In June 1647, Joseph Holloway returned home worn out after a long morning surveying the highways to eat dinner with his family. He sat down thankfully in one of the two chairs they possessed while his children gathered around the board balanced on trestles that served them as a table. Even though the Holloways were one of the wealthiest of the 61 families who ten years previously had founded the settlement of Sandwich in New England, they did not own a table. The family’s other chair was occupied by Joseph’s wife Rose, while their eldest children Joseph and Sarah, aged eleven and seven, perched on stools. The two smaller girls, four-year-old Mary and three-year-old Experience, had tree stumps to sit on, and Hopestill the baby was passed around from lap to lap.1
Rose had risen early that morning to bake the mixed wheat and cornmeal loaf that she now placed before them. The English preferred unadulterated wheat bread, but even at home wheat flour often had to be eked out with handfuls of barley or rye flour. For New Englanders a wheat loaf was a particular luxury. Joseph grew wheat on about a quarter of his cultivated land, but the crop did not generally do well in this part of America. The harsh winters killed the winter wheat and the spring varieties were afflicted by wheat blast, a form of rust that left the apparently flourishing plant with empty and shrivelled ears. Maize was the only reliable source of grain, and Joseph planted at least five acres with Indian corn.2
Fearful that in America’s strange climate they would degenerate to the savage state of the Native Americans, the English settlers clung to bread as the food of the civilised. Although cornmeal does not lend itself to bread-making – it lacks the gluten that gives wheat bread its texture – they persisted in using it as they would wheat flour to make loaves. Cornmeal mixed with water and beaten to a batter could be shaped in a wooden dish or slowly ladled, layer after layer, onto a bed of oak or cabbage leaves on the floor of a hot oven to make thick cake-like loaves.3 Cornmeal bread was most successful when the meal was mixed with rye flour. Of all the European grains, rye did the best in the foreign climate, and loaves of ‘ryeaninjun’ were the usual staple fare of New Englanders.
Next to the loaf was a large, round hard cheese and a little pot of butter. Joseph’s 19 cattle were good milkers, and while most New Englanders made a fairly rudimentary soft cheese from their surplus milk, the well-off Holloways owned two cheese vats and a cheese press that enabled them to produce English-style hard cheeses. Their store also contained salt pork, salt beef and a hogshead of malt.4
New England’s first settlers may not have wished to replicate their homeland’s religious culture, but they certainly aimed to replicate its cookery. Bread, milk, butter, cheese, beef and a good mug of beer were the staples of the seventeenth-century English diet.5 In all but the cornmeal in the bread, the Holloways’ dinner appeared to resemble the food of England’s middling farmers. On closer inspection, however, the dish of salt beef yielded telltale signs that the family were sitting down to eat in America rather than England. Rose had been simmering the beef in a pot hung over the fire since early that morning. An English cook would have thrown in a handful of dried peas, turnips or carrots, some parsley or thyme – whatever vegetables and herbs she had to hand in her garden – to make a mess of pottage. But in Joseph’s fields, rather than neat rows of carrots and patches of parsley, beans and squash straggled around the maize plants.6 Lima beans, kernels of maize and American squash took the place of English vegetables in the Holloways’ beef stew, transforming it into the Native American one-pot dish known as succotash, the English pronunciation of the Narragansett Indian sukquttahash.7 Despite the fact that they clung on to Old World food habits, once the settlers began substituting English with American foodstuffs, their dishes began to look uncomfortably similar to those of the supposedly savage Native Americans.8
Joseph Holloway had sailed to Massachusetts on the Elizabeth and Ann in 1635, aged 30. Rose, his wife of seven years, may have joined him later, as she is not on the ship’s passenger list.9 The Holloways were part of the Great Migration of 14,000 English Puritans who left England in the 1630s. The first settlements on the North American continent were Roanoke, established in 1585 using funds provided by Walter Raleigh and his associates; and Sagadahoc in 1606, but they both failed.10 The one successful early venture was Jamestown, established in the Chesapeake Bay in 1607 and funded by the Virginia Company. The early backers of American plantations hoped to rival Spain’s South American possessions by finding rich deposits of gold or silver. When these did not materialise, the investors focused on creating permanent English settlements to act as alternative providers of a range of cash crops such as hemp and flax, silk and indigo, timber, pitch and tar, which England currently sourced from Europe, Africa and Asia.11
