The cuisine of the Thirteen Colonies includes the foodways, culinary culture and cooking methods of the Colonial United States and its people. The cuisine adapted as colonists expanded deeper into the unfamiliar new environment.
Region Virginia and Maryland In the early 17th century, the first wave of English immigrants began arriving in North America, settling mainly around the Chesapeake Bay in Virginia and Maryland. The first settlers were poor farmers and severe famines took place before 1612. After that, according to Lois Green Carr, about 130,000 European settlers the majority of whom were English came to Maryland and Virginia in the seventeenth century. Three-fourths were poor people who came as indentured servants, needed for work in the labour intensive, highly profitable tobacco crop. Life expectancy was lower than in England. Unfamiliar New World diseases caused high death rates. Indian corn was the main source of nourishment.Lois Green Carr, "Emigration and the standard of living: The seventeenth century Chesapeake." Journal of Economic History (1992) 52#2 . pp.271-291Megan E. Edwards, "Virginia ham: The local and global of colonial foodways." in Local Foods Meet Global Foodways ( Routledge, 2013) pp.60–77. online There were still periods when food was scarce, and in 1680 Lord Culpeper, the Governor of Virginia was worried about the servants revolting due to hunger.
Cooking in southern England was noted for a tendency toward frying, simmering, and roasting, and this also became true for Virginian cooking. Wealthy households tended to vary cooking methods greatly, while poor households were generally confined to boiling and frying. The only form of cooking that was slow to develop was baking. Typical dishes among the upper classes were fricassees of various meats with herbs, and sometimes a good amount of claret. Common food among the lower classes was corn porridge or mush, hominy with greens and salt-cured meat, and later the traditional southern fried chicken and chitlins.David Hackett Fischer, Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America 1989), pp. 349–354Katherine E. Harbury, Colonial Virginia's Cooking Dynasties (U of South Carolina Press, 2004).Jane Carson, Colonial Virginia cookery: Procedures, equipment, and ingredients in colonial cooking. (Colonial Williamsburg, 1968).
New England New England had a great abundance of wildlife and seafood. Traditional East Anglian fare was preferred, even though it had to be made with New World ingredients.Fischer, pp. 134–39.
Baked beans and pease porridge were everyday fare, particularly during the winter, and usually eaten with coarse, dark bread. At first, it was made with a mixture of wheat and maize (corn), but a disease struck in the 1660s called wheat rust, after which it was made of rye and maize, creating what was later known as "rye an injun". Vegetables with thoroughly boiled meat was a popular dish, and they were cooked together rather than separately, and frequently without seasoning. Baking was a favorite method of cooking, and New England was the origin of dishes today seen as quintessentially American, such as baked turkey.Sarah F. McMahon, "A comfortable subsistence: The changing composition of diet in rural New England, 1620-1840." William and Mary Quarterly (1985) 42#1: 26-65. onlineSarah Francis McMahon, " 'A Comfortable Subsistence': A History of Diet in New England, 1630-1850" (PhD dissertation, Brandeis University; ProQuest Dissertations & Theses, 1982. 8211261).
Delaware Valley and Mid-Atlantic region
The Quakers emigrated to the New World from the East Midlands during the 17th century, and eventually settled primarily in the Delaware Valley. They were similar to the Puritans in the strictness that they applied to everyday life, though their religious teachings were far different. Their food was plain and simple. Excessive consumption was discouraged and failure to eat or drink moderately was punished with public acts of criticism.
William Penn was the founder of Pennsylvania and an important figure in the development of the Quaker movement, and he encouraged frugality in his followers with advice such as, "If thou rise with an appetite thou are sure never to sit down without one".Quoted in Fischer, p. 539 The Quakers, like the Puritans, encountered an abundance of food in the New World: forests rich with game and berries, streams teeming with fish, and abundant flocks of birds. Still, the asceticism persevered.
Many Quakers avoided eating butter as a form of self-mortification, and the most eccentric followers would avoid tea and meat. The idealist and pacifist ideas of the Quakers also encouraged many to boycott products that were considered to be tainted by sin. This included butter, due to its role in raising war taxes, and coffee, because it was produced by slave labor.
Eating habits were more egalitarian than those of either the Puritans or the Virginian Anglicans. At meals, entire households would dine at the same table, including children and servants.Fischer, p. 483
The most typical cooking method of the Quakers was boiling, a method brought from ancestral northern England. Boiled breakfast and dinner were standard fares, as well as "pop-robbins", balls of batter made from flour and eggs boiled in milk. Boiled dumplings and puddings were so common in Quaker homes that they were referred to by outsiders as "Quaker food".Fischer, p. 542. The Quakers ate cornmeal, elk, venison and wild turkey along with puddings and desserts.
Travelers noted apple dumplings as an almost daily dish in the Delaware Valley and cookbooks specialized in puddings and dumplings. Food was mostly preserved through boiling, simmering or standing.
A popular genre of dishes made from this favored method of food preparation was "cheese" (or "butter"), a generic term for dishes prepared by slow boiling or pressing. They could be made from ingredients as varying as apples (i.e., apple butter), plums and walnuts.
