Grand Portage - The Kitchen
August 12, 2019by Jane
In our ongoing tour
of Grand Portage National Monument (see links to previous posts in the August 2019 archives), we find ourselves in a state-of-the-art
kitchen—for 1797. Here, the meals were prepared for about 100 men (yes, only
men) dining in style in the Great Hall next door.
To ensure
that the “gentlemen,” or partners, of the North West Company received the
quality food to which they were accustomed, one of the partners would bring his
personal cook from Montreal. That cook would oversee a staff of about 20 local
Native women and retired voyageurs—men who were too old for strenuous paddling
and portaging but were still in debt to the company store. I’ve heard it said
that a small army of children was also employed for the sole purpose of batting
away the flies, and it takes only a few minutes during fly season to see why!
Every day, whoever is assigned to the kitchen prepares something from an 18th-century
recipe. Those of you who know what an indifferent cook I am will be amused to
learn that Hannah Glasse, of The Art of Cookery, has become a household name to me,
and I’ve been known to watch cooking videos on the Townsends You-Tube channel.
I'm still a fairly indifferent cook, but I've been enjoying dressing up modest dishes with fanciful presentations using whatever is in season in the garden. Below, the humble and ever-present Lake Herring (even if we don't cook it, we have to rinse it every day, so we may as well use it) in spring and fall, and Salmagundi (which could just as easily be called "use up your scraps" salad).
With the exception of a couple of loaves of bread on their arrival, the hard-working voyageurs don’t get to sample the food from this kitchen. Their rations continue to be exactly what they have been all season: dried corn, dried peas, and pemmican. And, as Steve mentioned in his post on the Great Hall, they are cooking and eating those rations over their own campfires outside the depot fence.
The kitchen is my favorite place to work, because there are lots of cool gadgets that are fun to demonstrate to adults and kids alike. Some of them are reproductions, and some of them are actually from the 18th century. It isn’t easy to tell which is which; I found out that I’d been letting kids grind coffee in a 200-year-old artifact. Oops. Some of the fun things I’ve been able to do include roasting coffee beans, deep frying squash blossoms, and baking in a “bake kettle” (what nowadays we call a “Dutch oven”), and roasting chicken in the rotisserie that was called a Dutch oven back in the day.
The kitchen lends itself to picturesque photos (as a visitor from Montreal the other day said with approval, "It's so French!") so let me leave you with some images.
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