Tag Archives: colonial America

Around the Table Podcast: Archaeology of Food with Crystal Dozier

By Sarah Peters Kernan

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In this episode, Sarah Kernan speaks with Crystal Dozier, Associate Professor and anthropological archaeologist at Wichita State University in Wichita, Kansas. She is Chair for the Department of Anthropology, Director of Wichita State’s Archaeology of Food Laboratory, and City Archaeologist for the city of Wichita. Crystal describes researching food and foodways using archaeological approaches, including experimental archaeology. Follow the Archaeology of Food Laboratory on Instagram and Facebook.

Music

Frédéric Chopin, Etude Op. 10, no. 5 in G flat major

Provided by Musopen.org through Creative Commons Public Domain Mark 1.0

Mentioned in the Show

Wichita State University’s Archaeology of Food Laboratory

Grape Wine Biomarkers on Pottery Sherds

Recreating Pumpkin Leather

Recreating 16th Century Wine

Making Mead

Riley Muncher (Alumnus, Wichita State University’s Archaeology of Food Laboratory)

Transcript

Sarah Kernan 00:08

This is Around the Table, a podcast from the Recipes Project. I’m your host, Sarah Kernan. Together, we will learn about exciting scholars, professionals, projects, resources, and collections focused on historical recipes.

Welcome to Season 2, dedicated to “making.” In each episode this season, we will feature interviews with guests who describe what making means to them. For some, it is recreating a historic recipe as closely as possible. For others, it is creating something new in a modern setting. However imperfect the process or the outcome, making historical recipes offers a powerful methodology for connecting with and understanding the past in a direct and tangible way.

Today I’m speaking to Dr. Crystal Dozier, Associate Professor and Anthropological Archaeologist at Wichita State University in Wichita, Kansas. She is the Chair of the Department of Anthropology, Director of Wichita State’s Archaeology of Food Laboratory, and City Archaeologist for the City of Wichita. I am excited to speak to her today about her expertise in researching food and foodways using archaeological approaches, including experimental archaeology. Crystal, thank you so much for joining me today.

Crystal Dozier 01:36

I’m delighted to be here.

Sarah Kernan 01:38

So, as I just mentioned, one of your areas of expertise is using archaeological approaches to studying food and foodways. Could you tell us a bit more about what those approaches are and what that can reveal about food and foodways centuries or even millennia ago?

Crystal Dozier 01:56

Of course. So, in your expertise of food history, you’re focused on the written word related to humans’ relationship with food. And archaeology is the companion science to history in this way, in that we’re telling a historical story, but we do not have always the written documentation to accompany it.

So, the archaeological record is a wealth of information that isn’t written down, but rather embodied in artifacts. So, our ability to tell the history of food in archaeology is going to the remnants of cooking practices themselves. To be explicit, this is looking at animal bones. This is the burned crust on the outside of bowls that are thousands of years old. This is looking at micro botanical remains that have been carbonized and preserved for thousands of years even. So, this is a companion to the written word in our understanding of food history by looking at what was actually practiced and what physically remains from those ancient techniques.

So, I like to think of the archaeology side of it as giving us this extra window into humans’ relationship in food that is actually far deeper and far wider than what the historical narrative can tell us. The historical narrative is, of course, relegated to those manuscripts that survive, written for people who could read them, which is a minority of humans across time and space.

So archaeology gives us these insights into all of these practices that we don’t have a written record for, or when we’re lucky enough to have a written record for, usually that’s biased or partial, and archaeology can widen this view of what was actually done in the past.

Sarah Kernan 04:04

I absolutely love the way that you phrase that, that archaeology and this history are companions in creating this narrative. And that’s an excellent segue into my next question. A lot of scholars who deal primarily with this written evidence have simply relied on the work of archaeologists to supplement or support their findings. But your research and publications really show that archaeology often reveals things that simply aren’t present in other evidence or even brings to light things when there isn’t any evidence at all in a written record. So could you talk about some more examples of your work that really highlight the value of archaeological methods in revealing previously hidden or unconsidered moments in a culture’s relationship with food?

