The Early American Table: Food and Society in the New World (review)

American foodies know Trudy Eden from her heavily glossed collection of recipes, Cooking in America 1590-1840, published in the Greenwood Press Daily Life through History series. Its expertise and deep familiarity with the shape and development of receipts reveal her as the heir to the late Karen Hess, a spiritual offspring blessedly free of Hess's contentiousness. Eden's knowledgeability and care appear everywhere in her new book, The Early American Table, which advances an engagingly contrarian view of how food worked in Anglo-American settler society and in the world system.

Ever since Alfred W. Crosby portrayed The Columbian Exchange in 1972, scholars have been concerned with mobility of biological materials in the period after Europe's contact with the Western hemisphere. Whether following the transit of individual foodstuffs (maize, okra, potato, wheat, capsicum) around the globe, or reconstructing the first world drug culture of coffee, tea, sugar, tobacco, chocolate, and hot peppers, scholars have suggested the permeability of food through cultural boundaries. This might be called the neohedonist view of global exchange, echoing the faith of the ancient companion of Alexander the Great, Archestratus of Gela, who in "Hedypathia" argued that taste was the most adventurous of the senses, and that a worldly sensus communis might been had by every people's consumption of one another's foods.

Eden's book suggests that a hedonistic embrace of the foreign comestible was hardly the course of culinary relations between English settlers and Native Americans. Quite the opposite. The bodily self-understanding of Europeans in terms of classical humoral theory gave rise to a profoundly conservative cast of mind when it came to consumption. Since food could alter the balance of the humors, and hence one's constitution, those who desired to preserve their identity strove to eat what had made them what they were in the first place. Only extreme circumstances—starvation, or deprivation of Old World comestibles—could compel a transformation of one's cuisine by eating New World novelties. So Eden's history sympathizes more with the Alfred Crosby of Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900-1900 than the Crosby of The Columbian Exchange. Eden suggests why settlers so insistently attempted to transplant the vegetables and grains of their homelands to America and did not immediately become avid eaters of maize, squashes, Jerusalem artichokes, and potatoes.

Eden's narrative of a settler culture preoccupied with security of identity is not wholly novel. Jim Egan's Authorizing Experience: Refigurations of the Body Politic in Seventeenth-Century New England Writing (1999) charts a parallel course, exploring the anxieties about the English body that foreign climes inspired. Yet Eden's study has a different explanatory force. For instance, she examines the prosecution of Maria Wingfield for hoarding food in Jamestown in light of a cultural preoccupation with food security and the notorious disinclination of Jamestown inhabitants to engage in field labor in an aversion to work at growing something they did not wish to eat. Suggestive.

Much of the latter half of The Early American Table shows the retention of key features of the old humoral physiology (the linkage of diet and character, the pursuit of a golden mean of consumption, the notion of an internal nexus of fluids/salts) into the eighteenth century, when mechanism began to frame notions of body and society. Eden compares English and British American gardens and recipe books and notes the similarity of cultivars and instructions, but she stresses that the profusion and general availability of common European proteins, vegetables, and grains made the consumption situation in America fundamentally different because such abundance gave rise to food security. Perhaps the most controversial of her conclusions is that persons, such as Charles Carroll, who wished to project social preeminence did so with the equipment of the table—china, silver, glassware—not the food; food (because the culture understood that its moderate consumption engendered virtue) could not be exoticized without...