The Larder: Food Studies Methods from the American South

CHAPTER 3 Prospecting for Oil

Of all the quests that early American farmers and horticulturists pursued, none was more enduring and consequential than the pursuit of culinary oils and fats—something less expensive and more suitable for salad dressing than melted lard. From Thomas Jefferson’s failed attempts to grow olive trees in Albemarle County,Virginia, to David Wesson’s labors in the laboratory to free cottonseed oil of its natural stink,the history of experiments is a fascinating chronicle of popular taste, economic ambition, and food chemistry . It begins in the attempt to acclimatize the best-tasting oil-producing plants of the Old World to the North American landscape and ends with the industrial synthesis of wholly new entities—Crisco and margarine— devised to be inoffensive to taste, even tasteless. These developments played out in a little more than a century,from 1773 to 1890,largely in the American South and were greatly influenced by African American dietary needs. Italian culinary evangelist Phillip Mazzei settled in the hill country of Virginia in 1773 to establish an American Tuscany of vineyards and olive groves. But the scant three years between the planting of his fields and the outbreak of the American Revolution thwarted both projects. Olive trees take at least ten years to mature and set fruit; muscat vines need five to supply sufficient grapes for a crush. The location of Mazzei’s land next to the plantation of Thomas Jefferson, then governor of Virginia, ensured that Mazzei’s property would suffer spoilage at the hands of British invaders.The truth is,well before the British came to Charlottesville Mazzei knew that his olive groves would not flourish. He had seen most of the saplings die when the winter temperature dipped below 15 degrees Fahrenheit in 1774. When CHAPTER 3 ▶ Prospecting for Oil david s. shields 58 David S. Shields Mazzei departed for Europe on a secret mission to secure arms for Virginia in 1779, he left without having fulfilled any of the major ambitions that had brought him to America. Even the vineyard Mazzei’s workers had planted for Jefferson at Monticello would never produce a single vintage,falling victim to Virginia’s rapacious raccoons, insects, and black rot. One seed that Mazzei planted did bear fruit—the idea of diversified planting—in Jefferson’s imagination.Mazzei’s example had turned Jefferson, a rather traditional Virginia staple farmer with an interest in fruit trees, into a horticultural experimentalist inspired by any new plant or animal he encountered . In 1787, during a journey to northern Italy where he witnessed how fruit and oil grounded the diet of the Italian peasantry,Jefferson awoke to the virtues of Mazzei’s cherished olive tree. His careful notation in his travel diary of the locales and elevations at which various cultivars flourished revealed that the winter temperatures in most of the United States precluded the olive’s cultivation. Yet in the Lowcountry of South Carolina and Georgia, and in the territory of Florida (if and when it came under American control), conditions were roughly comparable to those in Italy. Jefferson contacted the one institution that might oversee the establishment of olives, the South Carolina Agricultural Society, which had organized in 1785. His letter commended olive oil particularly: A pound of oil which can be bought for 3d. or 4d. sterling, is equivalent to many pounds of flesh by the quantity of vegetables, it will prepare and render fit and comfortable food. Notwithstanding the great quantity of oil made in France, they have not enough for their own consumption; and, therefore import from other countries. This is an article, of consumption of which, will always keep pace with the production. Raise it, and it begets its own demand. Little is carried to America, because Europe has it not to spare; we, therefore, have not learnt the use of it. But cover the Southern States with it, and every man will become a consumer of it, within whose reach it can be brought, in point of price. Parts of Jefferson’s letter must be explained—for instance,the claim that a pound of oil equaled many pounds of flesh in the preparation of vegetables. He spoke to his countrymen’s propensity to fry vegetables in lard or bacon fat. The expense of raising a hog in terms of feed and growth rate, butch- Prospecting for...