In the summer of 1784, Abigail Adams sailed for London to join her husband as the wife of the first Ambassador of the United States to Britain. In her diary, she confessed, “With the best accommodations [the voyage] will be dreadfull, to a Lady of any delicacy.” She bemoaned the ship’s drab lodgings and noted that her silver porringer was the only cup or bowl in sight. She also complained in a letter that the ship’s Black cook had “no more knowledge of cookery than a savage; nor any kind of order in the distribution of his dishes, but hickeltapickelta [higgledy piggledy].” She criticized his supposed missteps on course order, grumbling, “on they come with a leg of pork all Brisly, a Quarter of an hour after a pudding, or perhaps a pair of roast fowls first of all, and then will follow one by one a peice of Beaf and when dinner is nearly compleated a plate of potatoes.”
Adams’s frustrations reveal the fledgling nation’s distinctions in race and class and indicate the significance of mealtime rituals to elite and aspiring Americans. Her anecdote makes clear that dinner was not the place for experimental expositions or risk-taking jaunts but a choreographed performance, with every detail scrutinized. For Americans like Adams, sophistication materialized through the precise ordering of ingredients and synchronized flow of dishes.
In the nascent shine of independence, print culture celebrating American distinctness flourished. Americans juxtaposed their supposed virtue with the corruption and follies of Europe, but their claims of superiority belied deep insecurities. Because much of Europe, particularly England, regarded the fledgling nation as a provincial backwater, white Americans searched for ways to establish themselves as cultural equals in the eyes of their former kinsmen. Their desire for validation manifested in part through the emulation of English standards of etiquette that appeared in early American cookbooks.
Colonists in British North America had long consumed English cookbooks, devouring rhetoric extolling the virtues of honest English fare when compared to French lavishness. Their popularity on both sides of the Atlantic tells of long-simmering obsessions with self-image and station within shifting social hierarchies. Manners, clothing, household furnishings, and table settings became markers of rank during the early modern period, and markets emerged for printed works to help readers traverse the fluctuating landscape. Cookbooks arose to aid housewives and housekeepers in their quest to project posh.
Social climbers throughout the British Empire believed that the correct execution of politeness distinguished the well-bred from the low-born, materializing in countless small ways, especially at the dinner table. Elizabeth Raffald’s The Experienced English Housekeeper (1769) enjoyed enormous success with its print life spanning nearly five decades, including an edition of The Experienced English Housekeeper printed in Philadelphia in 1818. Raffald promised “Economy with Neatness and Elegance.” Her index provided “Directions for a Grand Table” and sketched out course arrangements to “make a pretty appearance” and “be entertaining to the Company.” She also noted what serving dishes to use and when, such as “Sweetmeats and Fruits dished up in China Dishes, or Fruit Baskets,” and added tips for garnishing. By heeding Raffald’s advice, the upwardly mobile strived to gain entry into privileged spheres.
After Independence, Americans sought approval by mastering preset codes of civility. While images rarely appeared in American cookbooks before the late-1830s, an emphasis remained on table settings as representations of prestige in and of society. Maria Rundell’s American Domestic Cookery (1823) (a revised version of an English cookbook for an American audience by the same author titled New System of Domestic Cookery (1807)) stated that an elegant table “gives respectability to her who presides.” Mary Randolph’s The Virginia House-wife (1824) affirmed, “a dinner justly calculated for the company, and consisting for the greater part of small articles, correctly prepared, and neatly served up” creates a “pleasing appearance” for all in attendance. Robert Roberts’s The House Servants Directory (1827), one of the earliest books written by a Black American in the United States, had explicit instructions on “Regulations for the dinner table,” “Dinner on the table,” “The first course removed,” “Second course removed,” and “Placing on the desert.” And Eliza Leslie’s The House Book (1844) dedicated nearly fifty pages to “The Dining-Room:—Table Furniture, Waiting on Table, Carving, &c.” Henry Sargent’s The Dinner Party (1821) illustrates that sweet spot Americans craved—quiet luxury through tasteful display.
Frances Harriet Green’s The Housekeeper’s Book (1837) was one of the first American cookbooks to include multiple illustrations. Her images focused on presentation and performance, notably the skills required for carving and serving meats. With seats at either end of the table, hosts and hostesses were expected to perform the task in front of a crowd. When dishes like calf’s head were placed before them, all eyes met theirs in eager anticipation. The show could turn into a debacle if done without finesse. As Eliza Leslie’s The Cook’s Own Book, and Housekeeper’s Register (1840) remarked, “nothing can be more disagreeable to one of a sensitive disposition, than to behold a person, at the head of a well-furnished board, hacking the finest joints, and giving them the appearance of having been gnawed by dogs.” American cookbooks aimed to spare such humiliation by incorporating images with step-by-step instructions.
Green also provided readers with the “most approved” method for presenting roasted turkey through a tale of caution. Green recounted that she was once invited to a dinner where the unappetizing bird was “brought to the table with the head on as well as the feet.” She tsked, “such trussing is exceedingly ugly and altogether unworthy of a good cook.” Her disapproving tone indicates the implications of not following her suggestions—an accusation of lousy cooking and inept hosting that verged on buffoonery.
Green’s text followed precedents set by English cookbooks as authoritative sources that set culinary standards and assuaged nervous readers. Her comments also reveal how following precise procedures led to assumptions about status. While adhering to polite culture opened opportunities for self-elevation for some, it simultaneously barred others who did not conform to its exacting standards.
America’s newcomer status meant that many of its inhabitants wanted to prove their worth to themselves and the wider world. Cookbooks and other prescriptive English texts had set guidelines for taste long before the first shots rang out at Lexington and Concord. During the early national period, Americans continued to purchase English cookbooks and began to author ones of their own based on the English model. While Abigail Adams might have wanted to adopt a stars-and-stripes attitude toward the early republic’s distinctness from England, the proof was in the pudding—the mother country’s parameters of decorum largely dictated America’s cultural norms of the time.
Jennifer Wells is a Ph.D. candidate in History at Texas A&M University specializing in British colonial North America, the American Revolution, and the Early American Republic during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Her research explores the social ambiguities of the urban South following the Revolution, a transformative period when questions of national identity and belonging swirled. Her dissertation studies the petition of Christopher McPherson, a free man of color who attempted to repeal an ordinance prohibiting Black Americans from owning or riding as passengers in carriages in Richmond, Virginia. Using the petition as a lens into the early national period, she investigates veteran affairs, the influence and limits of polite culture on class and race, educational reforms, apocalyptic prophets, and the history of early American psychiatric institutions. You can read a recent article she wrote about Christopher McPherson here.
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