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SIMON & SCHUSTER, 1996
(available in paperback from Simon & Schuster, 1997)
UNDAUNTED COURAGE is the late historian Stephen Ambrose’s riveting historical account of Lewis and Clark’s epic journey from St. Louis to the Oregon Coast and back at the behest of President Thomas Jefferson.
It was Jefferson who selected the young Meriwether Lewis for the ultimately futile task of finding the Northwest Passage—a water route that would connect the Mississippi to the Pacific Ocean. Jefferson personally assumed responsibility for training Lewis, and having others train him, in the many disciplines Lewis would need to make the journey a success: botany, geography, cartography, and medicine, among others.
At a time when news could travel no faster than the speed of a horse, Lewis and Clark led the Corps of Discovery, including the indispensable young Indian woman, Sacagawea, over often dangerous, uncharted terrain and through territory inhabited by Native American tribes, some of whom had never seen a white man and whose disposition toward the explorers was unpredictable.
The characteristics of the interior American West were so poorly understood that, as Lewis and Clark approached the Continental Divide on the modern-day border of Idaho and Montana, they were expecting hills no larger than the Appalachians and a view straight down to the Pacific Ocean. At the summit they saw nothing but a series of snowcapped peaks as far as the eye could see.
Undaunted Courage is the story of Jefferson’s vision, the perseverance of brave people in remarkably difficult circumstances, and the trove of information Lewis and Clark collected about the flora, fauna, and peoples of what would become the western United States.
In addition to documenting the geography of the West, Lewis and Clark recorded their daily culinary adventures in their journals. Although the members of the Corps of Discovery relied in part on provisions they brought with them, their survival also depended on hunting, fishing, Lewis’s knowledge of edible plants, and advice from various Indian tribes they encountered.
Before their departure in May 1804 from Camp Dubois in St. Louis for their journey up the Missouri River, Lewis and Clark secured a variety of provisions, including pork, hominy, and cornmeal as well as salt, wheat flour, sugar, coffee, beans, peas, portable soup (a reduced stock made into a bouillon cube), and, of course, whiskey.
During their first month on the river, the explorers were subsisting on wild game, pork, flour, and cornmeal. “Only on the rarest of occasions did the party get fresh vegetables, such as watercress, and there was no ripe fruit as yet,” writes Ambrose. In June 1804, with nearly four hundred miles behind them, Lewis and Clark arrived at the mouth of the Kansas River. There was reason to be hopeful: fruit was ripening.
During their journey, the explorers enjoyed sampling berries, wild plums, and currants. Clark pronounced the plums the “‘most delisious’ he had ever tasted” and “the grapes ‘plenty and finely flavored,’” reports Ambrose.
Mary Gunderson’s The Food Journal of Lewis & Clark: Recipes for an Expedition (History Cooks, 2003) is a gastronomic tour of the expedition, with recipes and commentary based on the food notes in Lewis and Clark’s journals. According to Gunderson, a culinary historian, fruit was essential to the Corps members’ diet as a source of vitamin C. “It was excellent that they were able to eat as much fruit as they were,” says Gunderson. “Fruit, along with the roots they ate, prevented gum problems, and kept scurvy, a disease caused by vitamin C deficiency, at bay.” Gunderson explains that it was critical to determine if fruit was edible, as there was much concern about poisonous berries. “These were remarkable men in terms of the breadth of their knowledge,” she adds. “Lewis’s mother, who was very knowledgeable about plants, gave him invaluable expertise.”
By early August 1804, says Gunderson, “they were walking into the prairie’s abundance of ripe summer fruits.”
When the Corps of Discovery celebrated Clark’s thirty-fourth birthday on August 1, 1804, Lewis wrote in his journal that to mark the occasion: “I order’d a Saddle of fat Vennison, an Elk flece & a Bevertail to be cooked and a Desert of Cheries, Plumbs, Raspberries, Currents and grapes of a Supr. Quality.”
Our Macedoine of Red Fruits is a birthday tribute to Captain Clark and consists of the same fruits he enjoyed when he marked his thirty-fourth birthday on the trail: cherries, plums, raspberries, currants, and grapes. We think you’ll enjoy the discovery.
