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About North American Cooking If there is a recurring theme in the history of Americans and their food it is abundance. From the earliest days of the new republic, foreign visitors and immigrants remarked on how well endowed Americans were with regard to food. This was reflected in their stature, which is closely linked to diet. During the American Revolution the average American soldier was much taller than his British foe. Even the poorly fed African slaves in the United States seem to have eaten better than most of their counterparts in Spanish, Portuguese, and French America. Yet the triumph over Britain on the battlefield was not mirrored by independence from British-style cuisine. The British immigrants, like most arrivals from abroad, had tried to import the foods of the homeland to their new abodes in North America. For the most part the environment cooperated, allowing them to reproduce many of the grains, meats, and vegetables that had formed the core of their diets back home. Indeed, at first they had even disdained the Native Americans' maize, which they called Indian corn after the word for staple food in Britain. It was only after maize and the potato, which was native to South America, gained approval back in Britain that they became important parts of the British immigrants' diet as well. For the most part their foods, seasonings, and methods of preparation remained similar to those of the old country throughout the colonial period. Only in the South, where the climate was warmer and African slaves played a major role in food preparation, did significant variations arise, and these were mainly in the form of the seasonings that slaves brought with them from Africa and the West Indies. The main gustatory problem for most Americans in the first years of the Republic was seasonality. About 90 percent of them lived in rural areas, and during the winter and spring, when the earth produced little, they and poorer city dwellers fell back on monotonous diets based on root vegetables, beans, corn or rye breads, and preserved meats. However, a transportation revolution was already beginning as roads and canals pushed into the hinterland. Increasingly, farms that had been largely self-sufficient could sell products for cash, which farmers used to purchase goods and foods they had previously produced themselves. The opening of the Erie Canal in 1825 created a cheap water route from the Midwest to the East Coast. Midwestern wheat then poured into the rest of the country (as well as into foreign markets), bringing markedly lower prices for flour. White bread, which only the better-off had been able to afford on a regular basis, now became commonplace. The nation's cities and towns also enjoyed ample supplies of corn-fattened pork, salted and packed in barrels, that were shipped from growing midwestern centers such as Cincinnati, which proudly called itself Porkopolis. At the same time, cooking over open fires in fireplaces, on spits, or in iron pots was being replaced by cooking on iron stoves. These enabled cooks to have much more control over the amount of heat applied to foods and contributed to the development of more precise and complex methods of cooking. Recipe books that took advantage of these innovations came onto the market, often as part of housekeeping manuals that helped codify middle-class standards of cooking and serving food for insecure women whose husbands' rising incomes were thrusting them into the new middle class. |
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