Crystal Dozier 04:57

Yeah, I think there’s lots of different ways to attack this question. I usually, as an archaeologist, I usually actually start with the written word. So, we rely a lot on the historical narrative and ethnographies that are written. But sometimes you have to realize that those are partial or incomplete. And so I have a couple of examples I can think of, one from my work and one in archaeology more general.

To come from my work, I had done a study as part of my dissertation looking at a Native American community right before Spanish colonization in central Texas. And archaeologists called this the Toyah phase, somewhere around 1350 AD to just, you know, the colonial moment, 1600, 1650.

And what we know about this group of people is that they were non-agricultural, so they’re mobile hunters and gatherers. There’s lots of bison bones at the sites. There’s usually lots of stone tools, but one of the unique things that is found at these kind of sites is pottery.

And for non-agricultural groups that are mobile, it’s a huge question of why you would put in the time and the effort to make pottery you’re doing the same life ways that you’ve done for thousands of years, you’ve never needed pottery before. You’ve got to lug it around. It’s heavy. It’s fragile. So you have all these questions about why would you start developing a ceramic tradition? And this is a group that there is no direct written history for. We have archaeological evidence, but there was no observation by colonialists into this tradition by the time that we have a historical record in North America.

So my dissertation asked the question of why would you put so much effort into making pottery for this foraging group? And one of the things that I noticed about the kinds of sites that we see for this group of folks is that quite a number of them showed evidence of feasting, of throwing really large parties that were probably inter-ethnic.

Crystal Dozier 07:12

And the reason why I say this is that we find earth ovens, which are a form of cooking technology all over the world in which people put rocks into fire, and then use the heat in the rocks to cook other foods. Usually it’s, you dig a hole, you set a fire, you put the rocks in the hole, the rocks absorb the heat of the fire.

You let the fire burn down, but the rocks are still hot. Cover it with green material, put your food in there, cover it all tightly wrapped. You cover it back up with dirt, and it’s kind of like a crock pot. It maintains the heat and will cook it for a long time without direct fire, so it’s very safe. And looking at the earth ovens at these sites are ginormous.

They are, I have to use metric, it’s 10 meters by 10 meters. That’s 30 feet by 30 feet. This is, you know, you can lie down several people inside of this crock pot, which implies that you’re either cooking something very, very large, or you’re feeding a lot of people, or both. And so these sites that have pottery for this non-agricultural community also includes pottery from the surrounding regions.

So, they’re in central Texas, but they’re pulling ceramics from east Texas and from west Texas. And so, I looked at the residue inside the pottery at some of these sites as part of my dissertation, with the idea that they’re probably making something important in them. And I had a bunch of different hypotheses about what kind of things they could be cooking. And one of the things I chose to explore is whether or not they were making fermented alcoholic beverages, because that’s what people do.

Crystal Dozier 09:04

When you throw a big party, a common feature internationally throughout human history is that you provide a beverage to your guests. And so I decided to include the ability to look for some biomarkers associated with grape wine, tartaric and succinic acids.

And to my delight and surprise, we did find this evidence of tartaric and succinic acids in this pottery sherd that predates Spanish expedition into North America. None of the colonial powers in North America reported grape wine as an indigenous product. But North America has a huge variety of “wild grapes” that colonial narratives emphasized how bountiful and available they were, which is probably because they were in the leftover stands that were being cultivated by Indigenous people prior to colonization.

And so this research helps open up the door to say, hey, even though Europeans didn’t see this, and I do think part of this is because the European mythos around fermentation is so strong, particularly wine. So that the idea that you have Indigenous folks producing the same things and using the same technology was previously unconsidered. And I hope this research opens that door to say, hey, even though the Spanish, the French, didn’t see it, doesn’t mean that this wasn’t being practiced. Because human beings love a good drink.

Sarah Kernan 10:53

Absolutely.

