Eating on the Journey West

• Flour, salt, dried beans and sugar would travel with frontier settlers.Hemera Technologies/PhotoObjects.net/Getty Images
  
  Cooking over a campfire for months does not resemble weekend camping trips. Preparing to eat on such a trip required months of planning and a great deal of money. Settlers purchases foodstuffs like flour, coffee, beans, sugar and salt in bulk, replenishing what they had eaten at the few outposts along the way. To obtain meat, deer, antelope, and fish would have been killed as opportunities arose. When fresh meat was unavailable, beans and jerky supplemented biscuits, bread or cornbread cooked over an open fire in a dutch oven or skillet.
  
  

Settling on the Frontier

• Wild berries were valuable finds for frontier settlers.Jupiterimages/Comstock/Getty Images
  
  Once settlers arrived at their destination, they would have begun preparing to grow their own food. Frontier gardens varied by location, but most offered greens, beans, peas, corn, potatoes, squash, pumpkins and radishes. These were supplemented with local wild foods like mushrooms, berries and lettuce. Since a settler might not venture to town more often than a few times a year, the family would eat what it grew, gathered, raised or killed.
  
  

Foods of the Frontier Settlers

• Soups, heavy in beans, and breads supplemented the large noon meal.Jupiterimages/Comstock/Getty Images
  
  Dinner was the largest meal, served in the middle of the day, between noon and 3 p.m. Frontier settlers would have served one or two meats, like roast mutton or calves' head, several vegetable sides, soup, and bread for this all-important meal. Breakfast and supper, or tea as supper was called, would have often been liberally supplemented by leftovers from this homegrown feast.
  
  

Preparing for Winter

• Surviving a winter meant the family would rely on their own canned goods,Brand X Pictures/Brand X Pictures/Getty Images
  
  Gardens produce their crops in spring and summer. Surviving fall and winter meant preparing enough food to last through the cold months until the first crops were bearing fruit in the spring. Since this was a time before refrigeration, preparing food for the winter meant preserving both foods and meats. Meat would have been salted and smoked to turn it into jerky. Most produce was preserved by canning. Some, like onions and root vegetables, would have lasted much of the winter in a cold, dark root cellar.