Northern Hospitality: Cooking by the Book in New England

Chapter Eight: Game and Meat

206 chapter eight • Game฀and฀Meat Touring England in the 1690s, Henri Misson was only one of many continental travelers who had “always heard that [the English] were great flesh-eaters” and who found that this was indeed true. While the people he observed would only “nibble a few crumbs” of bread, meat they would “chew . . . by whole mouthfuls. . . . Among the middling sort of people they have ten or twelve sorts of common meats which infallibly take their turns at their tables.” Around this same time it was calculated that English annual per capita meat consumption was 140 pounds. A bit earlier, in 1639, English flesh-eating was associated with a charge of heresy against one Puritan radical. John Everarde was alleged to have denied the doctrine of the resurrection of the body because he “did not game and meat • 207 beleeve that our bodyes nourished of and by beefe mutton and Capon and the like could rise againe and goe to heaven.” The settlers of New England were primarily drawn from the meateating , “middling sort of people,” but in the seventeenth century most of them were not yet prosperous enough to place flesh meat at the core of their diet. As we noted in Chapter 5, pottage was the staple dish of early New England, with the legume and grain component dominating the meat component and increasingly so as time passed since autumn slaughtering. By the middle of the eighteenth century, things had begun to change. Food preservation techniques in general, and meat preservation techniques in particular, had steadily improved, so that in a great many households salted meat supplies lasted the entire year. Frequently apt to be found in the “ample depths” of “the huge dinner pot,” steaming on “the genial open kitchen-fire” (to quote a nostalgic evocation by Harriet Beecher Stowe), were “beets, carrots, potatoes, and turnips [boiling] in jolly sociability with the pork or corned beef which they were destined to flank at the coming meal.” Boiled dinner, and the meat that was central to it, was supplanting pottage as the daily fare of New England. By the first half of the nineteenth century, the former English colonies had equaled or surpassed their onetime mother country in reputed flesheating avidity. A native observer, Timothy Dwight, found that in New England meat was consumed two or three times a day by even the poorer sort. An English visitor, forgetting his own nation’s achievements in this regard, stated that “as a flesh-consuming people, the Americans have no equal in the world.” This writer had seen a typical gentleman “choose as many as seven or eight different kinds of animal food from the bill of fare, and after having all arranged before him in a row, . . . commence at one end and eat his way through in half a dozen minutes.” Sarah Josepha Hale made flesh consumption the key to a dietary theory of human development and the configurations of power among the nations of the world. Since “a portion of animal food” was required “to develop and sustain the human constitution, in its most perfect state of physical, intellectual, and moral strength and beauty,” it was only to be expected that “it is that portion of the human family, who have the means of obtaining [such animal food] at least once a day, who now hold 208 • part 2. recipes and commentaries dominion over the earth.” More specifically, “Forty thousand of the beeffed British govern and control ninety millions of the rice-eating natives of India,” while “in our own country, . . . the severe and unremitting labors of every kind, which were requisite to subdue and obtain dominion of a wilderness world” were enabled by “a generous diet” based on meat. The importance of meat to the English and the English-Americans is on display elsewhere in this volume in other meat-based preparations, such as pies. Here we offer a representative selection of the ways in which flesh meat was more directly transformed into good eating. Game Game, especially venison, enjoyed great prestige in England as the food of the aristocracy, and there were certainly plenty of deer and other forest animals in North America for the early settlers to hunt or trap, cook, and eat. Nevertheless, game did not become particularly prominent in New England cookery. This was so in spite of the further fact that game—especially deer—were hunted to virtual...