A Revolution in Eating

How the Quest for Food Shaped America

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by James E. McWilliams

Columbia University Press

Due/Published July 2005, 384 pages, cloth

ISBN 0231129920

James E. McWilliams presents a colorful and spirited tour of culinary tastes and techniques throughout colonial America. Confronted by strange new animals, plants, and landscapes, settlers in the West Indies, New England, the Chesapeake region, the Carolinas, and the Middle Colonies found new ways to produce and cultivate 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 dining rooms of tobacco farmers and the kitchen tables of typical Puritan families to Iroquois longhouses in the backcountry, slave kitchens on Southern plantations, and taverns in Philadelphia, McWilliams portrays the grand variety and inventiveness that characterized colonial cuisine.
As colonial America grew and expanded so did its palate. Interactions among European settlers, Native Americans, and African slaves created new dishes and attitudes about food. And 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 American cuisine. McWilliams demonstrates that this was a shift not so much in new ingredients or cooking methods, as in the way Americans imbued food andcuisine with certain values that continue to shape American attitudes to this day.

To Make Pumpkin Pie:
Take the Pumpkin and 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 rose-water, if you like it, seven eggs, half a pound of fresh butter, one small nutmeg, and sugar and salt to your taste.