As George Francis Dow said in the preface to his 1935 book Every Day Life in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, the details about colonial life are sketchy, “For why keep an exact record of doings with which every one is familiar? It follows that many of the every day happenings, the manners and customs of daily life—much of the intimate detail of existence in the Colony, in the seventeenth century, have been lost forever.”
When English settlers arrived on the Mayflower in 1620 to establish Plymouth Colony in Massachusetts, they had very little, and that little was what they brought with them on the ship. When they arrived, there was nowhere to purchase food or goods. According to Dow, Governor Winthrop brought a fork to Massachusetts in 1630, which is believed to be the only table fork in the earliest days of the settlements. Table manners at the time didn’t demand that one properly use one’s fork, you see, as people placed the food in their mouths with a knife or their fingers. According to James E. McWilliams, “…America in the seventeenth century was primitive. It generally lacked shops and other commercial outlets for food and drink. It did not have an economic infrastructure comparable to England’s intricate networks of exchange.” Or forks.
I’ve been interested in the history of the Massachusetts Bay Colony since I began researching Her Dear & Loving Husband in 2009. I wrote about food and cooking in the Massachusetts Bay Colony here and here. A few years ago, I visited Salem, Massachusetts, and while I was there I visited Pioneer Village, a living history museum representing Salem in 1630. Located near Forest River Park, with a beautiful view of the bay, the village has examples of various types of early colonial architecture such as dugouts, wigwams, thatched-roof cottages, and the Governor’s Faire House. There are also gardens for medicines and food. When I visited, I took the tour with a wonderful docent in period costume who answered my questions with great kindness.
As the seventeenth century progressed, so did the availability of kitchen items. The heart of the kitchen then was the hearth, which was so large that it took up an entire wall. Ceilings were low in those days, about six or seven feet high, and windows were small, both to conserve heat. The windows were fitted with diamond-shaped panes of leaded glass or oiled parchment. Because of the small windows and low ceilings, the inside of the kitchen and the house itself was dark, and light came from the fire roaring in the hearth, tallow candles (which didn’t give off the best odor), or iron rushlight holders.
By the middle of the 17th century, most kitchens had the basics required for open hearth cooking: brass kettles, iron spits, cast-iron cauldrons, three-legged pipkins (which sat on the hot coals), long-handled tuning forks, and ash shovels. Inside the huge fireplace were pots and kettles. According to Dow, “The larger kettles hanging in the fireplace, were of brass and copper and some of them were of prodigious size. Hot water was always to be had and these kettles also served for the daily cooking, the cheese-making, soap-boiling, and candle-dipping.” According to Keith Stavely and Kathleen Fitzgerald, the brick oven was a feature of every chimney: “To reach it the housewife must stoop below the oaken lintel and stand inside the fireplace, taking care that her woolen skirts did not come near the flames. To heat it for a baking, a fire was built inside, usually with specially prepared pine or birch wood that had been split and seasoned out of doors for a short time and then housed. The fire and ashes were then taken out by means of a peel—a long-handled, flat-bladed shovel made for the purpose—and when dusted out with a broom made of hemlock twigs it was ready for the brown bread, beans, peas, Indian pudding, pies, and rye drop cakes which were made with rye meal, eggs and milk and baked directly on the bricks in the bottom of the oven.”
If you want to see hearth cooking in action, be sure to watch Justine on Early American. She’s an expert in authentic hearth cooking, and it really is amazing to see how difficult cooking was in the past. I’ve followed her for a few years now, and she shares recipes that look just as appetizing today. The channel is a great lesson in early American cooking. Townsends is another great resource on YouTube with examples of 18th century American cooking.
Traditionally, New England food consisted of cornmeal, boiled meats, vegetables, and stews. Every well-equipped household had spits for roasting, and many had gridirons. The main diet of the average family was hasty pudding, which was a cornmeal mush with milk, sometimes with boiled meat or fish, served on a large pewter platter and surrounded by boiled vegetables (Dow).
Tableware at the time was basic, with redware pottery, wooden trenchers (used as plates), wooden spoons, pewter tankards for cider or beer, and braided rye-straw baskets. Furnishings were also simple, with a long trestle dining table and simple bench seats, ladder-back chairs with rush seats near the fire, and a bench. For food preparation, most kitchens had a butter churn, mortar and pestle, wooden wash tubs, redware pottery bowls for mixing, and a work table used for kneading cornmeal, curing pork with salt, or baking.
If you were to walk into a kitchen in the Massachusetts Bay Colony in the middle of the seventeenth century, you’d be likely to notice the scent of the woodsmoke of oak and pine, rendered animal fat, drying herbs hanging from the ceiling joists (thyme, sage, mint), salt pork, tallow, and apple cider. You’d also notice the constant crackling of logs, the hiss of fat dripping into coals, the rhythmic thud of a butter churn or mortar, and the creak of timber in the winds blowing off the Atlantic. The kitchen would be dark, with dim, flickering light contrasting with deep shadows in the corners. Bunches of dried Indian corn, onions, apples, and medicinal herbs would hang from the overhead rafters to cure, out of reach of children (and rodents).
Colonial kitchens were simple compared to what these early colonists left behind in England. McWilliams notes that, despite sharing similar levels of wealth with families in England, the colonists lived much more primitively. The general lack of dining and cooking implements, especially during the earliest settlements of the seventeenth century, in addition to the minimal cooking space available to store those goods, helped foster the regional culinary distinctions that defined Colonial America. Simplicity, in food preparation as well as food consumption, enhanced regional differences because it necessitated a habit of figuring out ways to adapt to the ingredients and tools available in New England. The lack of cooking utensils and cookware, except perhaps one single pot, meant that what colonists tossed into that pot reflected what was available in their backyard, the surrounding woods, and the local market (if there was one).
According to McWilliams, “This situation began to change by the middle of the eighteenth century, when the rugged simplicity of the seventeenth-century kitchen gave way to more elaborate cooking arrangements. The change was gradual, but it was real, and it had a pivotal impact on the state of American cooking.”
By the late seventeenth century, things improved somewhat for the colonists since they had more to work with as far as utensils, cookware, and ingredients. When I do my Thanksgiving cooking this year with my modern stove, with food kept fresh in my modern refrigerator, using my modern utensils, I’ll have something else to be grateful for.
Sources
Dow, George Francis. Every Day Life in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. BZ Editores. Kindle Edition.
McWilliams, James E. A Revolution in Eating: How the Quest for Food Shaped America (Arts and Traditions of the Table Perspectives on Culinary History) (pp. 294-295). Columbia University Press. Kindle Edition.
Stavely, Keith; Fitzgerald, Kathleen. America’s Founding Food: The Story of New England Cooking (p. 66). The University of North Carolina Press. Kindle Edition.