Crystal Dozier 10:56

And there’s tons of it. So that’s one example from my research of things that hadn’t been considered before, that was a hidden foodways. And the reason why it’s hidden, I think, you know, may be really multilayered. But archaeology in general, I think, provides these alternative narratives to challenge both the historical understanding and really empower the way we think about humans’ relationship with food.

And this is by clarifying the origin of various foodstuffs. You know, where do these products come from? And also giving, I think, a lot of respect to the people actually doing the cooking, the chefs, and the women, and domestic labor that’s actually providing these meals for their families and their communities.

Sarah Kernan 11:45

I love that description. That’s such a great example that you have there. On a kind of related note, you’ve mentioned some elements of this as we’ve been talking so far. But could you talk more about how using a methodology like experimental archaeology might differ depending on the cultural context that you’re working in? For example, you’ve researched some very different topics and cultures. You have researched pumpkin mats made by Indigenous groups in the North American Great Plains. And you’ve worked on recreating 16th century French wine following a recipe in Charles Estienne’s L’agriculture et maison rustique. And these are really different places and times and types of supporting evidence, other evidence to draw upon to supplement your work and research and narrative. How do you think about tackling such different projects and what type of evidence you can draw on that might be available to support an experimental approach?

Crystal Dozier 12:50

Sure. So my work in experimental archaeology is mostly to understand how do we know from the archaeological record what people were cooking and eating. So in order to do that we need to actually make things we think people were eating and then see how it decomposes, see how it is formulated, and what components of it may persist in the archaeological record, you know, for thousands of years.

And for these kind of studies we have to start with what we know about these food products. So that can either come from the historical record, which is either through recipes, written down, which are fairly constrained, or it has to come from ethnographies, which are third-party observations of this foodstuff. If you’re very, very lucky, another resource that we can use is oral traditions of people who have continued those foodway practices. All of these sources come with the same kind of recognition that they are a product of a time and a place and therefore are not a full understanding of a particular practice.

For example, I don’t think everyone in the sixteenth century was making wine in this one particular recipe that we found. Or for the pumpkin leather mats, which is a form of fruit leather made with pumpkin, we were able to find two different records of ethnographies, of observations, of watching it being made, and they follow different techniques.

Because the goal of these studies is to figure out what is left in the archaeological record when the food is complete, that means we also need to take account what are the scientific processes that we know are happening in order to record it. These experiments do look and feel very scientific. We are measuring everything, everything from how much time it takes to how much water we put in, you know, to the actual looking at these things underneath the microscope, which is my main focus. Is, from this food, what is left on the crumbs of the piece of pottery that we’re looking for, the microbotanical crumbs, so to say.

Crystal Dozier 15:17

So, we have to be very exacting with our methodologies. But the process of it is remarkably similar, even though we are looking from very different traditions and time periods, in that you start with what do we know about this practice? What do we don’t know? What is likely to survive in the archaeological record? How can we trace that through this experiment? And very often we find also through the practice of making these past foodways, all sorts of tactical knowledge you would never know without physically trying to do it yourself.

You know, how would you know that this particular food gets very sticky at this stage, or that it makes a particular sound? And that sound is probably rather than, you know, what we’re doing, the temperature checks and the pH levels, maybe it was it was probably that sound or that texture that led ancient cooks to know, oh, this is done. So in that way, it is very scientific.

But I also really appreciate the very humanistic nature that recreation of these foods gives you is that, oh, this is messy and cooking is messy, and why did no one ever tell me that you can dry pumpkin and then rehydrate it to use all year round?

Sarah Kernan 16:38

You’ve worked on such a variety of really interesting projects. Do you have any favorites or is there anything you’re really excited to research soon?

Crystal Dozier 16:48

Yeah. I’ll tell you maybe the highlights of the experimental archaeology is when the food turns out really good. There’s also when the food does not turn out really good. So, my most “successful” experiment, in that it turned out delicious, is probably, I made mead, honey wine. And the goal of that experiment was to figure out if the pollen in the honey survived the fermentation process. Because pollen survives for a long period of time, we know that people often add honey to all sorts of fermented beverages. And so it was a very straightforward experiment of, does that pollen, does that remain through the fermentation? And that was probably my most delicious experiment to date.

