But it definitely was a good lesson.

And well, obvilusly it was a little bit of a challenge having to.

Oh, the oven's too hot now, it's too cold.

And let's add some more wood.

And these burners are hotter than these burners.

And so it definitely would take getting used to your own stove, your own oven back in those days.

And a new appreciation for food and just what people had to do back then because it was from scratch, you didn't go buy pre-made chicken at the grocery store and heat it up in the microwave.

I mean, they were slaving away all day in the kitchen and cleaning and taking care of the family and I'm sure butchering the chickens and all of the above.

But food preservation was different.

They're may not... they didn't have the variety we did, but they seemed to survive.

And adjust and adapt to what they had on hand.

I'm going to say something that it might be edited or not but this isn't a common occurrence.

So if you visit the Cottonwood, don't expect to come here for a meal.

Go to The Elephant.

Yeah.

Thank you.

Somebody should have cut this cabbage a little finer I think.

I know right.