Civil War Cooking: “There Were Yet Left Some Good Things in Old Virginia”

This historic menu had been on my goal list since finding it in 2020! Recorded in Private William McCarter’s memoirs about his service in the 116th Pennsylvania Infantry Regiment (Union Irish Brigade), the menu is semi-complicated, and the history surrounding the meal presents quite a few conundrums. Let’s start with the food and then look at the context.

Private McCarter and another comrade had been assigned to guard the home of a pro-Union man in Stafford County, Virginia, on November 27, 1862. They were offered dinner:

“She then conducted us into a neat, though small, dining room. In its center stood a table, fairly groaning with the weight of the good things upon it. It was covered with a snow white table cloth, the first thing of the kind that I had seen in Virginia. The food was coarse and plain, but plenty. It consisted of small roasted pig, two or three boiled rabbits, hoe-cake, white potatoes and an immense apple pie. To wash all these down, there was an enormous quantity of cider. Oh, what living for soldiers in the field, I thought to myself, in the very heart of the enemy’s country. As my eye scanned the grand and plentiful layout, I felt satisfied there were yet left some good things in Old Virginia.”

The culinary concept gave a good excuse to host a dinner party, and some fellow historians were invited to join in the “good things.” First things first, I had to find rabbit. The local butcher in Fredericksburg supplied that, but I decided against cooking a whole “small pig” and bought a good cut of pork instead. I wanted to keep the food “plain,” but I also wanted it to taste good; I made an herb and garlic marinade for the pork, then tackled how to cook rabbit.

I did my research. There are lots of ways to cook rabbit, but since McCarter said it was boiled, I looked more closely at those recipes. Finding some directions “translated” from an 18th Century English cookery book, I decided to use those directions. Basically, the rabbit is boiled with a lot of onions and fresh herbs, then the onions are used to make a sort of gravy sauce. I managed to clean the rabbit, but contemplating how to cut it up, my culinary courage failed, and I stuck the whole thing in the cooking pot. (At that exact moment, the electricity went out and stayed out for 90 minutes, leaving the arriving company to speculate where we could go start a fire and authentically finish cooking the dinner. Never a dull moment!)

With the power eventually restored, the rest of the meal preparations finished smoothly! I had parboiled the potatoes, smashed them a little, and baked them with light salt and pepper. The ho