The pumpkin mat also is a very delicious experiment. So, in that, which I kind of referenced, is dried pumpkin leather, like fruit leather, that is woven into a mat, like a, think like a table mat, but not that you would put stuff on, just for storage. And that is an incredible piece of technology. That we did the experiment three years ago and it’s still hanging in my lab. It is completely still edible. And every six months, we like take out a pair of scissors and cut off a piece and dunk it in hot water and be like, is it done? Do we need to take it down? Nope, this is still pumpkin-y.

Sarah Kernan 18:32

Wow.

Crystal Dozier 18:33

So that’s the really exciting, when you’re like, wow, this really works, and it’s delicious, and it continues. Every once in a while though, you realize how much we don’t know from ancient cooks and that they knew ways to make things delicious that were not written down and we do not have access to.

So recently, one of my graduate students completed an experiment looking at mesquite bean pods. So you probably know mesquite, the little bushy tree people use its wood a lot for smoking, but the beans themselves you can grind into flour. You can make all sorts of things with that. You can make bread, you can make cakes. We were particularly interested in making beer. In South America it’s very common, it’s called algarroba. And we wanted to recreate this knowing that in North America people were probably doing it as well. And I must say, missing a written record certainly missed something for us, because the experiment was successful in that we got really great data and being able to understand if or when people might have been making this in the past, based on starch residue. But it kind of tasted like dirt.

Sarah Kernan 19:50

Oh. I’m sorry that one didn’t work out.

Crystal Dozier 19:53

That one, I mean, it fermented, it was two and a half, almost 3 percent alcohol by volume. So, a light sessionable beer, but it was pretty acidic to modern tastes. So it’s one of those things of like, okay, we’ll be able to tell this, but we need more research into what ancient people were doing because they probably knew better than we do how to make this actually delicious.

Sarah Kernan 20:19

Wow. Well, I guess you might have to have another graduate student down the line work on that one again.

Crystal Dozier 20:23

Exactly.

Sarah Kernan 20:26

If we could turn a little bit toward teaching and public engagement. Food is such an incredible way to draw in people, get them interested in all kinds of topics and fields of study that maybe they normally wouldn’t be all that engaged with. And your institution, Wichita State University, has a really incredible resource, the Archaeology of Food Laboratory. Could you talk a bit about how the lab functions and how it works with and engages students of all levels and ages, and how the lab interacts with the public and non-academics?

Crystal Dozier 21:07

Sure. So the Archaeology of Food Lab is something that I established shortly after arriving at Wichita State as a way to not only formalize a lot of these research questions that I’ve had in the basis of my research, but also explicitly to be the avenue to support not only students, but the public at large. And so the way that the lab functions is really in two different components.

The first of which is that the lab actually serves as a contract archaeology research lab. In that I take research contracts from mostly private archaeological firms with very particular questions about the foodways that they’re researching. Most of these firms work in what’s called cultural resource management, which is a compliance-based field that ensures that when development is happening, that roads, airports, anything with federal funding isn’t destroying the archaeological record as part of that development. And as those firms ensure the safety of our historical record, they encounter things that they don’t know what to do with and that very few people have expertise in.

And so my lab actually accepts samples from all over North America. And we perform the residue analysis for different areas, looking for those residues of what was being cooked in the past. We’re one of the very few labs that is able to take these as contract samples. Otherwise, you have to usually have like a personal relationship with an academic, which is complicated with university systems.

Crystal Dozier 22:56

The benefit of doing this is not only that we get to know more about the archaeological record, but I employ students to work with me on these projects. So, students, we have undergraduates and Master’s students who work, are employed in the lab, who are paid to do this research. And this is a companion to the kind of work that they’re doing as part of their educational journey. Right. So they’re learning it in the classroom and do a lot of independent studies.

