
It’s been a hot minute since I last (and first!) posted anything on this blog. A lot of my drafts involve the usual: polar exploration, forays into imagining the lives of long-dead frozen sailors, musing on weirdness found in archives, etc. But if I’ve learned anything about myself, it’s been that I’m an enormously tactile student. While I do fine with book learning, I retain far more being able to see, touch, smell, hear, and occasionally taste the things I’m learning about. (This is not, however, a recommendation that you go lick a book. Archivists tend to frown on that kind of thing. What you do with the books that you own, however, is none of my business.)
Back in June, I made dinner for my dad for Father’s Day. As my dad is a not-so-secret Regency romance junkie, I decided to go the route of cooking and baking out of Julienne Gehrer’s absolutely incredible Dining with Jane Austen cookbook. Our bill of fare included haricot mutton, vinegared cucumber salad, Regency-era mac n’ cheese, Bath buns, and a meringue cake covered in candied peel. What struck me at the end of the dinner was the flavors that came through in the recipes, all in their turn sourced from two different cookbooks from Jane Austen’s family. The spice combinations, usage of subtlety versus outright flavor, and textures were different—some even new to me. For instance, I’m not a huge user of caraway seeds in cooking, not for lack of liking them, but just that not too many recipes I’ve used call for them. In my Regency dinner, I used them in both raw and comfit format in desserts, and it was incredible. While cooking, it also hit me how scarcity of certain ingredients at the time would make for cooks using said ingredients heavily during special occasions. I’m fortunate enough to say I’m not used to scarcity in my food, so I really had to put myself in the mind of someone from, say, 1815 to appreciate the flavor profiles. In short, it was eye-opening and palate-pleasing.

So that experience got the gears turning, and as did the next one that was much less fun. My washer broke, and as the slightly-altered phrase goes, modern problems require antique solutions. (Or a nearby brother with a working washing machine.)

One full hour of scrubbing laundry by hand and stomping water out of my pajamas like a vintner stomping grapes, the idea for Project Zina was born.
Project Zina is named after my great-grandmother, Elzina “Zina” Crouch. She was born in 1897 and spent most of her life in northern Michigan. At one point in her life, while her husband was running electrical line across the Upper Peninsula, she lived with her three sons in a tent year-round, cooking on a transportable cast iron stove and subsisting mostly on foraging and what she could trade.

I was really fortunate to have met her during my lifetime, and she was pretty sharp all the way until she passed away at 102 years old. Later on, I learned from my great-aunt, Zina’s daughter, that Zina had been trained to be an herbalist by her father, who in turn was trained by his father, and so on. Inspired by her, I decided to try not only her recipes that have been passed down, but others from different books and manuals from her time and beyond.
In the end, I’ve chosen to attempt to replicate recipes, remedies, arts, crafts, activities, and chores from around 1750 to 1950. This isn’t a hard and fast set of years, as there may be things that come up in my research that I’ll end up wanting to try from either before or after my range. Most of the focus will be on Victorian-era subjects, since that’s my main era of interest, but I’m really not picky.
Part of this project is also to better represent these subjects in writing and research, in both fiction and nonfiction. I like to be accurate about what I write, and if this project helps others in their writing or understanding of the time periods, then that’s a win for me.
So, what kind of subjects do I plan on covering throughout the project? The list is non-exhaustive, but I do plan on covering cooking, baking, laundry, hygiene, gardening, house cleaning, celebrations, drying and preserving, games, camping, letter-writing, fabrics, clothes-making, mending, decorating, and art. As I do further research, I imagine this list will grow.
What I’m not doing is attempting to live in another era. As much as I’d love to do that a la Victorian Farm, I don’t have the money to do so. I also live in Kansas, which has notoriously brutal summers, and I really do enjoy being able to retreat into air conditioning. I’m also not going to try any recipes that a 21st century person would recognize as unsafe or outright dangerous, so no arsenic, laudanum, opium, or mercury for me. This also isn’t an attempt at a prepper or DIY lifestyle, although the project could possibly be of benefit to people pursuing either of those.
When possible, I’ll post recipes as altered to fit a modern kitchen, with a facsimile of the original recipe available as well. So far, I do have a pretty sizable list of sources, so I’ll make a little works cited at the end of every post so you can go back and take a peek as well. With few exceptions, everything sourced will be available through open source archives such as archive.org and Project Gutenberg. Free information for everyone!
Finally, I imagine some of this is going to get expensive. Eventually, I would like to get an actual cast iron stove and objects like a wringer, larger washbasins, different fabrics, and ingredients. I do okay on my own, but I’ll also link my Patreon and ko-fi for anyone who would like to support this project. It’s not expected, but it would be greatly appreciated!
Thank you, and here’s to what will hopefully be a fulfilling and cool project!