A new history of American eating guaranteed to tempt all foodies.
Why don't Americans eat blood pudding? Who created pumpkin pie,
popcorn and rum, and how did such tasty treats come to be staples
of the national cuisine? McWilliams (History/Texas State Univ.)
details the history of cooking and eating from the early colonies
through the Revolutionary War. Colonists, he shows, spurned Native
American agriculture and tried to reestablish English gardens in
Massachusetts. They did, however, adopt Indian corn; the son of the
Massachusetts Bay Colony governor even traveled to London to argue
its benefits before the Royal Society. In the Chesapeake Bay area,
colonists wanted to fix fancy food that could be served at elegant
and impressive dinner parties. Not content merely to regale us with
culinary curiosities, the author constantly connects cooking and
eating to other political and social matters. An infusion of
British cookbooks in the early and middle 18th century, for
example, helped instill a sense of belonging in a diverse and
disparate group of colonists. Reverse logic prevailed during and
after the Revolution, when Americans championed simpler fare. Their
tables mirrored their politics; plain eating was a concrete
rejection of European cuisine and European society, which Americans
perceived as luxurious and effete. McWilliams tells a story of
change and adaptation. Newcomers to the colonies brought culinary
expectations with them, but eating inevitably evolved as Americans
settled in their new home. The author earns points for
inclusiveness by attending to the ways in which Native American,
African-American and European-American cooking interacted to create
a new cuisine. Meanwhile, an inconsistent tone-academic jargon like
the anthropological term "foodways" butts heads with
self-consciously casual lingo ("This discovery is more than a neat
connection")-is this delightful book's only flaw. Delicious from
start to finish, with only a very few lumps along the way. (Kirkus
Reviews)
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.
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