All of my Master’s students have an independent thesis or research project that may or may not, you know, intersect here. But this allows us to support their work better and aid our understanding of the history. In turn, this allows the lab to be stocked for those student projects. And so almost all of these experiments that I’ve spoken about have included students. So, the pumpkin man experiment was the work of an entire class, that we took it on as a class project. I mentioned Riley Muncher is the Master’s student who worked on the Mesquite bean pod beer. So, this affords the lab the ability to do these experiments on the academic side as well. And this in turn is something that we want to ensure is available to the public.

We do a fair amount of events with our more public facing parts of the university. This is everything from public lectures. I was invited down last year, down to the Wichita and Affiliated Tribes, who is the ancestral population to a lot of the archaeological work I’m doing here in Kansas now. And they asked me to speak about what are the foodways of the Wichita and the archaeological record before the modern moment. And so I think those are really important conversations to have about what are traditional food ways, what are the forgotten food products that have really complex interactions with health and well-being.

And so, this is something I do in the classroom, but also to the public, whether it’s school groups coming to visit, or working with our art museum on campus about how do artists interact with food and what do we know about the history of it. I like to support as much of this public facing as possible and do it through avenues like this podcast and open access publishing. We talk about how hard it is in the ivory tower to get our research out there. And so whenever it’s possible, I try to make sure that our research is available freely to the public, like the pumpkin leather mat article is open online for anyone to read anywhere all over the world.

Sarah Kernan 25:54

I love how all of this feeds into itself. And you’re really supporting, through this lab, all these different really important groups and constituencies, and it’s all serving this greater purpose of both researching and garnering interest from students and the public, as well as other academics. I think that’s just so important and really great that there’s this locus on your campus for that sort of activity.

I have a final question. Let’s say someone is listening to this podcast right now and they’re thinking, oh my goodness, I would absolutely love to use all these different archaeological methods to learn more about foods in the past, but I have no idea where to start. What do you recommend, whether they’re an undergraduate student who’s maybe looking for a major, or they’re an interpreter at a historic site, or a scholar at an institution who is looking to incorporate archaeology into their bag of research tricks? What would you recommend?

Crystal Dozier 27:04

Right. So, I’ll start this with a piece of advice I love to start when talking with the general public. And it’s that our relationship with food as human beings has so dramatically changed in the last 20 years, the last 50 years, the last 100 years, the last 1,000 years. So, one technique or avenue or trick that I really enjoy is when you are sitting down to a meal or if you’re in the grocery store, try to identify or look up, just real quickly, you can just Google it, where does that food come from? Where is its origins? And I think a lot of folks don’t realize the complex histories of so many of these food products.

You know, we think of tomatoes as an essential part of pasta sauce in Italian cuisine. But tomatoes come from Mesoamerica and were considered very questionable to European tastes in the early colonial period. And not only looking at where is it, where is the origin of this food, but also what did it look like prior to domestication? Over 90% of the food we eat today has been fully domesticated and managed under human horticultural and agricultural practices.

Again, a quick Google will show you what is the archaeological record of what did this food start as? And it’s absolutely mind boggling. Look up bananas. Wild. Humans did things to these foods that has absolutely changed the landscape of our globe. And I think if you start there, of what did this food actually look like and how have humans transformed it? And you know, you can then apply that if you’re working in a particular context.

What does this narrative actually look like? What would have meant to do the dishes in this society? How would you have cleaned them? Something as simple as that. It’s not going in the dishwasher. Are you using a brush? What is the brush made out of? This kind of exploration and imagination, I think, is really crucial to the archaeological process. You really have to push yourself into what are the boundaries of what we know about the food. And there’s always more to know.

Sarah Kernan 29:34

Crystal, thank you so much for joining me today and for talking a bit about the archaeology of food.

Crystal Dozier 29:41

Of course, anytime.

Sarah Kernan 29:44

Thanks to everyone for listening today. Please remember to subscribe to this podcast so you never miss an episode. I’ll see you again next time on Around the Table.

