Made In America (36 page)

Under the patient tutelage of the Indians, the colonists gradually became acquainted with, and even developed a fondness for, native products like pumpkins, at first generally called
pompions,
and squashes, which the colonists confusingly also called pompions. Pumpkin pie became a big hit after the Pilgrims were introduced to it at their second Thanksgiving feast in 1623, but the conventional spelling didn't become established until much later. As late as 1796, the first American cookbook – a slender volume with the dauntingly all-embracing title of
American Cookery, or the Art of Dressing Viands, Fish, Poultry and Vegetables, and the Best Modes of Making Pâtés, Puffs, Pies, Tarts, Puddings, Custards and Preserves and All Kinds of Cakes, from the Imperial Plumb to Plain Cake, Adapted to this Country and All Grades of Life, by Amelia Simmons: An American Orphan
– called the dish ‘pompkin pie'. Pumpkin pie was also called
pumpkin pudding
until the mid-1600s, pudding then suggesting a pie without a top crust.

The Indians introduced the colonists not only to new foods, but to more interesting ways of preparing them. Succotash, clam chowder, hominy, corn pone, cranberry sauce, johnnycakes, even Boston baked beans and Brunswick stew were all Indian dishes. In Virginia it was the Indians, not the white settlers, who invented Smithfield ham.
³
Even with the constant advice and intervention of the Indians the Puritans stuck to a diet that was for the most part resolutely bland. Meat and vegetables were boiled without pity, deprived of seasonings and served lukewarm. Peas, once they got the hang of growing them, were eaten at almost every meal, and often served cold. The principal repast was taken at
midday and called
dinner. Supper,
a word related to
soup
(and indeed at the time still often spelled
souper),
was often just that – a little soup with perhaps a piece of bread – and was consumed in the evening shortly before retiring. Lunch was a concept yet unknown, as was the idea of a snack. To the early colonists, ‘snack' meant the bite of a dog.

Johnnycake
is sometimes said to be a contraction of
journey cake,
the idea being that it was a food packed for journeys, but since it is a kind of corn-bread and corn-bread patently is not a travelling food, the explanation is unconvincing. Another suggestion is that it is a corruption of
Shawnee cake.
As Ciardi notes, in New England it was called
jonakin
or
jonikin
long before it was called
johnnycake,
suggesting that
johnnycake
is a folk etymology based on some earlier, forgotten Indian term.
⁴
Two other travelling foods known to early Americans were pemmican and jerked beef. Despite the name, nothing is jerked to make jerked beef. The word comes from
charqui,
a Spanish adaptation of a Peruvian Indian word. Though the variant name
jerky
is etymologically closer to the Spanish original, it actually entered the language much later.
Jerked beef
was well established in the colonies by the early eighteenth century.
Jerky
is not attested before 1850.
Pemmican,
more straightforwardly, is from the Cree
pimikân.

The Pilgrims naturally brought many Old World dishes with them, among them flummery (a sweet dish made of flour or cornstarch, sufficiently insipid to still be eaten in England, where it is called blancmange), dunderfunk (a kind of hard-tack hash fractionally enlivened with molasses), frumenty (a milky mush), hoe-cake (another kind of mush), and that mysterious compound of the Little Miss Muffett nursery rhyme, curds and whey. (For the record, curds are the coagulated residue of milk and whey the watery remains created while making cheese.) Curds were also used to make syllabub, another sweet dish.

Pudding
signified not just a dessert (a word that had
recently entered the language from France and was pronounced ‘duh-
zart‘
) but a wider range of dishes, from black or blood pudding to hasty pudding (a cornmeal mush so named because it could be prepared quickly). Cranberries were at first also called
craneberries, cramberries
or
bounce-berries
because you bounced them to see if they were fresh.
Fool,
as in gooseberry fool, meant clotted cream.
Duff,
as in plum duff, merely reflected a variant pronunciation of
dough.
Doughnuts, which the Puritans had discovered from the Dutch during their years in Holland, did not have the hole with which we associate them now, but were small balls – 'nuts' in the parlance of the time – of fried dough. They also ate doughboys, often spelled ‘dowboys', a dumpling made of flour or cornmeal.

