Democratic Sentinel, Volume 1, Number 48, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 11 January 1878 — Confederate Coffee, Etc. [ARTICLE]

Confederate Coffee, Etc.

Rye coffee, with the coffee left out, was the Confederate breakfast-drink, and when sweetened with sorghum was a dose to be remembered. Gane sugar, though it brought high prices and was regarded as a luxury in the last days of the Confederacy, was always to be had in plenty for those who could buy it. Sorghum, however, was the “sweetening” best known and cheapest in Confederate times. Every planter cultivated it; every owner of even a few acres had at least one of those acres set in sorghum cane. Housekeepers rang the changes on it in every possible form. Sorghum cake, sorghum pudding with sorghum sauce, sorghum pies—all these and more were on their bills of fare. Preserves were put up with it, and the sirup itself was a standard article of food on most Southern tables. Indeed it is scarcely too much to say that the hardy Chinese sugar-cane was one of tho pillars of the Confederacy, inasmuch as it became a staple article of food at a time when food was scarce and famine seemed to draw near. The list of recipes in a Confederate cookery book reads oddly enough : “Yeast from dried apples,” “ditto from life everlasting,” “ calves’ foot jelly without wine or lemons,” brandy and vinegar being the substitutes; “hard candles without wax,” and “Confederate gum-arabic,” which last was cherry glue dissolved in vinegar, are among those which I remember. Juvenile Confederates had few sweetmeats or candies, and one of our household trials was that we could never coax sorghum into anything like taffy—a thick jelly-like sirtTp was the nearest approach thereto of which it was susceptible. Red pepper and mustard were made at home in plenty from homegrown mustard seed and cayenne peppers. The mustard was beaten in a mortar, or ground in a spice-mill with comparative ease; but the preparation of the pepper was a trying time for the household. First strung and dried in the sun; then, to make sure, dried again in the oven, the pods were rubbed into powder with heavy wooden pestles in a wooden trough, and ruu through a sieve. This sufficed for ordinary purposes, but for the castors the product was again dried, pou&ded and sifted. The work was done in an outhouse by veiled women, but a general atmosphere of sneezing and weeping always accompanied the pepper-making. Black pepper—to be had only in small quantities —rose steadily in price throughout the war, until in April, 1865, it was sold for S3OO a pound, an amount equal, at the scale afterward fixed for Confederate money values, to more than $7 in gold. -r-Mrs. M. P. Handy, in Philadelphia Weekly Times.