“To a Lady of any delicacy”: A visual exploration of the sway of English dining etiquette on early American identity

By Jennifer Wells

Gilbert Stuart, Abigail Adams (c. 1810-1815), National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons.

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.”

Paul Revere, Porringer (c. 1760). Image Credit: The Met, New York. 

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.

Front piece and Title Page to Hannah Glasse, The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy (London: Printed by L. Wangford, c. 1777). Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons. 
The Art of Cookery constantly lambasted so-called French extravagance while including French recipes in her Cookbook. Note, for example, Chapter III: “How expensive a French Cook’s Sauce is.” 

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. 

Directions for a Grand Table, 1st Course and 2nd Course to Elizabeth Raffald, The Experienced English Housekeeper (Manchester: Printed by J. Harrop, 1769), Google Books. 

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.

Roberts’s index included extensive directions for meal service, see pages 42 to 64. Index to Robert Roberts, The House Servants Directory (1827), (Boston: Munroe and Frances, 1827), MSU Libraries. Image Credit: MSU Libraries, East Lansing. 
Henry Sargent, The Dinner Party (c. 1821), MFA Boston. Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons.

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.

Half a Calf’s Head to Frances Harriet Green, The Housekeeper’s Book (Philadelphia, William Marshall & Co., 1837). Image Credit: HathiTrust. 

 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. 

Turkey for Roasting,” to Frances Harriet Green, The Housekeeper’s Book (Philadelphia, William Marshall & Co., 1837). Image Credit: HathiTrust.

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.

Reference List:

Berg, Maxine. Luxury and Pleasure: In Eighteenth-Century Britain. Oxford: University Press, 2005. 

Bickham, Troy. “Defining Good Food: Cookery Book Illustrations in Britain.” Journal for Eighteenth Century Studies, 31 (2008): 473-489. 

Bickham, Troy. Eating the Empire: Food and Society in Eighteenth-Century Britain. London, Reaktion Books, Ltd., 2020. 

Breen, T.H. “Baubles of Britian’: The American and Consumer Revolutions of the Eighteenth Century,” Past and Present, 119 (1988) 73-104. 

Lehmann, Gilly. The British Housewife: Cookery Books, Cooking and Society in Eighteenth Century Britain. Prospect Books: Totnes, 2003. 

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Listening, Tasting, Reading, Touching: Interdisciplinary Histories of American Food

By Theresa McCulla

When members of the American Historical Association gathered for their annual meeting in New York City in January, attendees set out to explore disciplines other than history. Or rather, they aimed to understand where and how other disciplines intersect most fruitfully with the practice of history. To our panel of four scholars interested in food, such a perspective felt perfectly apt. The study of food has demanded an interdisciplinary approach since food history’s rise to popular prominence in the 1980s. Our papers sought to illustrate the value of material, visual, spatial, literary, and sensory approaches to answering historical questions.

Spanning the colonial period through the twentieth century, in rural as well as urban sites, we used food as a lens to explore social transformations in North America. United by themes of consumer culture and ethnic encounter, our research showed how food consumption reflected, and was reflective of, notions of nationality, religion, ethnicity, race, gender, and sexuality in distinct historical moments.

Carla Cevasco, a PhD candidate in American Studies at Harvard University, used methods of material culture analysis to compare English Puritan, French Catholic, and Huron communion vessels in colonial America. Cevasco argued that violent imperial conflict troubled the boundaries between spiritual and secular eating, blood and wine, and cannibalism and communion in these three cultures. Protestants were suspicious of the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation, and yet Protestants and Catholics alike practiced medicinal cannibalism, ingesting substances derived from the human body for medical purposes. In the same era that early Puritan colonists repurposed secular drinking implements as communion vessels, the Huron used French-made copper kettles to practice a ritual called the Feast of the Dead. Cevasco argued that New World combatants were willing to kill and die over perceived differences between what were in fact strikingly similar ideas and practices. Her paper testified to the value of material culture methodologies to the historian seeking to understand the belief systems of marginalized people who left only faint traces on the historical record.