Until 1624, when the first shipment of cows reached Plymouth, the colony's supply of livestock consisted of only half a dozen goats, fifty pigs and about as many chickens, but by the mid-1630s matters were improving rapidly. By then, with the population of Massachusetts standing at more than 4,000, the colony could boast 1,500 cows, 4,000 goats and ‘swine innumerable'. Cows primarily had a dairy role. For a very long while meat came almost exclusively in the form of pork – indeed, in the South ‘meat' and ‘pork' were used interchangeably.

As time moved on, the diet of the average American became heartier if not a great deal more appealing. In an environment where women devoted their lives to an endless, exhausting round of doing everything from weaving to making soap and candles to salting and pickling anything that could be preserved, it is hardly surprising that quality cooking was at a premium and that most people were, in the words of Thomas Jefferson, ‘illy fed'. None the less, by the late eighteenth century, portions for almost everyone were abundant, and visitors from the Old World commonly remarked on the size of meals in even the humblest
households. For the wealthier families, dishes were varied and, by earlier standards, exotic. The cookbook kept at Mount Vernon, written by George Washington's mother, tells us much about both the variety of foods eaten and their sometimes curious spelling and pronunciation, notably ‘mushrumps', ‘hartichocke pie', ‘fryckecy of chicken', and ‘lettice tart'.

By the time of the Revolution, the main meal was taken between two and four o'clock in the afternoon, and eaten in an order that strikes us today as a trifle odd. A typical meal might consist of salted beef with potatoes and peas, followed by baked or fried eggs, fish and salad, with a variety of sweets, puddings, cheeses and pastries to finish, all washed down with quantities of alcohol that would leave most of us today unable to rise from the table.
⁵
Meat was consumed in quantities that left European observers slack-jawed in astonishment. By the early 1800s the average American was eating almost 180 lb. of meat a year, 48 lb. more than people were consuming a century later, but fresh meat remained largely unknown because of the difficulty of keeping it fresh. Even city people often had chickens in the yard and a hog or two left to scavenge in the street. Until well into the nineteenth century visitors to New York remarked on the hazard to traffic presented by wandering hogs along Broadway. Even in the more temperate north, meat would go off in a day in summer, and milk would curdle in as little as an hour. Spoiled food was a daily hazard for the wealthy as much as for the poor. One guest at a dinner party given by the Washingtons noted with a certain vicious relish that the General discreetly pushed his plate of sherry trifle to one side when he discovered that the cream was distinctly iffy but that the less discerning Martha continued shovelling it away with gusto. Ice-cream was a safer option. It was first mentioned in America in the 1740s when a guest at a
banquet given by the governor of Maryland wrote about this novelty which, he noted, ‘eat most deliciously'.

Thomas Jefferson, thanks to his scrupulous – one might say obsessive – record-keeping (for eight years, while helping to run a new nation, he found time to track the first and last appearances on Washington market stalls of thirty-seven types of vegetable), has left us the most complete chronicle of the life of a farmer in colonial times, but also the least typical. As we have already seen with the tomato and potato, Jefferson was a tireless experimenter with foods and grew any number of plants that most Americans had never heard of, among them such exotica as eggplant, damson plums, Savoy cabbages, sugar beets, cauliflower, endive, chicory (which he called
succory),
broccoli, celery and a kind of squash called cymling. Only grapes of a sufficient calibre to make a palatable wine eluded him, to his unending despair.
⁶

Other planters were less adventurous, but compensated with quantity. Diners at the finer homes were commonly offered eight or ten kinds of meat or fish, a galaxy of vegetables, and half a dozen desserts, all washed down with copious quantities of wine, porter, rum, beer or Madeira. Jefferson, in his first year in the White House, spent $2,800 – more money than many people saw in a lifetime – on wine alone.

For farmers, food was almost entirely home-grown. As late as 1787, even a prosperous yeoman farmer in New England might spend no more than $10 a year on all outside purchases. This might include a little tea or coffee, a good deal of salt and perhaps some molasses, but in all other respects he and his household were entirely self-sufficient.

