The Hunnicutt Homestead

Benefits of Diets against colds and 19th Century Living.

S and I are sick with colds.  Our family goes through 4 gallons of raw milk each week, we are daily eating fresh veggies from our organic garden, we also consume raw honey from our hives daily.  We've recently gone back to taking vitamins on top of this.  We are still dabbling in convenience and fast foods as well, so perhaps this needs to be eliminated?  We don't know anyone else who is ill.  I had supposed that healthy eating would make colds a very minor and short lived issue because it would help our bodies to fight them off much faster.  It has only been three days.  While I am most miserable today I'm hoping that tomorrow it will have quickly run it's course.  I know colds are viruses and as such catching one has nothing to do with diet, however after reading so much literature on the benefits of raw milk and fresh all natural local veggies I had somehow expected some type of major resistance to them.

I guess it is time to rest and wait.  How funny that I was to start prepping the dining room and hallways to paint!  My plans have been foiled again!  As the weather today has taken a drastic change from the 90's earlier this week to 50 degrees, I am happy to sit by a cozy fire with a book and drink hot tea to warm my achey body.

I did attend my sheduled field trip to Carrillon Park this morning with the boys.  I was very loaded up on cold medicine.  We went inside the William Morris house.  Mr. Morris was a former Revolutionary War soldier who had moved his family to Ohio to start a new life when the war was over.  In this small home (about a 24ft by 20ft room for the first floor, which was then divided into two bedrooms and a kitchen area), were where his family of four had lived.  A servant lived in the loft above where food was also stored. 

Here we studied the various candles that people made in the 19th century.  Fat candles (made from pig's fat), Bayberry (usually bought from someone form the East Coast), and of course beeswax candles.  I preferred the beeswax candles as they had the brightest light and the pleasantest smell.  The kids then dipped their own candles in wax that had been melted over the fire and each took a homemade candle home.

The most interesting thing I learned was that the beds were short then, not because people were shorter than nowadays,as is so often thought, but rather because people had a fear of sleeping lying down flat on their backs.  It was believed that doing so would cause people to smother in their sleep!  The women had the job of chopping the wood and keeping the wood supply sufficient for the fireplace as they knew exactly how much wood it would take to keep it going for the week.  They primarily cooked one day per week, and recipe or "receipt" books would not tell you how to cook, just the general ingredients themselves as they assumed you already knew how to cook over a hearth.  As this is the case, I am finding a hard time finding instructions on how to use my own beehive oven! 

I have received the following information to research , however:

• Google "Feeding America" a site where they have scanned multitudes of historical receipt books and domestic manuals
• Google domestic manuals from Catherine Beecher (Harriet Beecher Stowe's sister)...those written 1860 or earlier may have references to beehive ovens or more specific instructions to hearth cooking
• Isabella Beeton- the young English woman who's publisher husband needed something to publish.  As she did not know domestics she wrote of these, and became the Martha Stewart of her day.  People assumed she was a 40 something domestic diva, when in fact she was a bumbling girl learning alongside her readers!

Thanks for reading my various interests and complaints.  Back to the fireplace for me...