Northern Hospitality: Cooking by the Book in New England

Preface

Preface Where does a reader or cook turn to get a good taste of traditional New England cuisine? Up till now, those exploring the region’s culinary past have found mostly adaptations of historic recipes. Usually highlighted within this narrow repertoire are dishes that were developed during the colonial revival of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. While based on long-established everyday foods, these exemplars of the tradition are frequently sweetened beyond recognition or otherwise reworked to appeal to modern palates. For those who remained convinced that more was involved than baked beans and clam chowder, the only alternative was a confusing array of single cookbook reprints. Both the adaptive and reprint approaches leave out much of the threehundred -year history of the changing gastronomic customs and styles of New England. The good news is that numerous cookbooks reflecting and helping to build that tradition were imported into or created in the region . They offer a reservoir of significant historical information. In an earlier book, America’s Founding Food, we told a large part of the complex, colorful, sometimes controversial story of New England cooking . The present book represents our attempt to tell the rest of the story, through a generous selection of unaltered historic recipes, combined with analysis of the writers and cookbooks that most influenced the food habits of New Englanders from the seventeenth to the early twentieth centuries. The gastronomy found in their pages tells a rich and evolving tale. Adding to the fun is the fact that the recipes, while rarely written with the precision to which we have become accustomed, are nevertheless accessible to any mildly adventurous cook. Over the past several years, we have discussed with many audiences and individual readers the social context of cooking and eating in New England, along the way describing particular recipes, methods of preparation , and ingredients. Frequently people have asked where they could go to learn more. They have told us that they would like to begin or to deepen their own encounters with historic cooking. Others, avid students of history and recipe readers, have said they were hungry for primary source material on New England food history. This critical anthology is our attempt to further those encounters and feed those reading habits. We hope readers will find as much relish in the reading as we have in the compiling and writing. xii • preface ...