Eating and Drinking in Colonial America

Each Independence Day, friends and families gather to celebrate what it is to be American. Backyard barbecues are a great place to share friendship and reflect on what makes American great. Food and beverage have always supported social gathering and as Americans gather over beer and hotdogs—66 of them if you’re Joey Chestnut—the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence is a great day to think about the history of American food and beverage.

Food in Colonial America

It is perhaps appropriate that Americans celebrate Independence Day with a barbecue. Historically, food in Colonial America would always be shared “family style”; food served individually is a relatively new invention.

Mark Meltonville is a food and drink historian. Meltonville is a Brit who spent some time living in America, giving him a unique perspective on the differences between British and colonial custom. Now living again in Britain, Meltonville has worked with the Cultural Heritage Department of the Royal Agricultural University in Gloucestershire; Lester’s at the Royal Collection Trust in London; exhibitions at Buckingham Palace; and the Food Cult Project, based at Trinity College in Dublin. While living in America, Meltonville worked as the heritage distiller for the George Washington Distillery in Virginia.

“It’d be really interesting if we could take one of your great founding fathers to a modern restaurant. The first thing he’s going to say is, ‘How come I don’t get to choose how much of everything’s on my plate?'” says Meltonville. “You know, ‘What the hell’s your chef doing? Why can’t I choose a selection of food for myself?'”

Instead, the host’s job was to ensure their guests had choice. What can be more American than that?

“Up until about 1830, whether it be Britain or America, [a meal] is a buffet, not a plate of food. You’re going to get a drink; you’re going to get a choice of drinks. You’re going to get food, and you’re going to get choices of food,” says Meltonville. “As a host, my job is to offer you a selection of things. So, if you went into a colonial house, I’m going to make sure there’s some roast meat on the table, there’s a pie, maybe there’s a chicken there…. So there’s all these things on the table that make me think, ‘God, it’s good here….’ Because in a world where most people who are poor can’t choose their food, having a choice of things is a great starter.”

Another historically accurate thing about modern Independence Day barbecues is the reliance on grilled meats. While Americans rely on charcoal, natural gas or propane today, historically, the fuel of choice would have been wood. But cooking over a fire was one thing that differentiated colonial America from Britain.

“You guys have got a lot of wood,” says Meltonville. “[In] the early colonist food writings, that’s what they write back to England. They go, ‘Guys, there’s loads of wood here….’ You can have an oven. You can have a roasting fire. You can afford to roast meat.”

But colonial America would not have gathered around hamburgers and hotdogs. While dishes would obviously have varied, one surprising dish that was enjoyed at the time, but is not likely to be part of a modern July 4 barbecue is curry. According to Meltonville, the first cookbook published in America contained a recipe for chicken curry, which proved to be very popular.

Drinking in Colonial America

Americans drink beer.

Despite the oft repeated story that beer was the safe drink, since it is boiled in its manufacture, colonial Americans drink beer not because it is safe, but because it is delicious.

Although “beer” is a generic term today, historically “beer” has hops in it while “ale” does not. The addition of hops to beer is, in the long history of grain-based alcohol, a relatively new invention. Prior to that, ale was not commonly boiled in its manufacture. So the idea that beer was safe to drink because it was boiled is likely not true.

“What most people don’t realize is for the thousands of years that Europe made ale, you don’t boil it, there’s no boiling process,” said Meltonville. “Recipes that I follow from the 17th and 18th centuries were boiling [beer] with the hops to clean the water….” Boiling was a part of the recipe to create better beer, not to kill microbes.

If making a safe-to-drink beverage was the goal, a beer boil would only need to last a few minutes. But historic beer recipes called for much longer boil times. “Every recipe has its secret hot boil time: one hour, hour and a half, two hours, whatever they do. Two ounces of hops, four ounces, all part of the recipe,” explained Meltonville. “They are boiling it to create that break, to create what we know now breaks the proteins down … clearing the beer.”

Meltonville points out that even in the 18th century, people were fully aware how to dig a well in search of good water. And they knew that good water was necessary for making good beer. Nobody was choosing brackish water to make beer from, relying on a boil to make beer safe. Americans always drank good beer—beer made from good water.

At Genesee Country Village and Museum in Mumford, New York, curators have used detailed notes to reproduce a 1797 brewery which the museum uses from time to time to reproduce beers from that era. The brewery, known as the Grieve’s Brewery, is housed over three floors, with copper and Cyprus vessels in which beer was brewed from barley and corn.

Despite America’s independence from Britain, barley did not grow well in America, so at least some barley continued to be imported from Britain. To reduce reliance on that grain, corn was used in beer in America, along with other native cereals. Today, Rochester, New York’s Rohrbach Brewing Company helps recreate two beers for Genesee Country Village and Museum on their modern brewhouse, though the museum’s recreated brewery is used from time to time.

Stocking Hill Ale is an American wheat ale made with ginger, though lemon was included in the original recipe. And Fat Ox Ale is an American brown ale. Both beers are based on actual recipes “or receipts, they called them back then,” according to Brian Nagle, director of interpretation of Genesee Country Village and Museum, and sometimes brewer on its reproduced brewhouse.

What is missing from the reproduced Grieve’s Brewery at Genessee Country Village and Museum is a distillery. The original Grieve’s Brewery did have a still, which Meltonville says would have been common for breweries at the time. According to Meltonville, that imported barley would have been expensive (and maybe a bit of a secret shame, relying on Britain for ingredients), so brewers would net let it go to waste.

“There’s always a still in the corner of a good size brewery, because … beer goes wrong,” says Meltonville. “The first thing you do is look at it, taste it, and think, ‘Can I fix that?’ And we have these recipes from the 18th century: fixing foxed ale, fixing ropey ale, fixing all these different descriptions of obviously ale that they think doesn’t taste quite right.”

And if a bad beer is beyond fixing, rather than discarding it, it gets distilled into white whiskey. At first, that white whiskey would be sold as medicine to apothecaries. Eventually, it became popular as a drink in its own right. That whiskey was clear. Storage in wooden casks was a matter of practicality, not flavor. But the foundation of modern bourbon has already been laid.

Food and beverage in colonial America were functions of the ingredients available to people in the new world. America’s culinary traditions are no accident. They reflect the agricultural and political climate of the early days of the Great Experiment.

Hoist a beer. Toast your neighbor. Eat some curry. Happy birthday, America.