Food in the American colonies, from the difficult and sometimes desperate early beginnings to the much more favorable conditions of the late 1600's. Published 2012. 24 recipes, 113 research notes, 37 pages. 5.5 x 8.5 inches. Soft cover, saddle-stitched. ISBN-10: 1-929384-14-9. ISBN-13: 978-1-929384-14-3.
Travel-minded Europeans were attracted to the new American colonies by lyrical descriptions such as this by Captain John Smith in 1614:
“Of all the foure parts of the world that I have yet seene not inhabited, could I have but means to transport a Colonie, I would rather live here than any where. . . .”
Alas! The New World was not Eden, after all, but the colonists coped and cooked in their new environment. Patricia B. Mitchell explores the early days of American cookery in Colonial Foodways in the 1600's. 113 endnotes and numerous "read-out-loud" passages make this book an asset to education and conversation.
Food instructions from the period include Pumpkin (“The ancient New England standing Dish”), “Beavers' Tails,” and “Raccoon.” Commemorative recipes helpful in showing the tastes of the period include “Ash Cake,” “Whigs,” and “Modern Day Gooseberry Fool.”
Note: Some portions of Colonial Foodways in the 1600's are revised and expanded from previously-published passages in Patricia Mitchell's Girth of the Nation (1994, and reprinted as At the Table in Colonial America) and Pilgrims, Puritans, and Cavaliers: From Hunger to Feasting (1999, and reprinted as Colonial Foodways).
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