The main thing that people depended upon each other for were cooking implements. These became increasingly hard to come by as the war went on. Sometimes the entire community shared a precious few cooking pots, and every care was taken to see that they lasted longer than possible. These sharing of cookery may have sown the seeds for block parties and church socials that filled my life as a child. As long as the crockery goes home, it never really mattered who it went home with. Hmm.
Then as well as today, most adults just couldn’t make it without their daily java. Real coffe went to the troops, at least until broken food lines made that near impossible. The common folk were left to their own devices. So, they ground whatever they could find: parched rye, parched corn, and wheat were good substitutes if you could find them. Some people diced and sundried sweet potatoes to grind in the coffee mill. Even acorns were used as coffee, although it was widely reported as awful.
For those that craved tea, leaves of many fruits were used, such as rasperries and strawberries. Mint grows so easily that it was quickly turned into a palatable tea. Other replacements included linden and basswood blossoms, sassafras roots, and anise stars. Many of these are so palatable as teas that they are still used today, in herbal tea compounds. I prefer camomile myself.
Citrus fruits were confiscated for the army of Virginia when scurvy began to cause many secondary deaths in camps. Lemonade, however, was a drink of leisure, and they did not like to do without what little pleasures they had. Replacements for lemon included sumac berries, and even concoctions that are just a little bit poisonous, such as the addition of mustard or a touch of lye for that tart flavor.
A popular drink of the time was a ‘possum toddy.’ This flavorful concoction was made with persimmon. The persimmon fruit was almost as versatile as sorghum, being used in drinks, ground for bread, and made as a yummy preserve as orange marmalade became as scarce as gold.
Leftover bread was never thrown away. Dried pieces of bread were used as the base for almost anything you might eat at the table: bread pudding, stuffing, tea cakes, flapjacks, hoe cakes, and cakes.
Salt was more precious than gold early on in the war. Salt was very important to begin with, because it was needed to cure meat for winter. Before refrigeration was common, salted meat was a necessity. Some people took to boiling down seawater. Some removed the floorboards in their curing house, so that the dirt could collect drippings and salt be processed back out to be used again. But many learned to do without meat in the winter, as they could either not afford the salt or could not find the meat.
Flour was another precious commodity. During the most dire times of the war, the price of wheat flour was driven up to $100 a barrel. That is a platinum price in times when a dozen eggs could be had for a penny.
Sweets were a thing of the past by the time of the fall of Vicksburg. Lines were cut that sent sugar and molasses from Louisiana to the eastern South. But many households learned quickly that sorghum cane made good ‘sweetenin’.’ It was a very useful herb, for the seeds could also be ground and substituted for flour in the making of brown bread.
After dinner, dogwood twigs were used for toothbrushes. Rose of Sharon was another popular replacement. These were flexible twigs within easy reach of Southerners in warm, semi humid climes like the heart of the South. Not so much in Texas, where many people would rather watch what they eat than use the hard woods we have around here.
Tallow candles were widely used at the time because of the shortage of lamp oil made from sperm whale.
But tallow candles were not the best for vision when it came to working through the night. The smelly but better alternative was to soak sycamore balls in oil and light them up.
There was precious little coal in the south, and tallow was gobbled up by the armies by the middle of the war. Pine cones soaked in inedible fat were often thrown onto the hearth for firelight. Endless candles were made by wrapping a stick in a beeswax covered wick.
Women made quilts for fundraisers like mad in the Civil War. Women worked in the hundreds of thousands to send quilts to men going off to serve in the civil war. They joined Ladies Aid Societies, The US Sanitary Commission, Church groups and Sewing Circles to provide much needed bedding for soldiers, both in the field and in hospitals. In Alabama woman used quilts to raise money for gunboats.
During and after the war fabric was scarce, and many quilts were made of homespun or much worn dress scraps. Quilts were made of returning and deceased soldiers’ uniforms when they returned home; and many stitched names, dates, and places into the quilt to commemorate or memorialize the fallen soldiers or victorious armies.
