Comments on: How to Plan Your Menu After You Reach the Valley

By: Ray

Ray — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 14:17:22 +0000

I never had chokeberries, but fresh blackberries and blackberry jam . . . I’m getting hungry just thinking about it.

By: Maurine

Maurine — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 22:15:51 +0000

The meagerness of food wasn’t only found among the early pioneers. Many saints who came later had sacrificed just to get here and were in debt to the PEF. Some of them never rebounded, but struggled for a long time. My great-grandfather was always poor. He was trained as a shoemaker,but his eyes went bad and he couldn’t work at that. He tried farming, but usually rented poor land with broken-down machinery. He and his two wives and families lived in Petersboro, Utah, in Cache County for three years during the early 1880s. All of the children talk of that near starvation period of their lives, living on greens and weeds and little else. One of my grand-uncles said that at the age of seven, his job every day was to go fishing and hunt jack rabbits so they could have some meat to go with the greens.

By: Researcher

Researcher — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 17:28:48 +0000

…or chocolate…

By: Jami

Jami — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 17:13:05 +0000

It is amazing how inventive and tenacious people can be. Even though I’m tempted to think that I would be too wimpy to survive under similar circumstances, I think we are just hardwired for survival. We’d do what had to be done, but I’m thinking sego lilies wouldn’t really make up for ice cream.

By: J. Stapley

J. Stapley — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 16:06:22 +0000

This is a fascinating correspondence, Ardis. We had elderberry jelly as a kid as well!

By: kevinf

kevinf — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 15:51:08 +0000

I love chokecherry jelly and syrup! My folks use to gather wild chokecherries when we lived in Utah, and then one year, my sister in law gave us a sack of pretty moldy chokecherries, too far gone to use for syrup, so we threw them in the soil of our back yard in Kaysville. It took a few years, but we then had a pretty good size chokecherry bush in our yard, enough for my wife to put up a couple doxen pints of chokecherry jelly and syrup each year. Leaving that chokecherry bush behind when we moved to Washington was one of the hardest things we did.

I think we forget how hardscrabble the pioneers had it those first several years in Utah. They got there too late in 1847 to be able to grow much of anything, and with more people coming each year, they were always behind the curve.

Ardis, I love this blog! Best and brightest spot on the internet for me!

By: Ardis E. Parshall

Ardis E. Parshall — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 15:13:19 +0000

Keryn, that’s wonderful. My mom did try both chokecherry and elderberry jelly one year because we were living in a wild place where they grew — I remember loving the flavor of the chokecherry, but not the elderberry. Thank heavens it was just an adventure for us to try that and not our family’s only source of fruit!

Thanks for your comment.

By: Keryn

Keryn — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 14:51:47 +0000

Ardis, thank you so much for posting these tidbits. I am amazed, educated, and entertained by your posts.

When my grandmother was a girl (she was born in 1926), she would go gather chokecherries for her mother. She knew where all the watercress and sego bulbs were likely to be found. It’s interesting to see how some of the menu items didn’t change even two generations after the “lean” time, after the railroad, after cultivated fruit was readily available in the valleys.

Of course, my mother never learned to make chokecherry jelly, and has never eaten a sego lily bulb. So just one more generation (in my family at least) erased that. But she still knows how to find watercress.