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Colonial Days: A Taste of the Past

What was it like to travel to America in the 17^th & 18^th centuries and establish a home and a family? The conditions were harsh and families were transformed. They begin to see themselves and their role in society differently.

A typical colonial fare would usually include a form of wine, brandy, nutmeg and mace; they were very popular ingredients at the time. The colonists also survived on fish (mainly sturgeon), turtles, rays, herons, gulls, oysters, raccoons, and other native animals, as well as provisions of beef, pork, and fish they brought with them from Europe.

To review the taste of the past you would need to conduct a lot of research. Not only are recipes difficult to come across, they also listed ingredients that are unfamiliar and tools that we do not use in today’s modern kitchen. Once you realize that “chicken” may be spelled four different times throughout one recipe and that a quart was double the size it is today then menus start falling into place.

The best sources for appropriate recipes are cookbooks or “receipt” books known to have sold in the Williamsburg area during the 18^th century. Hannah Glasses’s 1760 publication The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy is one good example; another is Eliza Smith’s The Compleat Housewife of 1742.

It is obvious that today you would use your electric eggbeater instead of a birch twig whisk and less obvious what double-refined sugar and a grated penny-loaf are supposed to be. Some recipes call for a dozen or more eggs, a reminder that our eggs are considerably larger than they were back then, but by how much?

Meals cooked by the American colonists were made with foods brought from their British homelands and foods introduced to them by the Native Americans, Spanish and French explorers and African slaves.

There were native foods available to the early American colonists; game, fish, berries and Indian crops (corn, squash, pumpkin). It took some time for the colonists to change their old eating habits and adapt to the new foods available.

Settlers brought wheat and rye seeds with them to grow in America but found these crops were difficult to grow in the soil along the coast. Corn, a Native American crop, was easier to grow. They adapted their bread and pudding recipes to use corn instead of wheat and rye flour.

With no electricity or refrigeration it was difficult to store perishable foods. Eventually foods were stored in cool cellars. Cellars are similar to basements. It is a room located below ground level. Eventually the colonists learned to store winter ice and used this as refrigeration. Meats and fish could be salted and smoked and saved for later use.

Most colonists produced all the foods they ate. Most meals were cooked in one large iron kettle over an open log fire. Ovens, used for baking, were eventually built in the sides of the fireplaces.

Maple sugar and honey were used for sweetening. Berries (huckleberries, strawberries, blackberries) grew wild and were used for making pies, tarts, sauces and preserves. Ice cream was available toward the end of the colonial period.

Coffee, tea, cider, rum, chocolate drinks, beer and wine were some of the popular drinks of the time. It has been suggested some of these drinks became popular because the water supply was often not safe to drink.

Domestic cows, pigs and sheep were eventually introduced into America.

Source: University of Illinois Extension – Family Nutrition Program – US Department of Agriculture

Interesting Facts

• In Colonial times children had to follow some very strict rules such as, not moving their mouth with any noise and the same for all their other body parts.
• Children couldn’t even sit down. When a meal was good they couldn’t say that it was good.
• There was not much milk in the winter. Instead the colonists used sweetened cider thinned with water. Sometimes they soaked bread in it.
• If you were not as wealthy as your neighbors, you would hide your fish in the cupboard when they came to visit. This is because you would not want them to know that you eat cheap fish.
• Getting food wasn’t as easy as going to the super market. Most of the food was hunted, grown in the family garden, fished for or came from the animals on the farm.
• The people thought water made you sick. There weren’t as many cows as there are now, so people did not drink very much milk. They often drank peach and apple cider.
• On Sunday Colonial families ate baked beans. The mother of the family would start baking the beans on Saturday night. She would put molasses and a piece of salt pork, along with the beans into a pot called a bake kettle. She would leave the beans in the fireplace all night. In the morning they were ready to eat.
• The Colonial people saved lots of their vegetables by pickling them. This means they put the vegetables in vinegar for a while. The meat was saved by putting it in the smoke house. It would get dry and the smoke made a safe coating.
• Drinks were not set on the table by the server (at an eatery) but presented to each guest, ladies first, on a serving tray, and diners passed their plates and served one another from the dish nearest them.
• White tablecloths were changed after the first and second courses, but the dessert course was served on the bare table.
• Ladies never ordered anything for themselves when they went out to dine and therefore never engaged in any conversation with the waiters. The gentleman next to the lady took the responsibility of asking the server for more wine if her glass became empty. Waiters were meant neither to be seen nor heard. Much of their time was spent standing like statues, waiting for an unobtrusive signal from the hostess to proceed with the next task. Multi-course dinners were an important social event and usually lasted for several hours. After toasts at the end of the meal, the ladies typically adjourned to the parlor for tea while gentlemen remained at the table for several more rounds of drinks before joining the ladies.

Source:Colonial Williamsburg Journal, The Association for the Preservation of Virginia Antiquities

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