Brunch is Served

At the Riversdale House Historic Site and Museum, we periodically host cooking demonstrations organized by our Kitchen Guild volunteers. On April 26, 2026, the Kitchen Guild held a “Spring Brunch” cooking demonstration. Was “spring brunch” a “thing” in the early nineteenth century? I am not sure, it’s above my pay grade. Regardless, it was a fun idea that had some great turnout from community members and helped generate interest in the museum. So, putting my grumbling aside about the historicity of spring brunch, I can say that all in all this was a successful program and I am glad that I could participate in it. Before proceeding any further, I would like to issue a disclaimer to anyone reading this that is interested in visiting a Kitchen Guild demonstration: you will not be allowed to eat the food. Food safety regulations prevent us from being allowed to serve the food we make for guests. You would think that the county would give us a historical exemption, but alas.

On this particular day, the Kitchen Guild menu included smoked herring, a root vegetable called salsify, and “hoe cakes.” I think the smoked herring is pretty self-explanatory, we picked that up from Giant the day before the demonstration and it was ready to cook straight out of the package. Salsify and hoe cakes, on the other hand, required me to dig a little deeper, or perhaps hoe a little deeper (forgive the pun) to understand what they actually were. 

Salsify grows abundantly in the wild and can be cooked easily with minimal preparation. It is similar in taste and texture to parsnips. Given that it grows in the wild it likely would have been an important source of food for enslaved people and other early American settlers who would have been struggling to scrape out a living. Hoe cakes are a bread dish made from cornmeal, water, and salt. Along with salsify, hoe cakes would have likely been a staple of diets for poor families in early America, particularly enslaved people and those living on the Appalachian frontier where agricultural opportunities were much more limited than on the coast.