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Reviews
Feasting and Fasting with Lewis and Clark: A Food and Social History of the Early 1800s
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By Leandra Zim Holland
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Farcountry Press, Helena, Mont., 2003. Illustrations, photographs, maps, tables, notes, bibliography, index. 287 pages. $24.95 paper.
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Reviewed by Jacqueline B. Williams
Seattle, Washington
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| Feasting and Fasting with Lewis and Clark focuses on the explorers' concern with how best to ensure an adequate food supply for their company of soldier-explorers. In this readable, almost encyclopedic book, Leandra Zim Holland, a nationally recognized expert on the food and social history of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, documents the culinary details so often missing in many Lewis and Clark histories. The stories range from a history and use of portable soup, an early form of dried bouillon that Meriwether Lewis considered essential, to the menu that William Clark choose for his birthday dinner on August 1, 1804. "This being my birth day I order'd a Saddle of fat Vennison, on Elk fleece [strip of fat] & a Bevertail to be cooked" (p. 101). |
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Ever cognizant that she is writing history, Holland identifies the ingredients and foods mentioned in the journals and explains how they might have been used during that time period. Lewis's statement that he is allowing the men to "exchange their flour for bread or bake their bread in a better manner than they had the means of baking it while traveling ... ," for example, elicits Holland's explanation of baking techniques, bread substitutes, and ways of packing the flour and other ingredients (p. 76). |
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Feasting and Fasting is divided into two parts plus an extensive reference section that includes an index of foods, recipes, menus, and plants and animals used or encountered by the expedition. Illustrations, including drawings, colored photographs of paintings, and maps, compliment the text. |
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Part 1, "Food Culture of the Times," describes cooking techniques, food preservation and procurement, and nutritional maladies of the early nineteenth century. The section concerned with food, hospitality, and diplomacy makes it clear that "food and diplomacy are inextricably linked, and were a means of forming a diplomatic buffer, a hospitable gesture, a means of establishing friendships" among the Natives (p. 63). |
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Part 2 highlights the Corps' problems and successes finding sufficient food on their trek across the country. Holland's culinary knowledge is evident as she weaves journal entries into stories of feasting on buffalo while crossing the Northern Plains or making a meal of dried berries when game disappeared during the trudge across the Rockies. The chapter titled "Winter with the Mandans" explains how the expedition members used gifts of food to foster friendship and the role Native Americans played in aiding the expedition. "I think we spoke together of your carrying some steel or cast iron corn mills to give to the Indians or to trade with them, as well as for your own use," President Jefferson wrote Lewis (p. 71). This chapter also offers one of the best descriptions of Indian foodways that I have read in recent years. Later chapters review how the leaders struggled with "short rations," the "specter of starvation," and sickness caused from eating unfamiliar foods such as camas root (pp. 158–9, 156–7). |
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Several recent cookbooks imply that they are telling readers about the foods Lewis and Clark prepared and ate, but none have the scope or depth of this study. Students and scholars, as well as anyone interested in nineteenth-century social history, will want to add Feasting and Fasting with Lewis and Clark to their library. |
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