Lye Coffee?

[Mogorilla]

Anyone know what this is?  I am reading "Three Years in Dixie", a journal of a Union soldier from 1862-1865 and he mentions having lye coffee, bacon and hard tack.   I cannot find out what it is

Thanks,

[Delmonico]

You have me on that one, pretty hard to stump both of us.  Off to see what I can find.

[Delmonico]

Where exactly was he when he wrote about this?  Wonder if he meant coffee made with a strong alkali water, aka in a area with a lot of an alkali substance in it aka from either limestone or a lot of oak leaves or simmilar contaminating the water.

[Mogorilla]

He was writing in western Kentucky.  It was rainy and they were having trouble lighting a fire, but he said he did get lye coffee, a few slices of bacon and some hardtack.   I will try and find the exact quote tomorrow.  I was mighty confused and had never heard of it.  But he calls hominy, lye hominy as well, so I wondered if it was a treatment of the beans, or a substitute that required a little lye in the processing.

[Delmonico]

No reason to treat the beans with it.   Also the North was really good about keeping their troops supplied with coffee.   Really makes me wonder if he was tefering to alkili water, crops up a lot on the Great Plains.

[Mogorilla]

Here is the journal entry.

Tuesday, January 20, 1863

A dull, cloudy, disagreeable day.  It rained nearly all night and is still raining this morning.  I have heard my good grandmother say that there was always a milking time on a rainy morning and I suppose it must be so, yet such a time has not come this morning since my emerging from the land of dreams at least.  We had a good (or bad) time getting a fire made this morning.  At first we would get a pale, sickly blaze to venture through the wet wood, when a blast of wind and rain would drown it again, but by some mysterious means our contrabands managed to get one (I suppose), at least we had some lye coffee, a few pieces of bacon and hardtacks for breakfast.  Our regiment went on picket this evening.  As I was on camp guard I did not go, but all but two have gone out of mess No. 1.

Alva C. Griest was in a unit dealing with Morgan in Kentucky/Tennessee.   

http://www.threeyearsindixie.com/

[Don Nix]

I'm not sure that it is even in the same context but I have heard parched corn referred to as liars coffee.

[Delmonico]

I'm not sure that it is even in the same context but I have heard parched corn referred to as liars coffee.

I'd thought of that but as a Union soldier they made sure that they got their rations and there was no shortage of coffee.   

[Mogorilla]

As I read through his journal, the winter of 62/63 the brass had them moving all over western Tennessee and Kentucky and it seems that their supply train was behind them by a few days everywhere they went.

Thanks for looking into it.    I highly recommend this as a read.   Interesting look into the life of a union soldier. 

[Fox Creek Kid]

I'm not sure that it is even in the same context but I have heard parched corn referred to as liars coffee.

Which makes perfect sense given the bad spelling of the era:

http://www.uttyler.edu/vbetts/coffee.htm

[Delmonico]

Which makes perfect sense given the bad spelling of the era:

http://www.uttyler.edu/vbetts/coffee.htm

And the fact that the supplies were having trouble keeping up with them, which would be the only reason to not drink the real stuff.

[Delmonico]

OK, just another thought also as to why, there were people in the time period who thought coffee was bad for you and drank what were often called cereal drinks, Sylvester Graham although dead for 10 years or so was a leader of this movement, later in the 1890's the Kellogg brothers and Mr Post pushed this, leading to Post developing or stealing his formula for his cereal drink called Postum.   Also the Mormons pushed this idea also.

[Tsalagidave]

I know exactly what it is and have had it on many occasions.  First off, we need to understand how lye is made:

*Lye was (and is) commonly made by perforating the bottom of a large pail or bucket
*Now line the bottom with a few layers of cloth
*Next, fill it with the white ash of clean burnt wood
*Pour in water  that would work its way down through the bottom of the bucket
*The white liquid is your lye. Use it as a disinfectant or boil it down with tallow and salt to make lye soap.


I mention this because mixing ash with water or food for purification was a common practice dating back for centuries. According to what I've found so far, Whites, namely used it to decontaminate water but picked up using it in cooking through their contact with Native Americans:

"They (the Cherokee and Creek) use a strong lixivium prepared from ashes of bean stalks and other vegetables in all their food prepared from corn, which otherwise, they say, breeds worms in their stomachs."

-William Bartran, Transactions of the American Ethnological Society Vol. 3, Pt. 1 (1789)

"Water taken from stagnant pools, charged with putrid vegetable matter and animalcumulae, would be very likely to generate fevers and dysinteries if taken into the stomach without purification.  It should therefore be thoroughly boiled and all the scum removed from the surface as it rises; this clarifies it, and by mixing powdered charcoal with it, the disinfecting process is completed."

-Randolph Marcy, The Prairie Traveller p. 49 (1859)

This is still practiced, BTW.  I always mix it into my cornbread and sagamite. It is also used in other traditional Native American bean dishes & bean breads.  It imparts a mild effect on the flavor that is actually good. When I dig for my water, I allow the pool to settle; boil the water thoroughly; and then sift in about a 1/2 tsp of white wood ash per quart.

The soldier is referring to purified water taken from a standing source as opposed to a well that is less prone to contamination.  In other words, Alva Greist was complaining how his overall breakfast experience sucked; bad weather, wet kindling, trouble with the fire, mundane food and coffee from a 2nd rate water source that had to be cleaned before consumption.

-Dave

[/list]

[Tsalagidave]

He was writing in western Kentucky.  It was rainy and they were having trouble lighting a fire, but he said he did get lye coffee, a few slices of bacon and some hardtack.   I will try and find the exact quote tomorrow.  I was mighty confused and had never heard of it.  But he calls hominy, lye hominy as well, so I wondered if it was a treatment of the beans, or a substitute that required a little lye in the processing.

His reference to using lye on his hominy and beans is a very traditional process in food preparation.  It is also the smoking gun indicating a real traditional process that I actually have recipes for if you are interested.  He mixed lye into the water for his coffee because the water was taken either from a pond, lake or puddle.  Even a nineteenth century campaigner's GI could not withstand that and so it needed to be decontaminated.  Good literary find. I've never read that book and should put it on the to-do reading list.

-Dave

[Mogorilla]

Hey Dave,
Thanks for that information.  It is a great read and I have been making my way through it a week at a time.  Was going to just read an entry per day but realized I would be reading it for three years.   
I had to look up Sagamite, what is the difference between it and Sofkee?   Just tribal, or is there more to it?

[Tsalagidave]

Thanks  again for letting me know about another book I haven't heard of before. 

Sofkee is more like gruel> Sagamite can be turned into that but its a different dish.

Sagamite goes by quite a few different names but it was the MRE of Native People and Frontiersmen/women for centuries now.

Typically, its dry corn flour with a little lye ash, cinnamon,  and sweetened by sorgum (eastern recipe) or mesquite bean flour (southwestern version).

Drop a pinch of it in your mouth to temporarily forget about being hungry or thirsty.  It can also be mixed with water and drunk or even made into a porridge.

-Dave