Food

Survival in the New World for all people depended on their ability to adapt their diets to new foods. Europeans, Native Americans, and Africans encountered one another on a basic level, borrowing food growing and gathering techniques, recipes, and tastes. In fact, contact between Europe and the Americas fundamentally changed diet and nutrition worldwide, as the so-called Columbian Exchange carried new foods both ways across the Atlantic and around the world.

The first Europeans to visit the Americas often exaggerated the easy abundance of food compared to conditions on their crowded continent. After a period of adjustment to new tastes and techniques of procurement, colonists generally enjoyed a healthier diet and longer lifespan than did their contemporaries in Europe. Native Americans had developed more than 200 varieties of maize, or Indian corn, a crop high in yield and nutrition, especially when planted the traditional way, together with squash and beans. Maize became the colonial staple once the newcomers learned how to cultivate and prepare the grain. Europeans were astonished by the bounty of the woods, from which Native peoples harvested nuts, berries (some “2 inches around!”), root vegetables, herbs, birds, and game. The sea seethed with hundreds of varieties of fish and shellfish, including lobsters said to be five feet long. Europeans learned a host of skills from Indians, including methods of hunting and fishing, tapping maple trees and preparing syrup, stewing beans, and parching and grinding corn for meal.

Along with maize, beans, and squash, Europeans exported other Native American foods that enriched and transformed diets around the world, including peanuts, manioc, pumpkin, chile peppers, pineapples, cocoa, and turkeys. Other food, such as tomatoes and potatoes, did not enter the colonial diet until they first became accepted in England. New World crop cultivation in Europe, Asia, and Africa improved health, lengthened lives, and resulted in a population boom in northern Europe that, ironically, provided waves of immigrants to the Americas in later centuries.

Native Americans farmed their staple crops, gathered plants, hunted game, and fished in a seasonal cycle that depended on the diversity and balance of their environment. Some Europeans misunderstood the Indian way of gearing their diet to seasonal products and considered them “paupers in the land of plenty.” Eventually, Native Americans adapted their diets and lifestyles to include imported Old World foods, such as wheat, barley, carrots, peas, apples, and grapes, and used new technologies like iron cooking pots and hunting rifles. European livestock made an even greater impact on the American landscape and diet. Colonists, who preferred a diet heavy in meat and who harnessed animal power, imported and bred cows, horses, sheep, goats, chickens, and hogs. These hoofed creatures and fowl reproduced rapidly, reshaping Indian lands and lifestyles. Indeed, pigs became so plentiful in Virginia that, according to a European correspondent of the time, Virginians themselves became “hoggish in their temper. . . and prone to grunt.” Honeybees, called “English flies,” added a new sweetener to the American diet. European settlers, unused to the water, brewed homemade ale, “small beer,” and cider as a daily beverage. They made rum from molasses and bourbon from corn and rye, which they drank and traded with Native people.

Euro-American housewives used spices liberally (in part to mask food spoilage) in their stews, hashes, and soups and cooked in large iron pots over the hearth fire. They preserved foods by pickling, salting, smoking, and drying. Meals were plain and simple in farm kitchens and more elaborate in wealthier homes. Colonial style for all classes favored tables groaning with large quantities of meat and fish dishes. Milk, cheese, and beef were not common on colonial tables until the early 18th century. Cooks adapted recipes from their home countries, such as the New Hampshire housewife who created English mince pies from bear meat, dried pumpkin, maple sugar, and a corn crust. A traditional English pudding became “Indian pudding,” made with ground corn, maple syrup, and eggs. Affluent colonists appreciated the quantity of food available, but some bemoaned the quality of American foods, longing for their accustomed (and, they thought, superior) European fare.

Although they possessed few cookbooks, southern plantation families may have enjoyed a more varied diet than northerners. African slaves did much of the cooking in plantation kitchens and introduced new foods, especially vegetables, into the American diet. Slave owners provided a high starch, low protein diet barely adequate to sustain black field workers, but the impressive natural increase in the slave population suggests supplemental nourishment. African customs as well as their meager rations caused slaves to be frugal and innovative in their cooking, making use, for example, of many parts of an animal or vegetable. Africans brought rice, kidney and lima beans, nuts, okra, yams, sesame, sorghum, and watermelons (called August ham) to the Americas and cultivated these when possible to enhance their diets. Some slaves raised chickens, caught fish, and used the leftover parts of their masters’ pigs, frying the small intestines into chitlins. They introduced traditional African dishes, such as barbecue, cooked nutritious vegetable greens in “pot likker,” and invented dishes from corn, such as hominy grits and hush puppies.

Further reading: Sandra L. Oliver, Food in Colonial and Federal America (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2005).

—Deborah C. Taylor