The surprising bird that used to be consumed. The pricey delicacy that
was more common. The most popular place in town to get the best food.
Keep watching to find the most popular foods eaten in the 13 original colonies!
When it comes to popular foods in the 13 original colonies, everything begins and ends with corn.
Yes, the stereotypical idea of corn being eaten in the colonies was actually true,
as this is one myth your elementary school books didn't exaggerate.
The technique of growing corn was taught to settlers by the Native Americans in
a watershed moment that essentially saved the colonists from starvation.
Corn quickly became the first bedrock of American agricultural practice. Once the craft
was mastered, corn quickly was made a staple in colonial cooking, and a key part of the colonial
economy. Once Indigenous leaders like Squanto had taught the colonists how to grow corn and use
it to make cornmeal, it provided common ground for two societies struggling to come together.
“This corn is special, isn't it?”
“I love good corn."
All 13 colonies used the crop for cornmeal, an ingredient that held various dishes together
such as johnnycakes, which are basically cornmeal pancakes, and hasty pudding,
a porridge made with corn that was cooked in water or preferably milk.
These dishes were enjoyed by everybody in colonial society - and are still being made today.
Not everything that was killed, harvested, or bought in the colonies was to be eaten right away.
Much of it needed to be stored away for the long, cold winters — something that
became all too clear to the soldiers trapped in Valley Forge during the Revolutionary War.
"Three days successively we have been without bread. Two
days we have been entirely without meat."
But in a time before refrigeration, how did the colonists preserve
food? One answer comes in the form of potted meat.
Potted meat was essentially cuts and parts of various animals that were lightly cooked and
tightly sealed in a jar with butter or lard, allowing its shelf life to last for months.
When ready to eat, the potted meat could be unsealed and served up,
becoming a popular dish throughout the original 13 colonies.
That wasn't the only way to extend the shelf life of food during Colonial times.
D. M. Kinsman wrote in a report called "Meat Preparation and Preservation in Colonial America"
that meat could also be preserved through the "Three S's:" salt, smoke, and snow.
With survival on the line, the colonists had to use what they had around them,
with potted meat being just one of the resulting delicacies.
Another method of preservation that influenced the dinner table was the long-standing tradition of
pickling food. This involved placing either fruits, vegetables, or meat inside wooden
barrels or casks that were filled with brine. Pickled foods went hand in hand with potted or
preserved meats at the dinner table and were often seasoned with simple spices and salt.
Pickling was a process that provided comfort in times of food shortages or poor seasons.
And it was also delicious. According to the History Channel, Dutch farmers in New York started
growing cucumbers in the 1650s. Their crops were then pickled and sold by dealers on the street,
marking the beginnings of the pickle industry, which still thrives today.
They weren't just making food, they were also making money. It's the American Way!
It wasn't all salty meat and pickled vegetables in the colonies, though. Jumble cookies, along
with a host of other English sweet recipes, were also brought over and adopted into the New World.
Jumble cookies are believed to have come across on the Mayflower, eventually spreading into the other
areas of America. Martha Washington, the first lady to President George Washington,
even had her own special Jumble cookie recipe, which consisted mostly of eggs,
flour, sugar, milk, and maybe some caraway seeds.
The Jumble cookie is a perfect example of how the 13 colonies built upon their
roots from England to make recipes that took on an American flavor over time.
In spite of America's puritanical roots, all 13 colonies consumed a variety of different
forms of alcohol and found numerous ways to produce it. Some of these methods included
crushing apples and fermenting them into hard cider, or turning corn into whiskey, which is
still a practice done to this day and has been perfected through the distillation of bourbon.
Aside from utilizing local ingredients such as corn and apples to make alcoholic drinks,
the colonies relied on the importation of certain
goods in order to widen the palate of accessible alcohol. For instance,
molasses was oftentimes used to create rum — which had its downside when it came to wartime.
"A lot of them were drunk. Just putting them on boats. And people are like falling off,
s--tfaced, trying to get it… it's just funny."
Perhaps most interestingly, there is evidence that honey was used to make
metheglin in the New World, which was originally a Welsh spiced mead.
Since almost all of the original American colonies were along the coast of the Atlantic ocean,
it's no wonder that there were strong strong seafood influences in their diet.
The fishing was plentiful; anything from sturgeon, seals,
flounder, herring, and more were common catches for colonialists.
But codfish was by far the most popular to be caught,
cooked, and sold. According to "Colonial New England Recipes," a famous and widely used
technique was baking the codfish with various vegetables and herbs like onions and thyme.
The codfish found itself not only on New Englander's dinner tables but also being shipped
for exportation, which ended up inadvertently helping to win the Revolutionary War. You see,
codfish was by far the biggest export from the 13 colonies to other countries.
And that meant a fleet of ships, mostly fishing and commercial vessels,
were needed to support the trade. So when the war broke out, John Adams saw
a naval opportunity; soon, those fishing fleets had been transformed into America's young navy.
Codfish wasn't just useful in war, though. It also had an effect on religion as well.
Once codfish was dried it became around 80% protein, which made it the perfect food for
Catholic countries in Europe to import from the colonies during periods of religious fasting.
Ultimately, the codfish supplied food, money, and eventually a navy for the American people,
making it a very important bit of food indeed.
