When I was a kid- before my Mom got sick, she was big into history. Our family volunteered a couple of Autumns down at Lincoln's New Salem State Park- a log village where the future president lived a few years as a young man. Volunteers would dress in period costume and be trained to act and perform period tasks like soap-making, barrel-making, horse-shoeing, driving a team of oxen and a plow, etc. Mom and other ladies cooked hearth-side in a cast-iron Dutch Oven in one of the many hand-hewn log cabin residences and we ended up tasting some yummy things- mainly beef stew type meals. I didn't really enjoy it much then as a youngster- but looking back, it was pretty cool, really.