MANSFIELD — Laura Supinger can’t recall a time in her life when she wasn’t interested in history — and historical cooking.
“I grew up in it. For as long as I can remember, my family always did some sort of (historical) re-enacting. It just slowly grew,” she said. “I got asked to help when we did an all-18th century dinner and I was hooked.
“My mom started (historical cooking) and she decided to do something else. So I inherited all the cookbooks and it just boiled from there,” she said.
“I just actually finished my master’s degree, writing a thesis on historical cookbooks and how they connected to the women of the 18th century,” said Supinger, who also uses her knowledge during historical re-enactments.
That passion for open-hearth cooking was evident Saturday when Supinger led a five-hour, 18th century cooking demonstration inside the historic Petersburg Cabin in Mansfield’s South Park.
It’s nearly a 150-mile drive to Mansfield from Supinger’s home in the western Ohio village of Covington.
But the lure is strong for her to visit Petersburg Cabin and other historic venues created in South Park by the Richland Early American Center for History. She was joined by a small group of “students” on Saturday from Mansfield, Bucyrus and Norwalk.
Supinger, who has launched her own YouTube “Making the Past Present” channel for her cooking demonstrations, has made the trip to South Park five or six times since October.
“I have been doing a lot of the filming up here. They let me come up and stay and do all the work up here,” she said. “I come up as much as I can. I love it up here.
“The people who do REACH are so friendly and so helpful. They want to make sure I have everything I need. If I need something and they don’t have it, they’ll get it … they make it, they build it,” Supringer said.
Joined by two assistants in proper historical clothing, Supinger planned to make chicken-and-rice, a rich cake, beefcakes, a pudding and fritters. She also prepared “beef olives,” which consists of bacon and sausage rolled inside a steak and then cooked in gravy.
The dishes were prepared using historically accurate kitchen implements and bowls, as well as pots for cooking over the fire in the open hearth,
She also told participants about the joy of showing youngsters how to make a pound cake, “which literally is a pound of eggs, a pound of butter, a pound, a pound, a pound, a pound.
“I’ll use it at events, when it’s raining like this and you have a group of kids saying, ‘I’m so bored!’ And it’s like, well, I have a cake. If you mix it, you get the whole thing. They say, ‘Really?’
“As long as they beat it for the hour, they get the whole cake. I don’t know whether mom and dad like it or not, but at least I have them for an hour. So you know, it works,” Supinger said with a laugh.
