A Culinary History of Missouri

Foodways & Iconic Dishes of the Show-Me State

Suzanne Corbett, Deborah Reinhardt

• Publisher: The History Press
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9781439673584
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

Missouri's history is best told through food, from its Native American and later French colonial roots to the country's first viticultural area. Learn about the state's vibrant barbecue culture, which stems from African American cooks, including Henry Perry, Kansas City's barbecue king. Trace the evolution of iconic dishes such as Kansas City burnt ends, St. Louis gooey butter cake and Springfield cashew chicken. Discover how hardscrabble Ozark farmers launched a tomato canning industry and how a financially strapped widow, Irma Rombauer, would forever change how cookbooks were written. Historian and culinary writer Suzanne Corbett and food and travel writer Deborah Reinhardt also include more than eighty historical recipes to capture a taste of Missouri's history that spans more than two hundred years.

Chapter 1

NATIVE BOUNTY AND THE COLONIAL TABLE

When baking bread, it helps to have good mud. Good mud mixed with the right amount of straw to build a mud oven. This was a common oven found throughout Missouri during the early colonial period, and it yielded the diet mainstay for the colonial French, Missouri’s first European settlers.

Bread was baked from flour milled from the wheat the colonists grew—a product that complemented the natural abundance of foods that attracted not only the Europeans but also native inhabitants to migrate to what would become the state of Missouri.

Missouri’s abundant resources revolved around its ability to provide reliable food sources, which afforded food security for its settlements. These settlements included Missouri’s earliest residents, the moundbuilding Mississippians and Native American tribes—people who enjoyed a cornucopia of easily foraged, gathered and cultivated indigenous foods, supplemented by hunters who harvested a seemingly unlimited supply of game, birds and fish. These were proteins native cooks could roast, stew or dry for future use. These foods could be traded to neighboring tribes as well as French explorers/traders and colonialists who permanently settled along the Mississippi’s western shore and its connecting tributaries.

NATIVE FOODS TO COLONIAL FOODWAYS

Missouri’s woodlands were a hunter-gatherer paradise. Game, fish and forest delicacies such as black walnuts, persimmons, pawpaws and pecans were eaten. To enhance the food supply, beans, squash and corn were cultivated by the semi-nomadic Illini, Quapaw, Chickasaw and Oto tribes, as well as Missouri’s predominant tribes, the Missouria and Osage. These indigenous foods are best described as a frontier smorgasbord for the French colonists, who, by luck, stumbled on economic and culinary good fortune when they settled in one of the most fertile regions in the country.

This region is known as Upper Louisiana and the Illinois Country—an area whose rich soil and terroir produced the finest wheat, yielding bumper crops that, in turn, drove the establishment of lucrative milling operations that exported 300,000 pounds of flour to New Orleans in 1738 and 1739. This stone-ground whole wheat flour produced a dense bread that villagers reportedly ate nearly three pounds of per day; they were also used as edible trenchers.

Wheat, milled into flour, provided a valuable commodity that colonists traded for imported food staples and luxury items such as sugar, coffee and French wines—a favorite for those weary of local wines made from native grapes and a welcomed addition to the table.

Another valuable export was bear meat and bear grease, the latter an essential for cooking and preservation. Gourmands of the day favored bear hams, extolling their superior taste over hams produced from locally raised hogs. This hot commodity unfortunately depleted Missouri’s black bear population. It would take more than two hundred years for the black bear to return to Missouri and regain numbers to a level where the Missouri Department of Conservation would approve limited bear hunting.

Missouri buffalo and elk suffered fates similar to the black bear. Their numbers also dwindled; the buffalo were pushed beyond their Missouri range, and elk were completely wiped out. Another delicacy that suffered from overharvesting was the pelican, once abundantly found along the river. This tasty bird, like the black bear, has also reestablished itself along the upper Mississippi River. Luckily, quail, prairie hen, partridge, crane, duck, geese, wild pigeon, grouse and doves remained in fairly good supply. However, when needed, to supplement the food supply Shawnee hunters provided deer and turkey to the settlements.

While game and local livestock contributed greatly to the daily diet, cooks added variety to the menu with fresh fish, river mussels and freshwater shellfish. A favorite catch was catfish—in French barbue, which means bearded. Descriptions of dishes featuring this bearded fish occasionally appear in diaries and letters of the period. One such account described a popular Friday night specialty: catfish smothered in sour sorrel seasoned with pepper and sufficient salt. An elegant dish for its time, it illustrates Missouri’s French Creole culinary prowess, confirming their culinary expertise, about which Henry Brackenridge wrote in his 1834 account Reflections of the West: “[T]he humblest of French cooks possessed an appreciation of the culinary arts and a mastery of cookery.”

Pawpaws’ soft custard pulp and tropical flavor, best described as banana, explains its nickname, the “Missouri banana.” Missouri Department of Conservation.

After overharvesting by colonists, the black bear, which disappeared for more than 150 years, has returned to Missouri. Missouri Department of Conservation.

This appreciation elevated colonial cooks above others, which also included the enslaved Africans who arrived with the French. They expanded the area’s culinary diversity and reputation and are credited with introducing new foods such as okra and gumbos.

Unlike other American colonial groups, Missouri’s French defined themselves through their foodways. Illustrated by more than cooking and baking skills, households made a sizable investment in cookware and tableware. Inventories and shipping manifests document the importance and interest in setting a table. Among the listed items were faience (ceramic dinnerware), etched glassware and fine silver service pieces. These items were considered necessary to ensuring the continuance of French culinary traditions and the fostering of a civilized table. While the social elite possessed more table finery, poor households compensated by elevating their tables by utilizing the finest-quality foods and luxury ingredients they could afford.

Pewter, tablecloths and ceramic dinnerware, including French faience, illustrate the 1790s dining table of the successful Ste. Geneviève merchant Louis Bolduc. Ste. Geneviève Tourism.

No matter the dishes used to set the table, whether the household was poor or rich, equal importance was placed on a cook’s tools. Kitchens were stocked with an array of cooking implements—kettles and pots made from iron, tin, copper and wood. Specialty baking pans, pudding molds, braziers, wooden bread troughs and pepper mills were all common implements used.

Forks were usually made of steel instead of pewter, which was too soft. Early inventories reveale...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1. Native Bounty and the Colonial Table
• 2. Expanding the Missouri Table
• 3. Gilded Tables to Flavorful Fairs
• 4. Jazz, Prohibition and Route 66
• 5. Peace, Prosperity and Rediscovering Our Past
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• About the Authors