Cornbread Eighteenth Century Style

Wednesdays at Daniel Boone are typically when we have school groups come that want to take field trips. This week we had two small groups of fourth graders come, and we showed them how to make candles, bake cornbread in a bake oven, and then we gave them a tour of the Boone house. I observed my co-worker Janelle doing the cornbread activity with the kids and I took pictures so that the Homestead could have some proof of all the nice, hands on things they do with kids.

First we set up a table with all the ingredients needed in the Bertolet Cabin, becuase that's the building closest to the bake oven.

When the kids came in we talked to them about food preparation and preservation in the eighteenth century. We explained what implements were used and how much cooking was done over a hearth. We also explained what a bakeoven was and how it was used.

And in case you don't know a bakeoven looks like a little house, like a smokehouse. Inside there is a big brick cavity that goes back several feet. Inside of this cavity you build a fire and let the bricks heat up. You let the fire burn down to coals, then scrape out the coals, and (here comes the amazing part) the bricks hold enough heat to bake whatever it si you put in there. In the eighteenth century you would probably do all of your baking for one week at on one day, and you could put a lot of pies and bread in five feet of oven space. You retrieve the food when it is done with a thing that kind of looks like a pizza paddle.

Back to the story. We then had each kid come up and at a different ingredient to the cornbread batter.

And stir.

We put the bread in the over and baked it for abotu twenty minutes. It came out a little black on the bottom, but such is prery inevitable when you're backing in a contraption like that and you aren't acustomed to doing it everyday like women in the eighteenth century would have been. The kids got to eat the cornbread afterwards. I tried a piece, and I thought it was very good, although I think I'll stick to my Jiffy corn muffin mix.