Made In America - Bill Bryson [121]
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