Drawing on techniques of sensory history, Ashley Rose Young, PhD candidate in History at Duke University, listened to the sounds of the late-nineteenth-century French Market in New Orleans to unearth the pivotal role of immigrant vendors in shaping the taste preferences and food culture of the postbellum city. Young argued that sound, more so than sight, touch, taste or smell, informed depictions of late-nineteenth-century ethnic identity in New Orleans. Similar to public markets in many American port cities, the French Market served as a meeting ground for the city’s diverse population—a key space where the daily rituals of consumption bonded together community members from Europe, West Africa, the Caribbean, and North America. Here, African-American calas vendors competed alongside Spanish oystermen and Italian fishermen for customers. Their sonorous efforts to attract the attention of passers-by manifested in a wide variety of witty, salacious, musical, and grating street cries, which writers attempted to capture. To the delight of attendees, Young sang several street vendor cries. Her performance gave shape to compositions that used to be vital economic tools and cannot be fully appreciated as words and notes on a page.

The New Orleans French Market served as a social and economic space for city residents, travelers, slaves, free people of color, and indigenous people. French Market, New Orleans, 1900-1910, Detroit Publishing Co., Library of Congress.
The New Orleans French Market served as a social and economic space for city residents, travelers, slaves, free people of color, and indigenous people. French Market, New Orleans, 1900-1910, Detroit Publishing Co., Library of Congress.

With the paper of Heather Lee, Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the panel moved from the market to the restaurant. Lee employed methodologies of visual and spatial studies to understand Chinese restaurants as urban spaces, translating the establishments’ physical layouts into social histories of sexual transgression and exoticism. With the additional input of city anti-vice records, Lee argued that New Yorkers patronized Chinese chop suey joints during the 1920s and 1930s not to sample unfamiliar tastes, but because the restaurant experience allowed patrons to experiment with their sexuality. By staying open to the early morning hours, Chinese restaurants provided a contact zone for people looking to live outside the boundaries of propriety. Young couples could evade their communities’ social conventions of courtship by rendezvousing at Chinese restaurants, because the Chinese staff acted aloof to their clients’ behavior. Female prostitutes solicited johns on the dining floor and men interested in other men met up in secluded corner booths. In her broader work, Lee is developing a historical database of Chinese restaurants, which she will make publicly available through an interactive digital platform on Chinese migration.

Early-twentieth-century New York City's Chinatown attracted diners in search of social and sexual transgressions. New Years, Chinatown, Port Arthur Chinese Restaurant, New York, n.d., Bain News Service, Library of Congress.
Early-twentieth-century New York City’s Chinatown attracted diners in search of social and sexual transgressions. New Years, Chinatown, Port Arthur Chinese Restaurant, New York, n.d., Bain News Service, Library of Congress.

My paper shifted the frame back to New Orleans and forward to the mid-twentieth century. I read a set of letters and recipes for Creole gumbo – the signature dish of New Orleans – that Louisiana residents submitted to a 1951 newspaper recipe contest. The recipes functioned as a window onto private conceptions of regional and even racial identities in the final years of de jure segregation. I argued that New Orleans whites tried to use Creole cuisine to claim ownership of an exceptional cultural legacy, exclusive of people of color, during an era when the social and political privileges associated with whiteness were eroding. These gumbo recipes – which arrived from addresses throughout New Orleans, from cooks of varying social and educational classes – showed how the practice of being Creole and making and eating Creole food mattered just as much in home kitchens as it did in public places like restaurants. African Americans resisted such exclusionary efforts, however. Restricted from eating the food that they had cooked in their own restaurants’ dining rooms, both implicitly and explicitly, Creole chefs and cooks of color made the midcentury New Orleans kitchen a political space.

Together, our papers affirmed the inherent interdisciplinarity of food history as a strength. While we each benefitted from scholarship outside of history, our collective goal was to demonstrate the value of food history to the broader study of American history and encourage a similarly expansive, creative approach to investigating all historical questions.