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The typical and authentic way of cooking food at the Johnny Appleseed Festival is done over an open flame.
Image credits: Brett Huguenard |
Probably my favorite aspect of the Johnny Appleseed Festival is all of the food. I haven't tried anything there that I didn't like. Even foods as basic and common as cornbread have a remarkably wholesome and superior taste to any other cornbread I've ever tasted. At the festival, they bake the cornbread in the old style stone cookware as was common with the colonists in the time when America was a very young nation, trying to make a place for itself in the world. Whether or not that's the secret to why the cornbread tastes so good, I'm not sure, but it definitely makes an incredible difference. Another food served at the festival is a cooked bean dish, which is also divine, although I'm biased because I'm a real sucker when it comes to anything with beans. The chicken and dumplings are also an excellent choice to eat as you walk around seeing what else the festival has to offer. They have that fresh, prepared-over-a-real-fire flavor as opposed to the more manufactured, processed meats, or even canned chicken and dumplings that we tend to be more used to these days. Another local favorite, probably among most visitors to the festival, as far as the food varieties are concerned is the freshly cooked caramel corn prepared in a large kettle pot. As you walk around in Johnny Appleseed Park during the festival, it seems that almost half of the festival-goers can been seen carrying a bag of their tasty caramel corn. To wash this all down with, there are pavilions that sell homemade root beer brewed the old fashioned way sold in those self-locking, retro-style, colored glass bottles. As far as I'm concerned, food prepared in the old fashioned way such as in the Johnny Appleseed Festival is some of the best food I've ever tasted.
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There are many beverage vendor booths at the festival to quench your thirst after eating the authentic foods, such as this "Sarsaparilla Surprise" booth.
Image credits: Brett Huguenard |
This is one of the many old-fashioned beverage stands at the festival. Here, the beverages and drinks are made with more original and raw ingredients as they were made in much earlier days before the modern methods used in today's canned sodas. I remember for home economics class when I was in middle school, we made homemade root beer soda which reminded me of the kind made at the festival, using the raw ingredients and flavorings. The soda there tastes such as I imagine it would when it first became a beverage.
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Some of the food vendors at the Johnny Appleseed Festival prepare a rather large fire pit with logs of wood getting ready to cook.
Image credits: Brett Huguenard |
As I mentioned before, the Johnny Appleseed Festival does not lack authenticity at all. The workers of the festival do all of their cooking for the food you can buy in the park over an open flame using axe-cut logs for an authentic wood burning fire accurate to the time period. Some use a type of 'wood coal' such as that used in the days of John Chapman to improve the authentic method of cooking used by the vendors. You can see one of the bags of wood coal, not charcoal briquettes such as used in the charcoal grills of today, the woman is holding in the top picture on this page. She went on to say that the particular type of wood coal used at the festival is more expensive, but provides a better, hotter heat than traditional charcoal briquettes, therefore better, faster, and more authentic cooking like in America's earlier days.
