How did our foremothers DO this???

http://digital.lib.msu.edu/projects/cookbooks/html/browse.html

This is a site where you can read old cookbooks, starting as far back as 1798. Cooking back then was an aerobic workout!!

Another thing that's interesting is a sort of upstairs/downstairs thing--several of the cookbooks mention servants and how to handle them, and there are two or three books that technically aren't cookbooks, but that contain recipes ("receipts"), that were written by servants.

Interesting stuff--how to select meat and fish at the market, how to preserve eggs, how to make butter, how to get stains out of white lace, what to feed the sick and infants... There's a "western" cookbook from the utopian community of New Harmony Indiana Well--back in the 1850s, Indiana was pioneer country. Not exactly California or Oregon, but my Boston family moved out to Indiana from Ohio via oxcart at about that time.

Lots of good reading on this site.