New England's early foodways set a pattern for the common, everyday cookery that would be carried across the American continent and endure through time to the present. Many dishes considered today particularly American—pumpkin pie, johnnycake, pork and baked beans, apple pie, among others—evolved in New England from the yeoman English cookery of the seventeenth century colonist who came to the region.

Early Preferences

English settlers arrived in New England with a decided preference for beef and beer, wheat bread, peas and root vegetables, tree fruits, particularly apple, and well-developed dairying practices. Their seasoning habits were close to the rich and complex flavorings of the late medieval era. They ate fish on fast days, regarded it appropriately as light fare, but often associated it, especially salted fish, with poverty. Venison hunting and consumption was, for these people, restricted in Old England as sport and fare for the gentry. Within a few decades, settlers had considerably altered some of these habits to accommodate the climate and growing conditions of their new home, the variable supplies of still-developing trade networks, and economic realities of a colony as a joint stock company.

Climate and Cash Flow

New England's weather was much colder, particularly in winter, than the English were accustomed to in the Gulf Stream–moderated British Isles. The colonial period and early nineteenth century were, as well, affected by what weather historians have characterized as a mini ice age. Still summers were shorter, hotter, and more humid than English growing seasons, conditions that adversely affected wheat and pea growing in particular. A recurring mildew attacked wheat, gradually impelling a switch from wheat flour bread to one made with rye and the Native American's cornmeal, which settlers named "Indian" to produce a loaf called "rye and Indian." New England's climate favored the native beans that ultimately fared better than peas as a field crop and helped urge the shift to the beans pottage that would evolve into baked beans.

New England's climate limited natural abundance. Compared to other colonies in North America, settlers in the north were limited to gathering greens in early spring, and wild fruits and nuts in two to three months of summer and early fall. Deer, moose, and small animals were most toothsome in the fall before they had spent cold months grazing on evergreens and mosses. Settlers near water could hunt wild fowl, as well as catch fish. But cold weather hunting and fishing was often strenuous and yielded uncertain results with at least as great an expenditure of energy finding food as would be gained from eating it. Besides the issue of dubious food value, early settlers viewed hunting and gathering as the sport of the gentry and idle, and, more to the point, they faced economic realties which mitigated against that activity.

Of first importance was establishing an economic base for the colonies settled all through southern New England. As joint stock companies, they owed money, and much effort was expended to raise it and to create some business that would yield profit. From the start, this impulse created a market economy that skewed settlers' activity toward lumbering, fishing, and producing the most merchantable crops and agricultural products, and away from growing experimental foodstuffs or from indulging in hunting and gathering with potentially unreliable results. New England's gentry farmers in later years took up the gentlemanly farming found earlier in the South and the Middle Atlantic colonies, growing experimental crops, vegetables, conducting animal husbandry, and cultivating fruit trees—quince, pears, cherries, apricots, and even peaches, but chiefly apples. By the later nineteenth century even middle-class professionals spent their leisure growing everything from strawberries to pumpkins in gentile competition, but for the first century and anywhere on New England's frontiers, Yankees preferred the tried, true, and reliably abundant. This conservatism in taste and preference for reliability endured through the centuries.

Food from the Native Americans

New England's settlers adopted a limited range of food stuff and agricultural practice from the Native Americans. As most cultures do when encountering new foods, the English accepted those that most resembled the familiar and preferred. Practicality drove the adoption of what the Native Americans called the Three Sisters: corn, squash and pumpkins, and beans.

Corn grew and yielded well. Cornmeal behaved culinarily like the familiar oatmeal and was handled as oatmeal had been in England in the unleavened bread bannock. Bannock was also known in the North of England as jonniken. The corruption of the term jonniken accounts for the name johnnycake, best seen in the Rhode Island spelling of jonnycake, which is to this day an unleavened mixture of cornmeal, salt, water, sometimes thinned with milk, and baked over fire on a flat pan in traditional bannock fashion. Cornmeal was also cooked as a mush or hasty pudding, as had been oatmeal. Similarly, Indian meal was used in place of the customary coarse oatmeal to make the milk-based, molasses-sweetened Indian pudding, ultimately named for the cornmeal used to make it.

