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Picnics And Preserves Flavor Early Memorial Days

Flags decorate grave sites at Arlington National Cemetery

Cleanup Day



The country's first Memorial Days were focused on lost loved ones following the devastation of the Civil War. Those events were big group affairs, in which entire towns pitched in to clean up winter damage at burial sites and decorate graves with early blooms.

And of course, the day's work would end in a picnic.

Eric Colleary, a historian and food blogger behind The American Table, said picnic menus after the war were simple, portable and centered on spring cleaning.

"A lot of vegetables haven't come to season yet," he said. "So you're really depending on the last of your preserves. You would normally want to kind of free up space for the next round of food that you're going to be canning. Cleaning out the pantry." Pickled okra and watermelon rind, "euchered plums" and fruit jams would whet winter-weary appetites for summer treats ahead.

After the Spanish American War, Colleary said, celebrations moved from Civil War grave sites and – especially in the North – widened to include more general patriotic themes. The WPA program of the Great Depression created new parks and public spaces for people to spend days off, and slowly big community events gave way to family picnics and backyard barbecues of today.

Picnic Remembrances



Colleary found an evocative Memorial Day account from a 1912 New York Times article that illustrates those changes. The unnamed interviewee recalls larger community events before the turn of the century, and blames trollycars for spoiling the fun of old "picnic wagons." The article lays out a "modest" picnic list.

"We weren't hard to please. A few cold fried chickens, some peanut sandwiches, a big paper sack full of Saratoga chips, some potato salad in a fruit jar, two or three kinds of jelly and bread and butter, a couple of chocolate cakes and a cocoanut (sic.) cake and a freezer of strawberry ice cream and a few accessories were practically all we expected at a picnic dinner in those days."


Roasted Chicken The Very Old Way



For an old-timey way to cook chicken outdoors directly on a fire, Colleary turns to a vintage Buckeye Cookbook, charmingly dedicated "to the plucky housewives of 1876." The method dates back to ancient Rome and perhaps beyond, he said.

A delicious way to roast potatoes, birds, or poultry, or even fish, is to encase them in a paste made of flour and water, and bake in the embers of a campfire; or build a fire over a flat stone, and when burnt down to coals, clear the stone, lay on the potatoes, birds, etc., wrapped in wet, heavy brown paper, cover with dry earth, sand, or ashes, and place the hot coals over these, adding more fuel.


Thankfully, the same cookbook includes a simpler method for picnic-ready fried chicken on a skillet.

Coconut Treats



Earth Eats asked Colleary to chase down a recipe for the coconut cakes mentioned in the New York Times article, which turn out to be something like simple macaroons.

"Coconut, as it turns out, has a long-standing history in American foodways," he said. Even American colonists likely imported fresh whole coconuts from colonial growers in the Caribbean. "By the mid-19th century, pineapple and coconuts were being shipped to the more northern part of the United States from Florida, Cuba and parts of Central America."

Drawing from the pages of old Fannie Farmer and Mrs. Lincoln's Boston cookbooks, Colleary boiled down some "unnecessarily" complicated instructions into a simple recipe.

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