It’s been cold as of late and we have been getting a lot of snow. So, I was thinking that we needed something hot but not too spicy, just some ‘warm comfort food’ this week. I had to look at the resources that had come in this week and see if I could find a recipe that would work. Carmen brought me a couple of things, a quart of heavy whipping cream and some smoked ham from a pig they had raised down on their hobby farm this past year. Chris brought me 12 lbs. of chickpeas. What could be done with those items? Where have I heard of those ingredients being used in the past? There is something in the back of my mind…
Last spring, we took a number of our students on a three-day camping trip down to Southern Utah and one of the days we were able to take them to Zion National Park and hike up to the Waterfalls at the Emerald Pools. It was beautiful.
When we got back to the parking lot after the hike, we had our sack lunches and spent some time at the visitor’s center. There were all kinds of displays explaining various facets of the park, from geological formations, early discoveries and historical facts. One of the displays talked about how during the Great Depression, President Roosevelt established the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) to put men back to work on projects to build up
America. One of those CCC camps was established in Zion National Park and a number of the hiking trails were built by those men. I wondered what it would have been like to have lived and worked in one of those CCC camps.
Original Collection: Gerald W. Williams Collection
When I got home from that campout, I did a little bit of research on the CCC and found some articles that discussed a day in the life of those men at those camps. There were even descriptions of the food they ate. “CCC food was plain, nourishing, and served in large quantities.” I came across some journals of some of the men and read of their experiences. One of the journals was written by James Fechner, one of the camp cooks. That is where I found a recipe that used cream, garbanzo beans and ham, “Creamy Chickpea Chili—CCC.” He described it as “wholesome, palatable and of the variety that sticks to the ribs.” I guess that is how they said, ‘warm comfort food,’ back in the 1930s.
Since the ingredients seemed to find their way into my classroom this week, I decided that I would try and recreate that hardy meal that kept those men warm and gave them the strength to build all those miles and miles of trails. If you would like to see if it qualifies as ‘warm comfort food’ for you, drop by room 200 where we will be using it to motivate math students to complete their quizzes over parallel and perpendicular lines.