One popular recipe that relied more heavily on imported ingredients was pepper cake. It primarily
used pepper as a preservative and molasses as a sweetening agent. And it didn't just taste good.
Importantly, it was also easy to preserve, lasting for months or even over a year before going stale.
Think of the toughest gingerbread man you can imagine, and that is pepper cake.
So, just exactly how is this immortal molasses-filled cake concocted? Well,
once again we have Martha Washington to thank here, as she passed down a
recipe for pepper cake that she originally received in 1749 during her first marriage.
The recipe includes such interesting elements as ginger, coriander, caraway, and aniseed.
Food in the 13 colonies had to do more than taste good, it had to last.
Pepper cake is an all-star of everything a colonialist was looking for in food.
Inhabitants of all 13 colonies relied heavily on the dense amount of wild
game found in the vast forests of the New World for a source of fresh food.
Wild game was often the main dish satiating the colonial appetite,
as Americans hunted animals such as deer, rabbit, turkey, and even pigeon in droves.
This created a largely meat-based diet for the colonies. They killed what they could and ate
what they would. In regards to a more modern diet, pigeon certainly sticks out from the
rest of the usual game. One reason it's so unusual now is that the main type of
pigeon people used to eat, the passenger pigeon, was hunted into total extinction.
Colonial Americans enjoyed eating this bird in many ways, including roasting it,
baking it, adding it to a stew, or even sticking it into a pie. Once the bird went extinct due to
overhunting, the chicken replaced it on the dinner table and in the American marketplace.
Another plentiful source of food for the colonists was lobster.
In fact, according to History, there were so many lobsters when the first settlers
came to America that they washed up ashore in droves, nearing piles that reached up to 2 feet
high. The fact that they were so plentiful made lobster an ideal food for the poor,
and when difficult seasonal droughts reduced the supply of other foods.
Native Americans utilized the lobster to fertilize their crops, and they also cooked
and ate them alongside seaweed. As for the colonists, eventually the number of lobsters
literally washing ashore wasn't enough, so they developed fishing boats called smacks that were
specifically designed for catching lobsters. The men who ran these boats were known as smackmen
and pulled in such large amounts of lobster that the 13 colonies didn't know what to do with it.
So what they ended up deciding on was to feed lobster to slaves, prisoners,
and indentured servants. In fact, it became so common that before coming to America,
some servants would stipulate they could only be given a certain amount of lobster.
Yes, it's hard to believe given lobster is considered a delicacy nowadays,
but once upon a time it was considered only fit for society's poor and downtrodden.
As the colonies developed, taverns popped up all over the rugged landscape, offering warmth and
reprieve from the taxing traveling conditions of the time. Taverns also served many purposes within
a town or city, as they became a hub for sharing ideas and political organization. But there was
another major reason customers kept coming back to taverns across early America: the delicious food.
According to the National Women's History Museum, even colonists wanted "fast food."
One could expect a variety of dishes served at their preferred tavern.
These quick bites typically included bacon, ham, and other pork products, as they were fast, cheap,
and easy to preserve. Hot biscuits were also certainly a popular tavern menu item, and things
like shepherd's pie are still served in those colonial taverns that have survived to today.
"There's a shepherd's pie, and a bubble and squeak, the early American answer for leftovers."
"The Colonial Williamsburg Tavern Cookbook," by former Colonial Williamsburg Executive Chef
John Gonzales, also details some fantastic tavern dishes of the colonial era,
and perhaps more importantly, how to make them. Gonzales reveals that taverns sold sweet potato
muffins, steak stuffed with oysters, and for dessert, chocolate pecan pie.
Now that sounds like the recipe for a great Yelp review.
Alcohol and dessert all in one? Sounds too good to be true.
But welcome to the wonder that is syllabub.
There were many ways to make Syllabub, but there were always two key ingredients:
sugar and wine. This dish was literally whipped up for special occasions,
containing whipped cream and some kind of citrus for acidity.
Syllabub relied on that combination - plus alcohol! - to create a dessert that kept an
individual coming back for another bite. It was a delicacy well known throughout the 13 colonies,
often served as a centerpiece inside elegantly stacked glasses.
If you're looking to throw an old-fashioned 18th century party, Amelia Simmons' "American Cookery"
is a must. It offers a host of syllabub recipes ranging from whipped raspberry
cream to lemon cream in order to recreate popular variations of this colonial classic. Each list of
ingredients calls for a heavy pour of booze to be sure one catches a delicious buzz as well.
Nobody wants to eat bland food, not even colonists, so they figured out ways to
spice things up - literally. According to the Union Forge Heritage Association, a colonial
garden would have included things like basil, sage, caraway, chives, and dill, to name a few.
These herbs were used for cleaning purposes and at times were applied medicinally,
but mainly they were used to add flavors to pies, spiced meats, and soups.
Colonists were also able to use plant life for a range of things like tea
and balm. According to the Daily Progress, when Americans boycotted British teas,
they turned to local indigineous tribes to learn brewing methods, like with the wild bergamot mint.
Many of the base herbs were used to season meat and added to salads,
and oils were extracted for cooking. And for those colonists who could afford them,
other herbs and spices were imported to satisfy those looking to cook beyond the
typical colony fare or for those who couldn't maintain a garden due to colder weather.
These simple but practical applications of herbs added
an important flavor identity to the colonial diet - and shaped what we still eat today.