Baking Rises to a New Level
Let them eat cake!
As ships made their way into various ports along the East Coast of the New World, supplies, tools, and skilled artisans came to shore. While the colonists continued to utilize their new skills and native ingredients, they now had access to sugar, baking dishes, wafer irons, and butter churns (once considered a luxury).
Baking bread went from being a very labor-intensive process to a less time-consuming chore. The colonists’ creativity in mixing the old with the new led to some interesting results. For example, colonists in the South used ground rice and dried pumpkin to make biscuits and potatoes for muffins. Other breadstuff included:
Johnnycakes or journey cakes: cornmeal, boiling water, and salt
Ashcakes: cornmeal, grease, and water baked in cabbage leaves and cooked in the smoldering ashes of a fire
Scratch-backs: hardened corn pudding with a rough, uneven surface
Seedcakes: made with caraway seeds
As sugar and syrups arrived on the docks, desserts finally began to be more than just preserved fruit. Creative cooks produced sweet concoctions that quickly became popular in the taverns and wealthier homes:
Flummery: a cream custard thickened by the gelatin of a calf’s foot and topped with nuts and fruit
Syllabub: cream curdled with lemon, wine, sugar, and a whipped froth topping
Whitspots: bread pudding in pastry
Also popular were cobblers, fruit pies, spice cakes, pound cake, gingerbread, trifles, and beggar’s pudding, which consisted of cut-up stale bread (resourceful!) mixed with nuts, spices, and wine. There was candy too—rock candy, candied lemon peels, and maple-flavored treats.