The Menial Art of Cooking: Archaeological Studies of Cooking and Food Preparation

9. “Hoe Cake and Pickerel”

201 Chapter 9 “HoeCakeandPickerel” CookingTraditions,Community,andAgencyata Nineteenth-CenturyNipmucFarmstead GuidoPezzarossi Stanford University RyanKennedy Indiana University HeatherLaw University of California Berkeley Cooking practices and the foods they produce are particularly important arenas for exploring the experiences and daily routines of colonial populations. Both the biological and social necessities that compel the production and consumption of the quotidian meal are crucial to “constructing and punctuating the rhythms and regime of life” (Hastorf and Weismantel 2007:309–310; Braudel 1981; Giard 1998; Parker Pearson 2003). Thus, it is the daily repetitions of cooking and eating that cast foodways as a critical part of the production of habitus, a central influence in the process of social “distinction” and the formation of social identities (Barthes 1979:32; Hastorf and Weismantel 2007:309; Voss 2008:233; Dietler 2007:222; Bourdieu 1977, 1984). Within the range of repetitive food-related activities, the practice of cooking in particular sits at a blurred, ambiguous interface between tradition, innovation, and (re)production. From this intersection emerges a space for agency that, despite context-contingent structural boundaries (as per Abarca 2003), serves as a locus for the appropriation and production of new cultural forms and the inspiration for micro- and macro-scale “habits, customs and preferences” (Giard 1998:186). The importance of food and cooking to everyday life and their articulation with broader social and temporal scales 202 GuidoPezzarossi,RyanKennedy,andHeatherLaw give them great promise for exploring the creation and maintenance of new and existing identities within colonial contexts. Recent archaeological studies have explored the relationship between food, cooking, and identity in colonial contexts in a nuanced manner (e.g., Twiss 2007; Voss 2008, Silliman 2004; Trigg 2004:126–130). The strength of these studies comes in part from the influence of indigenous and subaltern archaeologies that attempt to break away from acculturative models (Voss 2005:424) that dichotomize continuity and change (see Silliman 2009; Dietler 2007:225). Such studies do not privilege the origin of material practices to define “authenticity” and cultural “loss,” but instead focus on the context and meaning of material culture to those who used it. In this chapter we examine the eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury colonial cooking practices of the Native inhabitants of a single site in New England. We look at the role that cooks and the act of cooking had on the creation of new forms of Native practices and identities at the site, and we attempt to tie this process into both long-term and short-term historical trajectories of food and cooking in the region. Ultimately, we show how Native cooks at the site engaged both fashionable “Euro-American” food practices and typically “non-European” cooking and eating practices and explore the processes by which this engagement fostered the emergence of new Native foodways. While these distinctly colonial foodways were clearly influenced by both past and present European, Native, and African cooking traditions, rather than attempting to untangle these influences we instead explore the character of foodways at the site as the “original” productions of the inhabitants of the site. By emphasizing the heterogeneity and fluidity of colonial processes and experiences, we hope to show that it is not the origins of food-related artifacts and cooking practices in colonial settings that are of greatest social, cultural and analytical importance, but rather the meaning of materials and practices to the people who produced, performed, and consumed them. We engage with these issues through the cooking practices at the Sarah Boston Farmstead site, an eighteenth - and nineteenth-century Nipmuc household located on Keith Hill in Grafton, Massachusetts (figure 9.1), through an array of material culture categories associated both with the production and the consumption of food. On the AgenCy Of COOks And their (re)MAking Of trAditiOn A focus on cooking and production is not meant to devalue the consumption of food but is instead an attempt to more fully appreciate the “tension” (Stahl 2002:842) of its dialectical relationship with consumption (Rodríguez-Alegría and Graff, this volume; Dietler 2007:222–223). De Certeau’s (1984) reframing of the seemingly insignificant act of consumption as a form of active, appropria- 203 “Hoe Cake and Pickerel” tive “production” can be extended to the cook and the act of cooking, which has also been portrayed as a “menial,” passive, and unreflective practice despite the clearly productive and knowledge-dependent nature of cooking. In an ethnographic reappraisal of the cook as an...