After several hungry years teetering on the edge of starvation and a long and brutal conflict with the indigenous Powhatan tribe, the settlers in the Chesapeake Bay established the tobacco-producing colony of Virginia.12 In 1620, a group of Puritan dissenters joined forces with a band of emigrants and set sail from England to join the thousand or so Virginians. Only one of their two ships, the Mayflower, made it to America, landing 200 miles north-east of the Chesapeake. Here the 102 surviving members of the expedition founded Plymouth and the separate colony of New England.13 The venture was given a boost nine years later, when a group of London merchants founded the Massachusetts Bay Company and appointed the Suffolk lawyer John Winthrop to take charge of a new emigration drive. His son Henry made it home from his sugar-planting venture in Barbados just in time to set sail in April 1630 with his father in the fleet carrying 700 emigrants that landed at Cape Ann in June. In the following decade, about a thousand emigrants a year swelled the numbers of this new colony, among them Joseph and Rose Holloway.14
Religion is usually portrayed as the main factor motivating New England’s colonists to uproot and make the perilous journey across the Atlantic. It certainly galvanised the Puritans, who were the vocal leaders of the settlement. They felt increasingly uncomfortable in Charles I’s England, where Catholicism was once again in favour.15 Roger Clap, a servant in a God-fearing household in Devon, certainly believed that divine providence had ‘put it into my heart to incline to live abroad’, though he had ‘never so much as heard of New England’ until a local clergyman spoke of his intention to emigrate.16 He may have thanked God for giving him the opportunity, but the limited prospects for a poor young man in England must have been what made emigration appealing. The social upheaval of seventeenth-century England rather than a religious calling motivated the majority of those crossing the Atlantic.17 As smallholdings and common lands were amalgamated into enclosed estates, the smallest and poorest tenant farmers were evicted. As one set of impoverished farmers were pushed off the land, others watched anxiously, fearing that they might be the next to slip into decline. The middling classes in the south-east who depended on the textile trade were already hard hit by the decline in the popularity of England’s woollen stuffs, and were now squeezed by rising poor rates, taxes on the propertied to provide poor relief for the needy and destitute of the parish. The depressing economic climate often combined with a spiritual or financial personal crisis to push middling husbandmen into the decision to leave. These wealthier migrants, who could afford to pay their own passages, chose New England rather than Virginia as their destination.18
They were attracted to New England as a place where they might realise the dream of becoming respectable and independent yeomen.19 During the Commonwealth, agricultural reformers promoted the view that a nation’s prosperity was best ensured by the dispersal of land into the hands of sturdy yeomen.20 As enclosure had concentrated land in the hands of the wealthy, this was a difficult ideal to fulfil at home, but in New England emigrants hoped to realise a version of the utopian commonwealth where ‘the whole people be landlords’, as depicted in the 1656 tract Oceana by the republican author James Harrington.21 New towns proliferated and each immigrant family was allocated its own farm. The 25 founders of the town of Taunton thanked God for bringing them ‘to this place, and settling of us, on lands of our own, bought with our money … for a possession for ourselves and for our posterity after us’.22 When the Holloways and their neighbours established nearby Sandwich, they were motivated by the same drive: to secure their own land as the means of acquiring an independent livelihood.
What the New England settlers stubbornly refused to recognise was that they were stealing other people’s land. The first band of settlers did not happen across a pristine wilderness but a landscape that had been managed for centuries by the Native Americans. Indeed, it was the Patuxet people who had made the clearings in the forest where the initial band of settlers planted their first crops. Before these bore fruit, the colonists survived only because they discovered stores of maize buried by the Native Americans before they were wiped out by epidemics of European diseases introduced by the West Countrymen who had tried to found the settlement of Sagadahoc 14 years earlier.23 There were still plenty of Native Americans in the vicinity of Massachusetts Bay, but John Winthrop applied the same reasoning that the English used to justify their colonisation of Ireland, arguing that because they ‘inclose noe Land, neither have they any setled habytation, nor any tame Cattle to improve the Land by’, they had not earned the right to own the land.24 The English settlers in America were, he argued, performing a Christian duty by taming the American wilderness. Winthrop, who had cousins with a farm on the Munster Plantation and had visited Ireland with a view to settling there in 1621, believed that just as plantation was the instrument that would eventually redeem Ireland, so English yeomen were bringing civilisation to America.25 The Native Americans were cast as versions of the barbarous Irish, who had forfeited their right to the country by their failure to properly order the landscape and realise its potential.26 The spirit of sharing embodied in the first Thanksgiving meal, when Wampanoag Indians celebrated the harvest with the Plymouth settlers in the autumn of 1621, was soon betrayed as any Indian group that opposed English intrusion onto their land was violently subjugated.