By the mid-1800s many Americans were eating well enough to give foreign critics something new to be appalled at. A correspondent for
The Times
of London recorded with amazement a ‘typical' American breakfast – ‘black tea and toast, scrambled eggs, fresh spring shad, wild pigeons, pigs'
feet, two robins on toast, oysters' and that, he implied, was one of the lighter repasts.
⁷
If such breakfasts were eaten, and a touch of scepticism might not be misplaced here, they weren't eaten by everyone. The bulk of urban dwellers ate poorly, partly because their meagre wages didn't permit better, but also because such medical advice as filtered down to them suggested that most fresh foods were hazardous. Until the mid-nineteenth century, received wisdom had it that anyone reckless enough to consume an apple or pear or indeed almost any other vegetative product was all but asking for a speedy death at the hand of typhoid, dysentery or cholera.
⁸
During cholera epidemics city councils routinely banned the sale of fruits and salads, but even during comparatively safe periods most people thought it imprudent to feed almost any plant food (with the exception of a well-boiled potato) to the more susceptible members of the community, especially children, who of course most needed the vitamins. As a result, diseases associated with malnutrition stalked even the better-off families.

Milk, too, was widely regarded as perilous, though with some justification, since it spoiled quickly and was processed and delivered in a manner that owed little – in fact nothing – to modern standards of hygiene. Almost every family had a story of a member who had died of ‘milksick' or ‘the trembles' after drinking tainted milk.

As the nineteenth century progressed, diet evolved into two camps – the few who ate well and the many who did not – and class antagonisms were not long in emerging. The patrician New Yorker Martin Van Buren was ousted from the Presidency in 1840 in large part because one of his Whig opponents made a celebrated speech attacking Van Buren for serving such delicate and unmanly fare in the White House as strawberries, cauliflower and celery. (Van Buren gained a sort of vicarious revenge when at the subsequent inauguration the crusty William Henry Harrison refused to don an overcoat,
contracted pneumonia and with alarming haste expired; his tenure as President was just thirty days, much of that spent unconscious.)

Gradually even poorer Americans became acquainted with a wider variety of fruits and vegetables, though the linguistic evidence shows that they weren't always quite sure what to make of them. For the potato alone, the
Dictionary of American English on Historical Principles
records such arresting nineteenth-century concoctions as potato custard, potato chowder, potato pone, potato pudding and even potato coffee. We can assume that most of these were consumed in a spirit of either experimentation or desperation and that most didn't survive long in the native diet.

Only a relative handful of new foods entered the American vocabulary in the nineteenth century, among them
pretzel
(1824),
pumpernickel
(1839),
liverwurst
(1869),
tutti-frutti
(1876) and
spaghetti
(1880). What changed was the
way
Americans ate. In particular they began to eat out. Before the 1820s, dining out was an activity reserved almost exclusively for travellers. Though it was possible to eat in hotels and taverns, there were no places dedicated to the public consumption of food for the mere pleasure of it, nor any word to describe them. Then in 1827 a new word and concept entered American English from France:
restaurant.

It was in that year that two Swiss-born brothers, Giovanni and Pietro Del-Monico, opened a coffee and pastry shop in the Battery district of New York City. The enterprise was sufficiently successful that in 1831 they invited their nephew Lorenzo to join them. Though just nineteen and with no experience in catering, Lorenzo was born to culinary greatness. He did none of the cooking, but he did buy the food, and made a point of arriving before dawn at the city's main markets to acquire the best and freshest provisions, a practice now routine but at the time unheard-of. He transformed the Del-Monicos' pastry shop into America's premier restaurant
(actually a series of restaurants: Delmonico's moved frequently and sometimes operated under as many as four roofs at once), bringing a dimension of elegance to American dining that it had theretofore lacked. Under the new, unhyphenated name Delmonico's, the restaurant introduced Americans to many unfamiliar dishes, ranging from artichokes and mayonnaise (named originally for the Minorcan port Mahón)
⁹
to fricasseed calf's head, and invented several as well, notably lobster Newburg, which began life as lobster à la Wenburg. It was so called in honour of an esteemed client, Ben Wenburg, until he disgraced himself through some unseemly (but intriguingly unspecified) altercation on the premises, and the dish was abruptly anagrammatized. A similar transformation happened with another Delmonico's creation, chicken à la Keene, named for one Foxhall Keene, which became over time (for reasons that appear to have gone unnoted) chicken à la king.