Revolution in Eating or The Traditions of Christmas

Revolution in Eating: How the Quest for Food Shaped America

Author: James E McWilliams

Sugar, pork, beer, corn, cider, scrapple, and hoppin' John all became staples in the diet of colonial America. The ways Americans cultivated and prepared food and the values they attributed to it played an important role in shaping the identity of the newborn nation. In A Revolution in Eating, James E. McWilliams presents a colorful and spirited tour of culinary attitudes, tastes, and techniques throughout colonial America.

Confronted by strange new animals, plants, and landscapes, settlers in the colonies and West Indies found new ways to produce food. Integrating their British and European tastes with the demands and bounty of the rugged American environment, early Americans developed a range of regional cuisines. From the kitchen tables of typical Puritan families to Iroquois longhouses in the backcountry and slave kitchens on southern plantations, McWilliams portrays the grand variety and inventiveness that characterized colonial cuisine. As colonial America grew, so did its palate, as interactions among European settlers, Native Americans, and African slaves created new dishes and attitudes about food. McWilliams considers how Indian corn, once thought by the colonists as "fit for swine," became a fixture in the colonial diet. He also examines the ways in which African slaves influenced West Indian and American southern cuisine.

While a mania for all things British was a unifying feature of eighteenth-century cuisine, the colonies discovered a national beverage in domestically brewed beer, which came to symbolize solidarity and loyalty to the patriotic cause in the Revolutionary era. The beer and alcohol industry also instigated unprecedented trade amongthe colonies and further integrated colonial habits and tastes. Victory in the American Revolution initiated a "culinary declaration of independence," prompting the antimonarchical habits of simplicity, frugality, and frontier ruggedness to define American cuisine. McWilliams demonstrates that this was a shift not so much in new ingredients or cooking methods, as in the way Americans imbued food and cuisine with values that continue to shape American attitudes to this day.

Publishers Weekly

"[T]he way [colonial] Americans thought about food was integral to the way they thought about politics," McWilliams persuasively argues in this survey of the creation of American cuisine. The Texas State University-San Marcos history professor explores what the colonists ate and why, how that affected their emerging political and cultural values, how their farms and their rights intersected and how "food remained at the core of America's Revolution." At the root of American cuisine, McWilliams finds, is the immeasurable impact of Native American agricultural practices. He explores the effect of the staple crop peculiar to each area of colonial America upon the development of regional foodways, as well as upon their economic and social practices. With remarkable clarity, he delineates the technical aspects of various agricultural tasks, from crop cultivation (sugar cane, rice, tobacco, corn, wheat) to more domestic work (building a kitchen garden, churning butter). The broad range of scholarship, the smooth weaving of political and social history and the full notes and fat bibliography will inform historians, while the lucid style and jaunty tone (the Quakers were "a people who made a virtue of frugality while making frugality more elaborate than anyone could have imagined") make this accessible to all. (July) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

Meticulously researched and packed with fascinating detail, this book provides an excellent account of the culinary development of Colonial America. Positing that "the agrarian values that colonists fought the Revolution to protect and preserve became the very values that Americans would use to frame their new foodways," McWilliams (history, Texas State Univ., San Marcos) reveals how the evolution of distinct and varying processes of the cultivation and preparation of food, the development of relationships with Native Americans, and the presence (or absence) of a slave culture reflected and affected the economic, ethnic, racial, and social development of the English West Indies, New England, the Chesapeake Bay region, the Carolinas, and the Middle Colonies. The extensive use of primary sources captures the immediacy of the Colonists' experiences, both humorous and sobering. McWilliams delivers an eminently readable history of food preparation and consumption in nascent American culture. Highly recommended for academic and larger public libraries.-Courtney Greene, DePaul Univ. Lib., Chicago Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Table of Contents:

	Introduction : getting to the guts of American food	1
1	Adaptability : the bittersweet culinary history of the English West Indies	19
2	Traditionalism : the greatest accomplishment of colonial New England	55
3	Negotiation : living high and low on the hog in the Chesapeake Bay region	89
4	Wilderness : the fruitless search for culinary order in Carolina	131
5	Diversity : refined crudeness in the Middle Colonies	167
6	Consumption : the British invasion	201
7	Intoxication : finding common bonds in an alcoholic empire	241
8	Revolution : a culinary declaration of independence	279

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The Traditions of Christmas

Author: Victoria Magazine Staff

Bring the wondrous charm and spirit of Christmas into your heart as you spend it with those you treasure most. The tips and advice are here: for beautifully decorating your home and tree, making gifts that will delight, and preparing recipes to savor. Evoke the romance of a traditional holiday with imaginative ideas that will enhance your Christmas today.