Cuisine of The Thirteen Colonies - Diet Before The American Revolution

Diet Before The American Revolution

When colonists arrived in America, they planted familiar crops from the Old World with varying degrees of success and raised domestic animals for meat, leather, and wool, as they had done in Britain. The colonists faced difficulties owing to different climate and other environmental factors, but trade with Britain, continental Europe, and the West Indies allowed the American colonists to create a cuisine similar to the various regional British cuisines. Local plants and animals offered tantalizing alternatives to the Old World diet, but the colonists held on to old traditions and tended to use these items in the same fashion as they did their Old World equivalents (or even ignore them if more familiar foods were available). The American colonial diet varied depending on region, with local cuisine patterns established by the mid-18th century.

A preference for British cooking methods is apparent in cookbooks brought to the New World. There was a general disdain for French cookery, even among the French Huguenots in South Carolina and French Canadians. One cookbook common in the colonies, The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy, by Hannah Glasse, held the French style of cookery in disdain, stating "the blind folly of this age that would rather be imposed on by a French booby, than give encouragement to a good English cook!" She does add French recipes to the text but speaks out flagrantly against the dishes, "...think(ing) it an odd jumble of trash." The French and Indian War (1754–1764) reinforced anti-French sentiment. The conflict strengthened an age-old English distrust of the French, and led the English to deport French-speaking people, as in the forced migration of the Acadians to Louisiana. The Acadian French brought a profound French influence to the diet of settlers in Louisiana, but had little influence outside of that region.