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of the difficulty of keeping it fresh. Even city people often had chickens in the yard and a hog or two left to scavenge in the street. Until well into the nineteenth century visitors to New York remarked on the hazard to traffic presented by wandering hogs along Broadway. Even in the more temperate north, meat would go off in a day in summer, and milk would curdle in as little as an hour. Spoiled food was a daily hazard for the wealthy as much as for the poor. One guest at a dinner party given by the Washingtons noted with a certain vicious relish that the General discreetly pushed his plate of sherry trifle to one side when he discovered that the cream was distinctly iffy but that the less discerning Martha continued shovelling it away with gusto. Ice-cream was a safer option. It was first mentioned in America in the 1740s when a guest at a banquet given by the governor of Maryland wrote about this novelty which, he noted, ‘eat most deliciously’.

Thomas Jefferson, thanks to his scrupulous – one might say obsessive – record-keeping (for eight years, while helping to run a new nation, he found time to track the first and last appearances on Washington market stalls of thirty-seven types of vegetable), has left us the most complete chronicle of the life of a farmer in colonial times, but also the least typical. As we have already seen with the tomato and potato, Jefferson was a tireless experimenter with foods and grew any number of plants that most Americans had never heard of, among them such exotica as eggplant, damson plums, Savoy cabbages, sugar beets, cauliflower, endive, chicory (which he called succory), broccoli, celery and a kind of squash called cymling. Only grapes of a sufficient calibre to make a palatable wine eluded him, to his unending despair.6

Other planters were less adventurous, but compensated with quantity. Diners at the finer homes were commonly offered eight or ten kinds of meat or fish, a galaxy of vegetables, and half a dozen desserts, all washed down with copious quantities of wine, porter, rum, beer or Madeira. Jefferson, in his first year in the White House, spent $2,800 – more money than many people saw in a lifetime – on wine alone.

For farmers, food was almost entirely home-grown. As late as 1787, even a prosperous yeoman farmer in New England might spend no more than $10 a year on all outside purchases. This might include a little tea or coffee, a good deal of salt and perhaps some molasses, but in all other respects he and his household were entirely self-sufficient.

By the mid-1800s many Americans were eating well enough to give foreign critics something new to be appalled at. A correspondent for The Times of London recorded with amazement a ‘typical’ American breakfast – ‘black tea and toast, scrambled eggs, fresh spring shad, wild pigeons, pigs’ feet, two robins on toast, oysters’ and that, he implied, was one of the lighter repasts.7 If such breakfasts were eaten, and a touch of scepticism might not be misplaced here, they weren’t eaten by everyone. The bulk of urban dwellers ate poorly, partly because their meagre wages didn’t permit better, but also because such medical advice as filtered down to them suggested that most fresh foods were hazardous. Until the mid-nineteenth century, received wisdom had it that anyone reckless enough to consume an apple or pear or indeed almost any other vegetative product was all but asking for a speedy death at the hand of typhoid, dysentery or cholera.8 During cholera epidemics city councils routinely banned the sale of fruits and salads, but even during comparatively safe periods most people thought it imprudent to feed almost any plant food (with the exception of a well-boiled potato) to the more susceptible members of the community, especially children, who of course most needed the vitamins. As a result, diseases associated with malnutrition stalked even the better-off families.

Milk, too, was widely regarded as perilous, though with some justification, since it spoiled quickly and was processed and delivered in a manner that owed little