Passport to Texas

Cooking at Barrington Living History Farm. Image from: wheretexasbecametexas.org

Learn Old Time Texas Cooking Techniques Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

This is Passport to Texas

January 6th is your chance to cook like an early Texan. That’s when Barrington Living History Farm hosts a hands-on cooking school where participants use the technology and ingredients of 1850s Texas to prepare a meal.

They end up cooking inside on a hearth.

Barb King is lead domestic interpreter at the Farm.

We do a couple of different types of foods to show the different ways of cooking on a hearth. So, we’ll do something that boils in a pot that hangs from the crane. We do a couple of baked goods that bake in Dutch ovens on the hearth, itself. And then we do a turkey or a chicken in a rotisserie–or a tin kitchen is more the period term. And that way people can see all kinds of methods of cooking as well.

If the class is full when you try to register, your name will go on a waiting list.

The joy of the class–since they’ve signed a waiver to do it–they get to eat what they cook. Normally when visitors come to the farm they don’t get to eat what we cook, because we’re cooking for the staff, and it’s not an FDA approved kitchen.

Barb King says the menu is seasonal–as it would have been in 1850s Texas.

Lots of root vegetables. Onions. We’ll do a roast that sometimes we’ll wrap in bacon. We do cornbread, because that’s a big staple in 1850–in the U.S. in general–but Texas in particular.

Find details for Barrington Farm’s cooking school in the calendar section of the Texas Parks and Wildlife website.

For Texas Parks and Wildlife…I’m Cecilia Nasti