Bob Prinz set some chicken to roast over the small fire burning in his hearth, readying some protein to go with the colcannon light supper the steward at Fort Vancouver might have made for the fort’s lead manager in the mid-19th century.
“There’s a lot of good documentation in terms of how they cooked, what they cooked, what utensils they were using,” said Prinz, 75, pointing to his cooking supplies, some of which were handmade by the fort’s blacksmith re-enactors.
Prinz runs the kitchen at the Fort Vancouver National Historic Site, volunteering in the kitchen as a re-enactor. He’s the fur trading post’s steward, circa 1845.
Colcannon is a traditional Irish dish of mashed potatoes mixed with cabbage or kale. The dish might make a light evening meal for the man in the “big house,” Prinz said, referring to Dr. John McLoughlin. McLoughlin ran the site for Hudson’s Bay Company in the 1820s to the 1840s.
Prinz “plays” Edward Spencer, the man who did much of the cooking, food preparation, food preserving and, probably, other planning around provisions at the fort for those in charge.
Prinz put a little flour into the onion sauce, for thickening, saying he wished he had the same set-up at home, with a wide hearth to cook over an open fire.
“I would do it, because I think it’s a lot of fun,” he said. “The modern-day conveniences are really questionable to me, after doing all of this.”
The one modern tool he misses? The potato peeler, he replied quickly, gesturing to a simple knife.
A life of cooking
Prinz, an avid cook, started taking cooking classes in the early 1970s, and has done many more since, some at the Culinary Institute of America and the Cordon Bleu in Paris.
He took some of his first classes in Boston, with Julia Child as the teacher.
“She is a big woman, she is a brash woman. She speaks with authority,” he recalled.
He remembered Child admonishing him for fouling up his chocolate mousse.
“My mousse didn’t mousse. I had more of a chocolate syrup than a mousse, and she really got on my case: ‘You’re better than that. You shouldn’t be doing that, you should be doing this better!'” she told him.
“And so I made a better mousse.”
If Spencer or anyone else at the fort wrote down any recipes, they’ve been lost to history. A lot of what he cooks is inferred from the records of goods the fort had, combined with known recipes from the era he finds through research.
Spencer came to the fort from Canada as a young boy. He worked different jobs around the fort before becoming steward.
Prinz said the steward’s day would often start with firing up the oven that’s housed next to the hearth, shortly after 4:30 or 5 a.m. It was mainly used for baking bread, so it’d have to be ready by 7 or 7:30 p.m. to feed the residents of the “big house” and their guests.
The largest meal was typically then 1 p.m. “dinner.” It’d take about two hours, have five to seven courses and serve somewhere between 14 to 25 people, depending on whether McLoughlin had any guests.
Between all the fort’s gardens, its livestock and the wild game and fish available, most ate well, especially those of means, like McLoughlin, he said.
Prinz said he always enjoyed history, particularly the history of the American West, a large part of which, for him, picks up with Lewis and Clark and the trappers and traders of outposts like Fort Vancouver.
Typically, he’ll do what prep work he can on Wednesdays at the fort. Some things, like smoking meat to preserve it, he does at home. On Thursdays, he’ll do demonstrations for fort guests, with more involved events on Saturdays. Lately, the fort had been hosting student groups for Saturday programs, he said.
After boiling the potatoes, he poured them into a bowl to add some cream, butter and the onion sauce. Then, using a beetle, which looks like a large pestle, he mashed the potatoes.
It’s a great tool for it, and for tenderizing meat.
“And the third thing is to keep the kids under control,” he said, repeating a re-enactor’s joke. “They get a kick out of that.”
He said he draws a lot of inspiration for how he tries to do his re-enacting from a volunteer at the Statue of Liberty site who played Frederic Auguste Bartholdi, the statue’s designer.
Culture by cooking
That was just one of the 380 National Parks sites where he’s been. Along with being a cook, Prinz is also an experienced traveler, and the two pursuits often inform each other.
He samples all the local fare while traveling, often making his way to the kitchen to talk shop with the cooks. He has his kitchen decorated with cookware from Southeast Asia and North Africa, pieces he uses himself.
“You learn a lot about a culture and what they like and what they do” through food, he said.
In cooking for traders and settlers to the 1840s Northwest, you find it was an atmosphere of relative scarcity, where little was thrown away.
“You learn that they had to be really self-sufficient. They had to be very aware of what they were doing, they had to be aware of what you can gather, how you can preserve your food,” he said.
You see the same thing in Indonesia, Kenya or Ethiopia, he said.
“They depend on what they can do, and you find out that they’re really work-ethic people,” he said, who, like with the fort he and the other volunteers simulate, must make do with what they can find in their environment.
He picked up his love for traveling after taking a two-year assignment in 1975 in Germany as part of a job for the Department of Defense. That turned into 32 years abroad.
“I figured, hey, you can’t beat this,” he said. “This is an opportunity to travel, experience different cultures, do different things, get involved.”
It’s a big part of why he didn’t come back: There aren’t many settings where you can grab lunch in France, hit Venice for a weekend, snag a play in London or take a long weekend to Thailand, he said. Prinz recently returned from a trip to Antarctica, his sixth continent.
“It just grabbed me. The travel opportunities really just absolutely grabbed me.”
‘Ongoing project’
Cooking is universal, which is part of why he thinks his stop at the fort garners so much interest.
“They like the kitchen being open, because this is something everybody can relate to. You go into a blacksmith’s shop — I’ll take nothing away from those guys, they’re fantastic — but you can’t relate to the blacksmiths. Go to the carpenter’s shop, same thing. Wonderful guys, wonderful demonstration, but you can’t relate to it,” he said.
“You come into the kitchen? ‘Oh! Food! When’s lunch? What are you making?'”
After the chicken was ready, he served it with the colcannon on a pretty blue-accented plate.
The level of sanitation is period-accurate — there weren’t a lot of stainless steel countertops — so he can only feed people there for special Saturday events, or fort staff.
“In three years, I haven’t lost anybody yet,” he said.
He said cooking, for him, comes down to one big idea. Cavemen, he said, probably threw something they killed on a fire, then maybe mixed in some choicer leaves or something.
“Well, cooking was built on that. Because somebody came over and said, why don’t we mix this with that and make something? And they did that. I feel the same way here.”
He points to his colcannon.
Who said the cooks at the fort didn’t throw in some carrots? Put in a bit of one spice instead of another, or both?
“When I cook at home, in my own style, I’m constantly experimenting with things. … You try it, if it works it works, great. If it doesn’t work, well, you don’t try it again,” he said. “Somebody before me did something to make it better. Now maybe I can come here and make it better by adding something else, or changing it. It’s an ongoing project, cooking.”
