Category Archives: food

Food in the 1790s

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While talking with a friend about early American food, and the divergence between American cookery and British, he said the differences were due to the influx of immigrants with their regional cuisines.

Yes, that is partly true, but more so later on,

The truth is that what was eaten began diverging right away.

Take the word corn for example. In Britain, corn was a general term for grain. (So in the nursery rhyme ‘the cows in the corn’, the cows could have been in the wheat. the term used for corn was the American Indian word maize.

Corn was a staple of the American diet, eaten in a variety of ways: bread, pancakes, pone (little cakes) and so on. Including something called ash pone which was cooked in the ashes. (Yuck?)

Squash, another Indian name for an American vegetable, was an addition to the American diet.

They did have something they called pumpkin pie but we would not recognize it. It was slices of raw apple and pumpkin sugared and cooked in a crust. (Unappealing, I think. I tried a recipe for a Shaker lemon pie which was slices of raw lemon, heavily sugared and baked in a pie. Incredibly sour, despite the sugar. But I digress). What we would call pumpkin pie (stewed pumpkin stewed with sugar and spices) was called a pudding at that time.

Other differences: corn cobs were used to smoke bacon and cranberry sauce accompanied the roast turkey, cranberries being an American fruit. Mince pie, by the way, was made with meat – usually venison, not apples and raisins as it is now.

One of the early recipes gives directions for spruce beer. Yes, it really does contain spruce, but also hops and molasses. And speaking of molasses, this is a word Americans, even from this time forward, have used in preference to the more British treacle.

What did they eat in 1797?

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With Thanksgiving coming up, my thoughts turn naturally to food.

One of the first things that strikes a modern person when one researches food from this era is how meat heavy it is. The American plate for the last fifty or so years has been meat, a vegetable and a starch like potato or rice.

Johnny cakes or cornbread would have more likely been the starch on the table. And while vegetables from the garden would be available in the summer and early fall, people would have been limited to good keepers like cabbage apples, and carrots after that.

Refrigeration was primitive. Root cellars, holes dug into the ground and cool, were further cooled with ice covered in sawdust for insulation.

But meat, both from domesticated animals and whatever a hunter could bag, was available all year. (Assuming enough wealth to own animals or the skill to hunt successfully.)

Here is a list of some of the animals eaten:

The regular domesticated: beef, pork, mutton, lamb and chicken.

Fish: salmon, shad, Hannah Hill (sea bass), oysters, lobster, cod, haddock, perch, eels

Wild: ducks, geese, partridge, deer, snipes, pigeon, hares and rabbits, turtles and of course turkey.

Recipes included many herbs.

No wonder people longed for greens in the spring.

 

 

 

More about salads – and vegetables

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Salad has a long history. One source I read claimed that the Greeks and Romans ate mixed greens with dressing.

I have salad recipes in my Queen Elizabeth I and King Richard cookbooks although they also include things like figs and are sweeter than we normally think of salad, which is now seen as more of a healthy food. The recipes from these renaissance cookbooks read more like dessert.

Besides wild greens and the tops of beets and turnips, early American farmers also grew several varieties of lettuce, cucumbers, radishes. What’s missing from the usual American salad? Why, tomatoes. Although now considered Italian, tomatoes are actually, like potatoes, from South America It was brought to Europe by Spain. And, a member of the nightshade family, it was considered a poison. It was not eaten at all during the Colonial period ( and grown as a decorative plant) but by the early 1800s was popular as a food. One story lists Thomas Jefferson as the who began planting and eating tomatoes. He was a passionate gardener who tried new foods but we don’t really know for sure.

But I digress. Cucumbers were frequently used as a salad and I have found old recipes for cucumber salad which usually consists of chopped cucumbers and vinegar.

Other vegetables: artichokes, onions, garlic, parsnips, asparagus and of course things like cabbage were popular. We think of the diet at this time as meat heavy, and it was, but cheese and diary and grains, as well as the vegetables, were also a big part of the diet.

I always mention food in my books. I’m a gardener myself and clearly a foodie – which regular readers of my blog can surely tell. And I find it fascinating to discover what our forefathers ate and didn’t eat. Sometimes it is surprising.