McWilliams - A revolution in eating : how the quest for food shaped America

A REVOLUTION IN EATING

Arts and Traditions of the Table

A REVOLUTION IN EATING

How the Quest for Food Shaped America

James E. McWilliams

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS : NEW YORK

Columbia University Press : Publishers Since 1893 : New York Chichester, West Sussex

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Copyright 2005 Columbia University Press

All rights reserved

E-ISBN 978-0-231-50348-8

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

McWilliams, James E.

A revolution in eating : how the quest for food shaped America / James E. McWilliams.

p. cm.(Arts and traditions of the table)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-231-12992-0 (cloth : alk. paper)

1. GastronomyHistory. 2. Food habitsUnited States.History. I. Title. II. Series.

TX633.M3 2005

394.120973dc22

2004061867

A Columbia University Press E-book.
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Acknowledgment is gratefully made for permission to reproduce the following: Illustration by Martha Lewis. From R. B., The English Empire in America (London: Crouch, 1685). Lawrence H. Slaughter Collection, Map Division, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations. From Charles de Rochefort, Histoire naturelle et morale des les Antilles de lAmrique (Rotterdam: Leers, 1681). Courtesy of the American Philosophical Society Library, Philadelphia. Courtesy of the Annenberg Rare Book and Manuscript Library, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia. From Johan von Staden, Americae Pars Tertia (Frankfurt, 1592). Courtesy of the Library Company of Philadelphia. Courtesy of the Rare Books Division, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations. From Theodor de Bry, America, pt. 1, Admiranda narratio, fida tamen, de commodis et incolarum ritibus Virginiae Anglico scripta sermone a Thoma Hariot (Frankfurt: Bry, 1590). Courtesy of the Rare Books Division, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations. From Theodor de Bry, America, pt. 2, Brevis narratio eorum quae in Florida Americae provicia Gallis acciderunt (Frankfurt: Bry, 1591). Courtesy of the Map Division, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations. Courtesy of the Arents Collections, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations. From Thomas Hariot, Americae pars, nunc Virginia dicta (Frankfurt: Wechel, 1590). Courtesy of the Library Company of Philadelphia. From Maryland Gazette. Spencer Museum of Art, University of Kansas, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. Dolph Simons Jr.. Courtesy of the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. Courtesy of the Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston. From Amelia Simmons, American Cookery (1796; facsimile, New York: Oxford University Press, 1958; reprint, New York: Dover, 1984).

CONTENTS

The Bittersweet Culinary History of the English West Indies

The Greatest Accomplishment of Colonial New England

Living High and Low on the Hog in the Chesapeake Bay Region

The Fruitless Search for Culinary Order in Carolina

Refined Crudeness in the Middle Colonies

The British Invasion

Finding Common Bonds in an Alcoholic Empire

A Culinary Declaration of Independence

Underlying the rich symbolic universe that food and eating always represent there is the animal reality of our living existence.

Sidney Mintz, Tasting Food, Tasting Freedom

A Meal: How It Might Have Looked

On a warm spring afternoon in 1650, Rebecca Cole stepped out of her garden, entered her kitchen, and began to cook. Maryland, where the Cole family had migrated from Middlesex, England, was becoming well known not only for its profitable tobacco crops but also for its ample corn, abundant garden vegetables, and healthy supply of meat. And that combination, as it did on most days, would make up the evening meal. Rebecca had started soaking corn kernels at the crack of dawn to soften them for pounding, an exhausting task made necessary by the lack of a local gristmill. She knew that she needed about six cups of cornmeal to feed her husband, five children, and herself. So for the next couple of hours, Rebecca and her two daughters dutifully hunched over a large mortar, took wooden pestles in hand, and reduced a tub of white corn kernels into a gritty heap of meal.

Meanwhile, out in the barn, Robert Cole and his son, Robert Jr., contemplated a decision: pork or beef? The fact that they even had a choice reflected Roberts preparation as a husbandman. Two months earlier, when the weather was still cool, he had slaughtered two piglets and a calf. The pigs were about seven months old, the age when their muscle density was low, fat content high, and stringy connective tissue still pleasantly soft to the palate. The calf was around two years old and similarly primed for consumption and preservation. Slaughtering a piglet was a turbulent task. It began with a rapid cut to the beasts throat, followed by a prolonged period of squealing and bloodletting. The beast was then scalded in a vat of boiling water to loosen its sharp and wiry bristles so they could be easily brushed off. Robert gathered the offal (the word literally denotes the off fall after the slaughter) from the barn floor to make sausage. He then hacked the corpse into two large chunks, called flitches, and placed them aside. The cow met a similarly brutal fate, but its slaughter took longer, resulted in a louder and deeper death rattle, and required greater precision: Robert had to not only kill it but also find its joints and dissect it into clean cuts of chucks, ribs, loins, and rounds. For all the commotion and mess that ensued, however, the slaughter was the easy part.

Robert Jr. and his brother managed the more physically taxing jobs of smoking the pork and pickling the beef. Smoking pork was a procedure dating back to the Middle Ages that sealed in fat and protected freshly cut meat from spoilage. The boys tossed the pork flitches in a large tub of salt, turning them over repeatedly, and then hung the coated slabs on metal hooks in order to air them out. After a day or two, the boys hauled the salted pork to the chimney, which served as a substitute for a smokehouse. With the pork hanging in the shaft, the wood smoke clogged the chimney and slowly coated the meats surface, enhancing its flavor while extending its shelf life. Pickling beef involved submerging the cuts in a brine and vinegar solution that the boys prepared with salt, spices, and saltpeter. The process took place in large wooden barrels and didnt so much impart flavor as give the acid in the vinegar time to kill the enzymes that decomposed meat. The boys secured the barrels and rolled them to the corner of the barn. With the girls and Rebecca still pounding the corn in the kitchen, the boys stood in the barn, considered their inventory, and made their decision. They chose beef.

After placing three pounds of meat in a warming pan over the kitchen fire, Rebecca demanded that her servant, a trained dairymaid, quickly fetch some milk and butter. The dairymaid had spent the entire morning in the kitchen, where the dairy was housed, scalding milk pans, trays, pots, and churns in an eighteen-gallon copper pot. Whatever did not fit into the cauldron had to be cleaned individually. A colonial dairy had to be pristine. Any residual milk that dried on the surface of a container or shelf might carry bacteria that would result not only in a soured product but very possibly in widespread and potentially fatal illness. The maid, who had learned her skill back in England, could milk a single cow in about ten minutes. Out in the barn, after cleaning the equipment, she did just that to seven of the Coles milk cows. She allowed the warm milk to cool in a tub and then strained it through a sieve concocted from a hollowed-out wooden bowl covered in a linen towel. The strained milk rested in earthenware milk trays for several hours, giving the cream a chance to coagulate at the top. The dairymaid then skimmed the thick cream with a slotted wooden paddle, leaving behind the thinner milk that Rebecca had requested. The weather that day was dry and warm, so the churning of the cream into butter took only a couple of hours rather than several. Once the butter had formed, the dairymaid squeezed out the buttermilk and fed it to the hogs, a practice that improved the taste of the meat. As late afternoon set in, she covered the bottom of a butter dish with salt, spooned in the thick butter, patted it down, and sprinkled the top with another layer of salt. She then carried a chunk of it over to Rebecca, whose cornmeal awaited.