Colonial Food
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Colonial Food - Ann Chandonnet
INTRODUCTION
COLONIAL FOOD is an introduction to the extraordinary culinary transformation kindled when explorers and colonists from England, Europe and Russia arrived in North America. Their challenge was to survive in the New World and prepare previously unknown foods like maize, potatoes, tomatoes, chocolate and chilies. Colonial diet was shaped by OldWorld habits, and seeds brought from home, as well as plants harvested in the wild and crops cultivated by Native Americans. American staples like corn (maize), various squashes and beans were quickly accepted by newcomers.
Preparing colonial food was not simply a matter of making new ingredients palatable. It also required a staggering range of skills: chopping kindling, keeping a fire burning indefinitely, plucking feathers from fowl, butchering animals large and small, cosseting bread yeast, brewing beer, making cheese, adjusting burners
of coals on a hearth and gauging the temperature of a bake oven. There were related skills, too, such as milking, making soap and candles, grinding corn, fermenting vinegar, pulverizing sugar, drying damp flour and recycling stale bread.
The housewife’s universe spiraled out from hearth and barnyard to tending a kitchen garden and perhaps a large vegetable garden, as well as assisting with the grain harvest. Growing and processing flax and hemp might have been counted among her endless chores.
Preserving methods were limited to drying, smoking, pickling and salting, so the cold months of the year saw a more limited diet than warm months. Dried apples and pumpkin were important staples, while sauerkraut and root vegetables like turnips were common winter fare.
In the seventeenth century, the ordinary frontiersman dined chiefly on corn, or Indian
, in some form—hoe cake, samp, hominy or Hasty Pudding. Ben Franklin discussed the delights of Indian in two essays. Corn’s flavor, he enthused, is one of the most agreeable and wholesome ... in the world; that its green ears roasted are a delicacy beyond expression; that samp, hominy, succatash, and nokehock, made of it, are so many pleasing varieties.
Samp was a porridge made from beaten or boiled corn. Hominy (from the Algonquian rockahominy) is dry corn with the hull and germ removed, often coarsely ground as in hominy grits. Succatash or succotash (from the Narragansett msickquatash, boiled whole corn kernels) is corn mixed with beans, sometimes enriched with fish. Nokehock was parched corn cooked in hot ashes, then pounded into meal.
Cornmeal mush was seasoned with pork, small game, greens, or pumpkin. Typical meals were mush with cream, oatmeal dumplings and gravy, barley broth, or fried sausage with roasted sweet potatoes. However by the eighteenth century, on thriving plantations and in Virginia’s colonial capital, Williamsburg, European-trained cooks held sway. Hence, diners grew accustomed to fish in pastry, venison pie, ragout of cucumbers, fried ox tongue and imported tipples.
A nice white gravy over a simple boiled chicken was no longer sufficient for entertaining. The goal was to set a table comparable to London’s best. Among the gentry, hostesses spared no expense.
An open door admits sunlight to a cabin’s main room. A rope bed takes up one corner. Living, cooking and sleeping in a common space was typical of the seventeenth century.
To preserve them for winter eating, rings of squash dry over an open fire. Photographed at Hart’s Square, a privately owned colonial village near Hickory, North Carolina.
The Indian corn found by the Pilgrims was various colors, including yellow, blue and red. Each ear bore just eight rows of kernels. After four centuries of horticultural improvement, today’s ear has nearly double that.
In this Tennessee cabin’s fireplace, a wall-mounted swinging iron crane supports a large pot ready for cooking—eliminating the danger of stepping into the fireplace. Three cast-iron skillets hang within easy reach.
ARRIVING IN THE NEW WORLD
AFTER Christopher Columbus proved that there was desirable land on the far side of the Atlantic in the last years of the fifteenth century, European countries strove for empire. With guile, enslavement, smallpox and genocide, Columbus conquered the Arawak of the Bahamas, Cortés the Aztecs of Mexico and Pizarro the Incas of Peru.
By window light, an interpreter in period costume prepares