Cream cheese had its origins in Quaker cooking, but was in colonial times not true cheese made with rennet or curds, but rather cream that was warmed gently and then allowed to stand wrapped in the cloth until it became semi-solid.
Dried beef was widely popular in the Delaware Valley and was eaten along with puddings and dumplings to add flavor. The use of dried beef was so widespread that it was often called "Quaker gravy" in the 18th century.
Although the Quaker influence from the northern Midlands was the most dominant, there was some influence from German immigrants during the 18th century. Scrapple, a pot pudding made from meat scraps and grain, became a staple of the regional cuisine for many generations.Fischer, p. 538–44
Backcountry The last major wave of British immigrants to the colonies took place in 1720–1775. About 250,000 people traveled across the Atlantic primarily to seek economic betterment and to escape severe economic hardships. Most of these came from Ireland and were of Scots-Irish or Irish descent.
Many were poor and therefore accustomed to hard times, setting them apart from the other major British immigrant groups.Fischer, pp. 608–12 They settled in what would come to be known generally as the "backcountry", on the frontier and in the highlands in the north and south.
A typical breakfast could be toasted bread, cheese, and any leftover meat or vegetables from the previous dinner. In summer, people drank fresh milk.James M. Volo and Dorothy Denneen, Volo, Daily Life on the Old Colonial Frontier (2002) p 149
The backcountry relied heavily on a diet based on mush made from soured milk or boiled grains. Clabber, a yogurt-like food made with soured milk, was a standard breakfast dish and was eaten by backcountry settlers of all ages.
This dietary habit was not shared by other British immigrant groups and was equally despised by those still in Britain. The Anglican missionary Charles Woodmason, who spent time among Ulster Irish immigrants, described them as depending "wholly on butter, milk, clabber and what in England is given to hogs".Quoted in Fischer, pp. 727–28
Porridge was a popular meal in the British borderlands and remained popular in America. The only difference was that the oatmeal was replaced by corn, and is still known today in the South as grits. Cakes of unleavened dough baked on bakestones or circular griddles were common and went by names such as "clapbread", "griddle cakes" and "pancakes".
While the potato had originated in South America, it did not become established in North America until it was brought to the colonies by northern British settlers in the 18th century and became an important backcountry staple along with corn.
The habit of eating "sallet" or "greens" remained popular, but the vegetables of the Old World were replaced with plants like squashes, gourds, beans, corn, land cress, and pokeweed.
The distinctive cooking of the American backcountry was boiling. Along with clabber, porridge, and mushes, the typical dishes were various stews, soups and pot pies.
Food was eaten from wooden or pewter trenchers with two-tined forks, large spoons, and hunting knives. Dishware was not popular since it was easily breakable and tended to dull knives quickly.
Except for the Quakers and Puritans, feasting with an abundance of food and drink was never discouraged and practiced as often as was feasible. Generally, backcountry cuisine shared neither the religious austerity of the North nor the refinement of the South and was therefore ridiculed by outsiders.
An apparent lack of fastidiousness in preparing the food provoked further criticism from many sources. The Anglican Woodmason characterized backcountry cooking as "exceedingly filthy and most execrable".Quoted in Fischer, p. 730
Others told of matrons washing their feet in the cook pot, that it was considered unlucky to wash a milk churn and that human hairs in butter were considered a sign of quality. These descriptions seem to be confirmed by an old saying attributed to Appalachian housewives: "The mair [more] dirt the less hurt".
Another expression of backcountry hardiness was the lack of appreciation of coffee and tea. Both were described as mere "slops" and were deemed appropriate only for those who were sick or unfit for labor.Fischer, pp. 727–31
Diet before the American Revolution
When colonists arrived in America, they planted familiar crops from the Old World with varying degrees of success and raised domestic animals for meat, leather, and wool, as they had done in Britain.
The colonists faced difficulties owing to different climate and other environmental factors, but trade with Britain, continental Europe, and the West Indies allowed them to create a cuisine similar to the various regional British cuisines.
Local plants and animals offered tantalizing alternatives to the Old World diet, but the colonists held on to old traditions and tended to use these items in the same fashion as they did their Old-World equivalents (or even ignore them if more familiar foods were available).Oliver, pp. 16–19.
The American colonial diet varied depending on region, with local cuisine patterns established by the mid-18th century.
A preference for British cooking methods is apparent in cookbooks brought to the New World. There was a general disdain for French cookery, even among the French Huguenots in South Carolina and French Canadians.Smith, The Oxford Encyclopedia of Food and Drink in America, vol. 1, p. 512. One cookbook common in the colonies, The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy, by Hannah Glasse, held the French style of cookery in disdain, stating "the blind folly of this age that would rather be imposed on by a French booby, than give encouragement to a good English cook!"Glasse(London,1750) She does add French recipes to the text but speaks out flagrantly against the dishes, "... think(ing) it an odd jumble of trash."
Crops