“That these people can live at all upon the products of their small farms is due to the extreme simplicity of their food, dress, and manner of living. The typical house is of logs, is about fourteen by sixteen feet, of one room, just high enough for the occupants to stand erect, with perhaps a small loft for the storage of extras. The roof is of split shingles or shakes. There is no window, the open door furnishing what light is required. At one end of the house is the fireplace, with outside chimney of stones or sticks chinked with clay. The furniture is simple and cheap. An iron pot, a bake kettle, a coffeepot and mill, small table, and a few cups, knives, and spoons are all that is needed. These, with one or two bedsteads, homemade, a few pillows and quilts, with feather mattresses for winter covering, as well as for the usual purpose, constitute the principal house possessions. For outdoor work there is an ax, hoe, and shovel plow. A wagon or cart may be owned, but is not essential. The outfit is inexpensive and answers every purpose. The usual food is bean bread, with coffee. In the fall chestnut bread is also used. Beef is seldom eaten, but pork is highly esteemed, and a considerable number of hogs are kept, running wild and untended in summer. [461]”
A cook of roughly the same moment, setting down the same dish.
1 cup scalded milk ⅓ cup butter, or butter and lard ¼ cup sugar ½ teaspoon salt 1 egg ⅓ yeast cake dissolved in ¼ cup lukewarm milk ½ cup raisins stoned and cut in pieces Add butter, sugar, and salt to milk; when lukewarm, add dissolved yeast cake, egg well beaten, flour to make stiff batter, and raisins; cover, and let rise over night; in morning spread in buttered dripping-pan one-half inch thick. Cover and let rise again. Before baking, brush over with beaten egg, and cover with following mixture: Melt three tablespoons butter, add one-third cup sugar and one teaspoon cinnamon. When sugar is partially melted, add three tablespoons flour.
Sources: The passage is from James Mooney, Myths of the Cherokee: Extract from the Nineteenth Annual Report of th, free to read in full at Project Gutenberg. The recipe is from Farmer, The Boston cooking-school cook book of 1896, also free in full. Both are in the public domain in the United States. The binding above is ours — plum cloth, boar stamp.