1½ cups pitted, sliced red plums 1½ cups seedless red grapes, halved ¾ cup pitted cherries, or ½ cup fresh or dried currants 1½ cups fresh raspberries |
1 tablespoon granulated sugar
2 tablespoons good-quality balsamic vinegar Sweetened Sour Cream (see below) or Sweetened Whipped Cream (see p. 434) |
Place the plums, grapes, cherries or currants, and raspberries in a serving bowl.
Combine the granulated sugar and cinnamon and sprinkle over the fruit mixture. Drizzle with the vinegar.
Mix gently and let stand for 20 minutes. Serve with Sweetened Sour Cream or Sweetened Whipped Cream.
Yield: 8 to 10 servings
4 tablespoons light brown sugar 2 cups sour cream 1 teaspoon vanilla extract |
Stir together the light brown sugar and sour cream until the sugar is dissolved. Add vanilla and stir.
Members of Booked Wednesday in Seattle enjoy a broad range of topics, but history has a strong appeal. “We are all of curious mind, so learning more about how our world evolved and about people’s experiences in it interests the entire group,” says Nancy Miller.
When they discussed Undaunted Courage, topics included the vastness of the land, the scale of the undertaking, and the breathtaking vision and bravery of the expedition members.
Booked Wednesday members were fascinated by the roles of women and race on the expedition. “The outbreak of democracy on the banks of the Columbia River was wonderful,” says Miller. Sacagawea, the Indian guide for the Lewis and Clark expedition, and Toussaint Charbonneau, her husband, a French-Canadian fur trapper who was hired for his language skills, intrigued them. “Charbonneau was hired, and Sacagawea went along,” says Miller. “But her knowledge was what became central to the success of the expedition. Along the way, she found trails and campsites, helped the expedition to acquire horses. While doing all this, she managed to keep an infant alive while hiking the wilds of North America and the Rocky Mountains in winter.”
Several members brought books with photographs showing the land Lewis and Clark had traveled, and some had camped or traveled through the area themselves and recounted their experiences, says Miller. Many members had visited Lewis and Clark’s winter camp, Fort Clatsop, near Astoria, Oregon, and the Lewis and Clark Museum in Ilwaco, Washington. “This gave physical presence and dimension to the descriptions in the book,” says Miller.
After reading Undaunted Courage, Miller and her husband drove the Lolo Pass on the Montana-Idaho border, along a forest service road that follows the original expedition trail, and visited three other Lewis and Clark museums along the route: Fort Mandan and Knife River Indian Encampment, in North Dakota, and Pompey’s Pillar in Montana, where Clark’s signature can be seen carved in a rock.
The Mandan village where Lewis and Clark spent the first winter especially intrigued Miller. “The village isn’t usually described in school textbooks,” says Miller. “I envisioned a tribe’s small encampment as one might see in a movie. It wasn’t a small nomad encampment, but a city larger than many East Coast cities, with established trade and transportation. It’s amazing what history texts omit.”
The wine and dinner series at the Ida and Cecil Green Faculty Club on the University of California at San Diego (UCSD) campus explores haute cuisine with historic themes.
“Instead of hosting the usual winery dinner, we thought our membership would enjoy a dinner with an academic twist,” says Tom Mignano, the club’s director. “Our Thomas Jefferson and Ernest Hemingway dinner themes add an intellectual dimension to our excellent wine and food program.”
For the Lewis and Clark Gastronomic Expedition Dinner, faculty club staff and volunteers created a menu based on extensive research of the many accounts of the expedition, including Stephen Ambrose’s Undaunted Courage. They also drew on the vast resources of UCSD’s Geisel Library, which houses the largest collection of cookbooks in California. “We took some culinary license in creating dishes, and of course the chef puts his signature on the dishes, too,” says Mignano.
The Lewis and Clark Gastronomic Expedition menu featured wild mushroom bouchée; endive salad with pear, honey pecans, and blackberries; rum-soaked dried currants and tomatoes; buttermilk-chive dressing; fresh sweet corn cakes with duck confit; mild jalapeño beurre blanc and crispy tortilla strips; campfire cassoulet; pan-seared salmon; smoked chicken and apple sausage; duck roulade with blackberry sauce; and, for dessert, blueberry pandowdy. While guests enjoyed a culinary tour of dishes featuring ingredients Lewis and Clark sampled on their cross-country journey, Roger Showley, a writer for the San Diego Union-Tribune, history expert, and UCSD alumnus, spoke about the famous expedition.
teaspoon ground cinnamon