There was no such thing as fast food on the Appalachian frontier.
Jacob Prickett decided to build his family’s cabin on a flat, elevated piece of land with just a short walk to get down to the Monongahela River.
For a settler in the 18th century, claiming a large swath of easy-to-farm flat land with access to fresh water was critical. And Jacob thought it was a wise investment to move his family from Pennsylvania to the western Virginia frontier. He figured that, sooner rather than later, a road would be built stretching from the East Coast across the Appalachian Mountains headed west.
When that road came through, Jacob would be there, firmly established on a prime piece of real estate. “Which, in theory, is a good idea,” says Cordelia Spencer, standing barefoot, her linen apron already dirtied from the day’s cooking, “except he didn’t realize the Revolution was going to be coming. When war starts, progress stops.”
Any chance of a road making its way to what later became Fairmont, near where the Pricketts settled in 1772, was put on hold. Meanwhile, Jacob’s wife, Dorothy, had to find a way to feed 15 mouths with no hope that a road—which would have meant access to more supplies—would come any time soon. The family would have to survive on what they brought, grew, or hunted. And as the one in charge of growing and preparing all the food, Dorothy’s life revolved around one center—the hearth.
Built mainly out of stones and mud chinking, the hearth was not only a pioneer family’s cooking stove. It was their source of light when the sun dropped below the mountains. It was their warmth on a cold winter’s day. It was the center of their small, primitive home, a beast that needed constant tending, a job for the women and the younger boys of the household.
It was the first thing Dorothy would have checked in the morning, hopeful that the coals were still hot from the night before so she wouldn’t have to start a new fire to get breakfast going. The first meal of the day would have included any leftovers from the night before— there was no real refrigeration at the time.
Breakfast rolled right into making dinner for Dorothy. Served in the middle of the day or the early afternoon, a pioneer’s dinner would have been the largest meal, often a big stew or soup, which Dorothy would have prepared while also completing her other chores. On good days, the meal could have included a roasted chicken hanging on a line above the fire or some fresh vegetables from the garden.
Still Cooking
The hearth still glows at Prickett’s old claim, now known as Prickett’s Fort State Park. Every Tuesday starting in the summer and running until the state park closes for the winter in October, Spencer can be found bent over the hearth, barefoot in a time-period dress, preparing a meal just like Dorothy would have.
She and assistant Bob Smith, who fondly refers to himself as her “indentured servant,” prepare historically accurate meals acquired from 18th century recipes they find. On a recent hot August day, the menu featured a roast pork loin accompanied by green bean salad and cornbread. It was nearly 90 degrees outside the primitive log cabin, designed to look similar to one Jacob and Dorothy would have built, so Smith and Spencer took turns tending and sweating over the hearth.
Smith, a retired forester, says the biggest challenge is trying to time how long everything will take to cook in conjunction with the heat and duration of the fire. For example, if Smith’s fire started off really hot but burned down quickly, he and Spencer would not have enough coals to cook their final dish, the cornbread. But if they started the fire off too slow, there wouldn’t be enough heat to distribute between the pork loin and the stew pot.
If Dorothy Prickett was lucky, she would have had multiple pieces of equipment to cook on, like a Dutch oven for baking and a spider skillet—a pan with three legs—for frying. But if space was limited on the pack horses or the milking cow the Pricketts used to move to the frontier, she might have been limited to a cast-iron stew pot. That’s one reason many pioneers relied on one-pot meals like stews, soups, and puddings. When Spencer cooks over a hearth today, she has all the tools available in the 18th century at her fingertips.
Her arsenal includes a “tin kitchen,” an earlier form of what we would today call a rotisserie. The device has an open front, so the meat can face the fire, with a flat pan sitting underneath to catch grease and a curved back that helps to reflect heat from the fire back onto the meat.
Smith swung an iron arm over the fire, a feature found in more well-to-do hearths, and hung a trammel hook on it. Trammel hooks work like the knobs on your stove at home—a way to regulate the heat by adjusting the flame’s distance from the pot. The top of the hook attaches to the iron arm while the bottom holds the handle of a stew pot. To boil water for cooking green beans, Smith lowered the trammel a few notches so the pot would be closer to the fire.
To cook the cornbread, Smith pulled a large bunch of coals from the center of the fire over to the right side of the hearth and set the Dutch oven on top. He then placed more coals on the oven’s lid and left Spencer’s cornbread batter to bubble away inside. The simple mixture of cornmeal, flour, sugar, salt, egg, and baking powder is one of Spencer’s few modern compromises. She uses baking powder, which didn’t appear until the mid-1800s. Pioneers would have just used ash from their fire.
A Holiday Feast, Every Week
To complete the meal, Smith smooths out the last bit of coals and places the spider skillet on top to cook some mushrooms and onions for the green bean salad, which Spencer finishes with a vinaigrette dressing.
The meal took nearly four hours from prep work to presentation. Feasts this labor-intensive would have been rare on the Appalachian frontier. “That kind of meal,” says Judy Wilson, a fellow interpreter at Prickett’s Fort, “would have been saved for company or holidays.”
But there’s no need to wait for a holiday at Prickett’s Fort. It’s a special occasion every time Spencer and Smith stoke up the fire.
Whether they are turning the rotisserie or checking to see if the green beans are tender or smoothing out the coals to make the cornbread, the duo also takes time to talk with visitors, explaining what they’re doing and the challenges the pioneers would have faced in the kitchen.
“That’s a lot of heat,” one visitor commented. “It’s a real fire,” Smith responded.
The old saw “if you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen” takes on a much more literal meaning when Smith and Spencer are making dinner.
written by Anna Patrick
photographed by Carla Witt Ford