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.
