Thanks for the interesting link above. I've not seen that anywhere before.
In looking over some of the details, it is always well to remember how much the differences there can be between what is on one man's table and on someone else's just over the hill. The differences are usually due to the different economic circumsances one family might be in compared with their neighbors. In some case, the difference might be remarkable. Naturally, there will be a big variation between what the rancher or plantation owner has and what his employees, tenants and before the Civil War in the South, his slaves, even though they all ate basically the same foods. One might be better prepared or from more choice ingredients. We have a saying here, "Eating high off the hog."
One could also say that not everyone in America is even living in the same present, in a manner of speaking. In more isolated places all across the country, mostly in mountainous areas, people lived largely the same way the original settlers lived, sometimes even in the very houses built when the country was settled. That's also true in other countries but people hold onto the "old ways" everywhere in rural areas, usually for very practical reasons. That's why log houses are still commonly used in Northern Europe and Asia.
In the United States, changes probably began in the 1930s, ironically, in spite of the Great Depression, and accellerated in the 1950s. Probably the biggest change here was rural electrification. For all the romanticism of Currier & Ives, wood-burning kitchen ranges and heating stoves were relatively difficult to use, dirty, a little dangerous and basically a lot of trouble. This I all know first-hand. But coal-burning heaters are still in wide use in a lot of places. But cooking didn't change much at all until relatively recently and even then, not that much.
The things that would have become only a distant memory would be cooking on an open fire, here referring to the fire place, but also open fire cooking outside on a regular basis. Cattle is raised all over the country but only in the wide open spaces of the mid-west were the cattle drives, chuck wagons and cooking on the trail. In the same way, logging camps are pretty rare now, too, but they had their own culinary traditions, if that's the right word. Loggers ate a lot.
