A colorful, spirited tour of culinary attitudes, tastes, and techniques throughout colonial America.
Confronted by unfamiliar animals, plants, and landscapes, settlers in the colonies and West Indies found new ways to produce food. Integrating their British and European tastes with the demands and bounty of the rugged American environment, early Americans developed a range of regional cuisines. From the kitchen tables of typical Puritan families to Iroquois longhouses in the backcountry and slave kitchens on southern plantations, McWilliams portrays the grand variety and inventiveness that characterized colonial cuisine. As colonial America grew, so did its palate, as interactions among European settlers, Native Americans, and African slaves created new dishes and attitudes about food. McWilliams considers how Indian corn, once thought by the colonists as “fit for swine,” became a fixture in the colonial diet. He also examines the ways in which African slaves influenced West Indian and American southern cuisine.
While a mania for all things British was a unifying feature of eighteenth-century cuisine, the colonies discovered a national beverage in domestically brewed beer, which came to symbolize solidarity and loyalty to the patriotic cause in the Revolutionary era. The beer and alcohol industry also instigated unprecedented trade among the colonies and further integrated colonial habits and tastes. Victory in the American Revolution initiated a “culinary declaration of independence,” prompting the antimonarchical habits of simplicity, frugality, and frontier ruggedness to define the cuisine of the United States—a shift that imbued values that continue to shape the nation’s attitudes to this day.
James E. McWilliams is associate professor of history at Texas State University-San Marcos. His articles have appeared in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, and The Washington Post, among other publications, and he is the author of Building the Bay Colony: Local Economy and Society in Early Massachusetts.
Read an Excerpt
To Make Pumpkin Pie Take the pumpkin and the peel the rind off, then stew it till it is quite soft, and put thereto one pint of pumpkin, one pint of milk, one glass of Malaga wine, one glass of rosewater, if you like it, seven eggs, half a pound of fresh butter, one small nutmeg, and sugar and salt to your taste.
Table of Contents
Introduction: Getting to the Guts of American Food 1. Adaptability: The Bittersweet Culinary History of the English West Indies 2. Traditionalism: The Greatest Accomplishment of Colonial New England 3. Negotiation: Living High and Low on the Hog in the Chesapeake Bay Region 4. Wilderness: The Fruitless Search for Culinary Order in Carolina 5. Diversity: Refined Crudeness in the Middle Colonies 6. Consumption: The British Invasion 7. Intoxication: Finding Common Bonds in an Alcoholic Empire 8. Revolution: A Culinary Declaration of Independence
What People are Saying About This
H. W. Brands
A delightfully incisive account of a fascinating subject. McWilliams traces the culinary folkways of Americans of the colonial period and demonstrates that we are what they ate.
— H. W. Brands, Dickson Allen Anderson Professor of History, University of Texas at Austin
H.W. Brands
A delightfully incisive account of a fascinating subject. McWilliams traces the culinary folkways of Americans of the colonial period and demonstrates that we are what they ate.
Nancy Zaslavsky
James E. McWilliams leads us on a cultural and gastronomic tour of Colonial America and tells us not only what early Americans ate, but also why they ate what they did. Lavishly illustrated throughout, with a generous use of overlooked historical images, this book helps us understand how we eat today.
— Nancy Zaslavsky, vice president of the Culinary Historians of Southern California
Bill McKibben
The question 'what's for dinner?' has been foremost in the minds of most humans for most of history, colonial Americans included. This fascinating book shows that how they answered that question helped shape the nation we became.
— Bill McKibben, author of Wandering Home: A Long Walk Through America's Most Hopeful Region, Vermont's Champlain Valley and the Adirondacks of New York
