Distant Tables: Food and the Novel in Early America

After the Revolution, some citizens of the new United States were worried about what to eat. What would be proper food for a new republic? With old English ways now tainted by association with monarchy and new French alternatives already marked by continental decadence, foodways became part of a larger debate between luxury and virtue. In the end, rather than change eating habits shaped through years of adapting local ingredients to British tastes, Americans sought to redescribe them, to claim an American identity for foodways that would remain fundamentally British well into the nineteenth century. American cuisine was thus born in the anxiety of identity. While this debate occurred in newspapers, club literature, and even poetry—Joel Barlow's "The Hasty Pudding" celebrates a kind of culinary nativism—such discussions did not appear in early American novels like The Coquette or Charlotte Temple. In the opening decades of the nineteenth century, however, food became much more important in the historical fiction that helped create a national literature. As part of the emerging myth of republican simplicity, novelists like Lydia Maria Child, James Fenimore Cooper, and Catharine Maria Sedgwick introduced fictive representations of local food and reimagined the role of domestic labor—and, in the process, helped define American culture by encoding food with social and moral meaning. Just as in dress or manners, choices in what and how to eat helped locate individuals and the nation itself within the central debate between what came to be seen as European luxury and what was claimed as American virtue.

The Declaration of Independence did not extend to American cookery. In the early republic—and indeed through the Civil War—eating habits in the new nation largely followed patterns established by the colonists, who had responded to the abundance of the New World by doggedly recreating British cuisine. The first English settlers in North America found an extraordinary variety of new foods that they refused to eat. Drawing on what Waverly Root and Richard de Rochemont have called "a certain amount of obstinacy" (10), the colonists insisted on eating only familiar foods, struggling to create a "cuisine of survival" in the midst of unrecognized gastronomic abundance (74). Except in periods of dire threat, they turned away from native foods unless they strongly resembled European foods or until the new ingredients won acceptance in European cuisines half a world away from their origin. For example, Harvey Levenstein notes, "The potato and tomato, which originated in native American civilizations just to the south of [the colonies] some millennia before, reached Anglo-America late in the eighteenth century, only after gaining grudging approval in Britain" (3). Like other food historians, he argues that "corn was integrated into the colonial diet mainly out of necessity" arising from the difficulty of growing European grains (3). The colonists did incorporate some other foods introduced to them by the Native Americans, but for the most part they focused their energies on developing imported resources to establish an Old World cuisine in a new setting, an attempt in which they succeeded beyond all expectations.¹

That the British colonists clung to the culinary traditions of their homeland is not surprising, for the British had resisted gastronomic change at home as well. Food historians have noted that, as continental cuisines underwent dramatic change from the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries, English cookery remained relatively static, continuing to emphasize the heavy, filling foods and spicing patterns of the late Middle Ages. Tannahill, whose monumental Food in History traces the development of Western eating habits, argues that "[t]he somewhat haphazard medieval menu had survived in England and America until well into the eighteenth century. The two-course dinner for an ordinary household suggested in The Compleat Housewife [by Elizabeth Smith] in 1727 was still markedly similar in style to the fourteenth century French menu" (296).² This resistance to change in the food habits that the colonists brought to the New World helped establish British cookery as the unshakable foundation of American foodways.

Although the colonists retained their English insularity with regard to resisting culinary change, the cookery developed...