Christmas Dinners of the Past

When our early pioneer ancestors first arrived in East Tennessee, most of their work consisted of building their homes and farm buildings and clearingland for crops. In those times, there was little time for planning elaborate celebrations. But the Christmas season was always celebrated, to some degree,in most pioneer family homes.

Christmas trees were brought in from the woods, and they were unlike the Christmas trees that we are familiar with today. The trees most commonly usedwere pine and cedar, and these were decorated with items found in nature, including holly berries, sycamore and sweetgum balls, or anything else that couldserve as an ornament.

When it came to Christmas dinner, most of it was prepared in the fireplace and on the hearth. I recall once hearing someone ask an older man what he hadfor Christmas dinner when he was growing up, and the man answered, “Anything we could get, ma’am.”

Whatever was brought in from the hunt was the foundation for Christmas dinner, and that could vary from family to family. Wild game that was hunted includedrabbit, squirrel, duck, wild turkey, bear and deer. Larger game was roasted over a pit or trench filled with hickory or red oak coals. When cooking onthe hearth, a Dutch oven was used.

The Dutch oven had three short legs, and the lid had a rim around it to hold coals on top of it and provide even heat. More coals were placed under theDutch oven which provided the heat for making stews or other recipes.

In cast iron kettles, various meats were browned with potato onions to make a thick, dark gravy. This recipe could be served in this manner or made intoa soup by adding potatoes, carrots and other vegetables. Potatoes were buried in the ashes and covered with coals to bake them.

During the earliest times, before grist mills were built, and for isolated settlers, wheat flour was not available for making bread, biscuits and cakes.Families relied on corn meal from the corn that they grew and ground at home.

Form this meal they could bake cornbread in the Dutch ovens or make hoe cakes on griddles in the fireplace. Pumpkins, which were grown in the cornfields, served many uses in the kitchen far beyond pies. Pumpkins were stewed, fried, made into soup, and added into a variety of recipes.

Although pioneer families lacked many of the foods that we associate with our modern Christmas dinners, they made up for it in the richness of creative ways in which they made the most of what they had to work with. As one old timer put it to me, “We were makin’ do.”

John Coykendall, Master Gardener