Squash and pumpkins worked in recipes like apples did, so they were stewed as a sauce or sliced in pie form as apples were in the seventeenth century. Later, in the eighteenth century, they would be used like the similarly textured sweet potato in the sweet puddings often baked in pastry shells, and thus gradually evolved into pumpkin pie.

For many centuries, the most commonly used bean in Europe was a large flat bean of which the modern fava is a kind. Settlers encountered the smaller, rounder, kidney-shaped beans of North America that could be used as peas had always been used in potages and soups, often with salted meat, or even sometimes ground to be combined with grains for a coarse bread. Most of the early potages were stewed dishes, but toward the end of the eighteenth century, New Englanders took advantage of still warm brick bake ovens to bake slowly a pot full of beans with salt pork. Baked beans were barely sweetened in the early era, the most usual proportion being one large spoonful of molasses to a quart of dried beans. Industrially produced beans of the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were notoriously and popularly sweet, and many homemakers followed the example to create the sweet baked beans we know today.

Reform and Beer and Bread

Uncertainty with grain crops together with the relative ease of apple growing gradually brought about a slight shift from beer and ale to apple cider drinking. Still for the first two centuries of New England's history, housewives continued the paired activities of baking and brewing, both of which used and generated yeast. The advent of the Temperance movement, the earliest of the food-ways-related reforms to take hold of New England, gradually eliminated brewed beverages from widespread daily and family consumption and replaced them with tea and coffee, and eventually for festive occasions, lemonade. Some people continued to drink wine, and beer and cider, but the Temperance influence was widespread in New England, and broke the bread-making and brewing connection, opening the way for commercial yeast-making and the wider acceptance and manufacture of chemical leavenings such as pearlash, later saleratus, and eventually baking soda and cream of tartar, and baking powder.

New Englanders reverted to making bread with wheat after the Eire Canal opened in the 1820s, and lower cost wheat flour came on the market. The old rye-and-Indian gradually disappeared, but in the mid-nineteenth century the combination could be found in Boston brown bread, which continued to use rye, cornmeal, and sometimes wheat flour as well, mixed with chemical leavenings, milk, sweetened with molasses, and steamed—more pudding than bread, but eaten as bread would be, often accompanying baked pork and beans. This combination continues even to our time, and was carried across the country anywhere New Englanders settled.

Fish, Molasses, and Industry

New England was the earliest region to industrialize. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Boston and Providence capitalists converted money from trade and shipping into textile manufacture. Some of this wealth had been originally generated by the salt cod trade with Europe and the West Indies, where it formed a leg of the well-known triangle trade that included molasses and slaves. Settlers engaged in cod fishing early, utilizing one of the regions natural resources, in order to produce an income for repayment of investments in colonies. The codfish that hangs in the Massachusetts State House has little to do with gastronomic preferences of New Englanders, but honors instead the source of much wealth.

New Englanders certainly did consume salt codfish, often on Saturday, often in the form of a boiled dinner with root vegetables, and a sauce of fried salt pork or butter and chopped boiled eggs. This dish gained the derisive nickname Cape Cod Turkey, variously Block Island Turkey. Chowder, another dish with strong New England associations, came ashore from the fishing fleets. Earliest versions of it were comprised of fishermen's provisions, salt pork and hardtack, to which fish was added. When Yankees added potatoes to their everyday diet, they were used in the chowder, too, eventually replacing hardtack as a thickener.

