Genesee Country Village & Museum Pioneer Experience Surprise!

Back when I lived like a pioneer, the museum had a photographer take photos of us.  I've never seen any of them, but have a large number of my own (non-professional of course.)

This morning I was browsing the museum website and stumbled on myself cooking over an open fire! That was a fun little surprise.

If you look at the picture please notice how nice my fire looks. None of my personal pictures show my fire like this!  The dutch oven they are referring to in the description is holding pumpkin and apple soup for our dinner on Friday night. To the right of the dutch oven is a pot of water that stays by the fire all day so that you have warm water when you need it. Of course you need to first carry the water with a yoke and buckets to get it to that pot!  Luckily, the water source is uphill so you walk downhill when your buckets are full!

What I am doing in the picture is heating an iron ladle full of water to clean the dishes with as utensils and wooden kitchen instruments needed to have boiling water poured over them after scrubbing them in the wash basin. Notice how I am holding it with 2 hands. This is because it takes a little while for the water to heat to boiling and an iron ladle tends to get heavy! 

I like how it says women would have had little time to fuss in the kitchen as there is too much work to be done elsewhere. While this is true, my own experience was a lot of fussing in the kitchen, mostly due to the fact that there were so many visitors that it literally took me all day to cook 4 items in that fireplace.

What a nice little reminder for me today of my experience!