A Revolution in Eating: How the Quest for Food Shaped America
James E. McWilliams
Language: English
Pages: 397
ISBN: B01FKW7WLW
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Sugar, pork, beer, corn, cider, scrapple, and hoppin' John all became staples in the diet of colonial America. The ways Americans cultivated and prepared food and the values they attributed to it played an important role in shaping the identity of the newborn nation. In A Revolution in Eating, James E. McWilliams presents a colorful and spirited tour of culinary attitudes, tastes, and techniques throughout colonial America.
Confronted by strange new 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 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 and cuisine with values that continue to shape American attitudes to this day.
No Happy Cows: Dispatches from the Frontlines of the Food Revolution
Radical Thought in Italy: A Potential Politics
Fashioning Fat: Inside Plus-Size Modeling
European Universalism: The Rhetoric of Power
Satisfaction Not Guaranteed: Dilemmas of Progress in Modern Society
Was ubiquitous on both sides of the Atlantic, but while 63 percent of the English lower middle class owned roasting equipment, only 24 percent of their colonial counterparts did. An even greater disparity divides these groups when it comes to tables and chairs. Of the poorest in England, 81 percent owned a table or table board. The same could be said for only 7 percent of the poorest colonists. Among England’s lower middle class, 80 percent owned chairs, compared with 28 percent of the colonists.
Support ample animal growth, Jefferson made an “appeal to experience” and noted that in America “a race of animals … has been increased in its dimensions9 by cold and moisture, in direct opposition to the hypothesis, which supposes that these two circumstances diminish animal bulk, and that it is their contraries heat and dryness which enlarge it.” Consider the bear, he implored. John Bartram had and, Jefferson recalled, described an average American bear weighing “400 lb.” Compare that with the.
66, no. 1 (1999): 41–65. Gentleman of the Faculty. Concise Observations on the Nature of Our Common Food, so far as It Tends to Promote or Injure Health. London: Swords, 1790. Gerard, John. The Herball, or General Historie of Plantes. London: Adam, Issip Joice Norton and Richard Whitakers, 1633. Gildrie, Richard P. Salem Massachusetts, 1626–1683: A Covenant Community. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1974. Glacken, Clarence J. “Count Buffon on Cultural Changes of the Physical.
Richard. “Caribbean Fishing and Fishermen: A Historical Sketch.” American Anthropologist 68, no. 6 (1966): 1363–1383. Price, Richard. Observations on the Importance of the American Revolution. London: Cassell, 1785. Pruitt, Bettye Hobbs. “Self-Sufficiency and the Agricultural Economy of Eighteenth-Century Massachusetts.” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 41, no. 3 (1984): 333–364. Quitt, Martin H. “Trade and Acculturation at Jamestown, 1607–1609: The Limits of Understanding.” William and.
Community.” Journal of Southern History 52, no. 1 (1986): 19–42. ———. “Taverns and Tavern Culture on the Southern Colonial Frontier: Rowan County, North Carolina, 1753–1776.” Journal of Southern History 62, no. 4 (1996): 661–688. Thwaites, Reuben Gold, ed. Early Western Travels, 1748–1846. New York: AMS Press, 1966. Tully, Alan. Forming American Politics: Ideals, Interests, and Institutions in Colonial New York and Pennsylvania. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994. Tusser, Thomas.