The molasses was made into rum, and provided an inexpensive sweetening characteristic of many of New England's early dishes. Wherever saltwater access made shipping possible molasses, brown sugar, and refined white sugar were available to cooks, even in the hinterlands. Two other sweeteners, commonplace in interior New England, were a thick, molasses-like syrup made from boiled down sweet apple cider, and maple sugar. Produced mostly as a commodity, partly for home consumption, sugar-making from maple tree sap became a widespread activity in the middle to late eighteenth century, and grew steadily through the nineteenth. The goal was sugar production, though in more recent times, the syrup has become more desirable.

The industrialization of New England promoted urban growth and transformed many New Englanders from food producers to food consumers only. Urbanization created a stronger market for dairy products—cheese, milk, and butter—and changed many New England farms from producing varied crops to focusing on a specialty such as dairying, orchards, or raising poultry for meat and eggs. By the mid-nineteenth century, grain and even beef and pork were brought into New England's cities from the West by way of railroads and artificial refrigeration.

Factory work also changed the daily patterns of meals for many New Englanders. The old rural pattern of a morning breakfast, noon dinner, and a smaller meal called tea or supper in the evening gave way to breakfast, a lunch carried to work, and a supper or dinner in the evening at the end of the work day. For many laboring families, however, dinner became a Sunday phenomenon, placed in the middle of the day. People in farming communities would continue the old pattern well into the twentieth century.

Immigration

Industrialization encouraged immigration from the French Canadian north and Europe and gradually introduced ethnic flavors to the region. The same reformist impulse that gave Temperance such a strong footing in New England also worked toward mainstreaming the newcomers' diets. Scientific cooking and cooking schools, such as the well-known Boston Cooking School, made as their missions both to educate middle-class women in healthful and aesthetically pleasing cookery, but also to uplift the poor, often immigrant, populations caught in the economic vicissitudes of industrialization. This combined readily with many immigrants desire to meld into American life, which they accomplished by giving up some of their traditional dishes to eat more meat. Many ethnic groups living in neighborhoods nevertheless managed to continue many familiar foodways and supported local groceries, butchers, fish markets, and green grocers. In the twentieth century, with the culmination of nearly a century of exposure to Italians, Portuguese, Eastern Europeans, French, and Asians, Yankee cooks ate in ethnic restaurants and experimented with foreign dishes at home.

Thanksgiving

The national holiday Thanksgiving owes it origins to the sustained custom of autumn harvest festivals brought to and continued in New England. Originally a moveable feast that could occur almost anytime at the conclusion of the growing season, early New Englanders preferred to conclude butchering season before celebrating the harvest, usually at the end of November or beginning of December. Individual colonial, later state, governors declared what day, usually a Thursday, the holiday would be observed. A holiday of family reunion, feasting, and recreation, Thanksgiving's menu has been much mythologized, starting with the event considered the first Thanksgiving, described by Edward Winslow in Mourt's Relation: "so we might after a special manner rejoice together after we had gathered the fruit of our Labors." Winslow reported that they had wild fowl and venison, and William Bradford writing in Of Pilmoth Plantation about the same event, referred to fish, turkeys, and Indian meal.

In the nineteenth century when the story of founding settlers of Plymouth was romanticized, the association of turkeys and the so-called Pilgrims at Thanksgiving assured that dish would appear on the table along with roast pork, chicken pies, fall-harvested vegetables such as squash, potatoes, and turnips. Cranberry sauce and pickles and other preserves accompanied the meal, and pies followed made of pumpkin, apple, and mincemeat. This menu, with very few substantial changes, spread across the country with settlers, and has continued to the present along with the habit of observing the day. While nearly every state in the nation observed Thanksgiving in some form, the day became a nationally declared holiday when Abraham Lincoln, at the urging of Sarah Josepha Hale, set the holiday at the last Thursday in November. Franklin Roosevelt changed the date to the fourth Thursday, where it rests today.

See also Fish: Sea Fish; Foodways; Maize: Maize as a Food; Squash and Gourds; Sugar Crops and Natural Sweeteners; Thanksgiving; Wheat: Wheat as a Food.

Sandra L. Oliver