Ideas about land ownership, farming and the right and proper way for a society to acquire its food were central to the ideology of Britain’s First Empire. Irish pastoralism was rejected as the practice of barbarians and the English refused to recognise Native American clearings in the forest as farms. But when New England’s settlers tried to impose English-style agriculture on American soil, they ran up against a series of obstacles that forced them to compromise their ideals. Organised as it was around small family farms, New England was chronically short of labour. This prevented the first settlers from taking full advantage of the very thing they had come to America for: the abundant land. With only the assistance of their wives and children, they struggled to clear the dense forest and transform it into productive fields. Digging out the tree stumps from newly cleared land to create neatly ploughed fields suitable for European grains was back-breaking and time-consuming. And the endeavour was barely worthwhile, as rust decimated the wheat crops and even the yields of rye and peas were often disappointing. The task was overwhelming, yet the need for food pressing.27
In his memoir, Roger Clap recalled that ‘many a time, if I could have filled my belly though with mean victuals, it would have been sweet unto me’.28 Bread and meat were ‘very scarce’ and the settlers reluctantly relied on seafood such as clams and mussels, although they despised them as food fit only for the poor and desperate as they were exhausting and unpleasant to collect from the mud along the seashore.29 Having condemned the Native Americans as lazy, the English were forced to adopt their methods of cultivation and crops, which produced as much food as possible in return for the least effort.30 High-yielding maize could be planted around rotting tree stumps on freshly cleared land, in soil that had been hoed rather than ploughed, and squash and beans could be grown in among the maize plants.31 Indeed, by 1700, most New England farmers had given up the struggle to grow wheat. Like Joseph Holloway, they were obliged to plant at least half their cultivated land with reliable native crops in straggling fields dotted with tree stumps so that they looked every bit as unkempt as the Native American gardens upon which they poured scorn.32
The early settlers worried a great deal about eating strange and unfamiliar foods and initially regarded maize as suitable only as animal fodder. But they had little choice and learned to appreciate it. They made it into loaves like the bread Rose Holloway baked for her family. They also boiled cornmeal in a cloth to make an American version of an English pudding. Mixed with molasses or maple syrup, perhaps some eggs, butter and a few spices, cornmeal was serendipitously well suited to this English technique. And if it was treated as if it were oatmeal, cornflour could be stirred into hot water to make a stiff polenta-like porridge or hasty pudding, eaten with milk or molasses.33 Clap remembered that in the early days, ‘when I could have meal and water and salt boiled together, it was so good, who could wish for better?’34 From the Native Americans they learned how to beat cooked maize into a powder and then mix it into a thick batter with water and bake it on a flat stone or a hoe over the fire to make flat breads known variously as johnny or journey cake, spoon bread, hoe cake or pone. Eventually, New Englanders identified so strongly with their corn breads, journey cakes, puddings and porridges, and their succotash stews, renamed ‘boiled dinners’, that their Native American origins were forgotten; they were redefined as plain, unassuming foods eminently suited to the palate of the plain, honest American.35 By the time they were served at a banquet to celebrate the first Plymouth Forefathers’ Day in 1869, they had been thoroughly recast as foods to be proud of rather than slightly shameful compromises born out of necessity.36
The early colonists learned how to prepare maize from the Native Americans. The kernels were first dried and then boiled in an alkaline lye made with water and wood ash. This loosened the hulls from the kernels to produce hominy.37 The hominy could then be ground into cornmeal. Boiling the kernels in lye had the additional advantage of breaking down the niacin within the maize into a digestible form. Those whose diets rely on cornmeal made with maize that has not undergone this process of nixtamalisation risk developing the vitamin deficiency disease of pellagra.
A NICE INDIAN PUDDING
No. 1. Three pints scalded milk, 7 spoons fine Indian meal, stir well together while hot, let stand till cooled; add 7 eggs, half pound raisin, 4 ounces butter, spice and sugar, bake one and an half hour.
No. 2. Three pints scalded milk to one pint meal salted; cool, add 2 eggs, 4 ounces butter, sugar or molasses and spice, it will require two and an half hour baking.
No. 3. Salt a pint meal, wet with one quart of milk, sweeten and put into a strong cloth, brass or bell metal vessel, stone or earthen pot, secure from wet and boil 12 hours.
JOHNNY CAKE OR HOE CAKE
Scald 1 pint of milk and put to 3 pints of Indian meal, and half pint flower – bake before the fire. Or scald with milk, two thirds of the Indian meal, or wet two thirds with boiling water, add salt, molasses and shortening, work up with cold water pretty stiff, and bake as above.38
Joseph Holloway had fenced in about 10 acres of his land in order to grow crops and then released his herd of cattle to forage on his remaining 20 acres of unfenced meadow, marsh and woodland.39 Having failed to bring most of their cultivated fields under the plough, the settlers did not even attempt to properly control their cattle, allowing the animals to lumber around the countryside, trampling and eating any Native American gardens they came across and causing great resentment.40 Indeed, this free-range form of animal husbandry developed into a mode of conquest.41 More cattle were imported into the colony than new settlers, and as the herds required more land to sustain them, the settlers moved into neighbouring areas, founding townships and giving rise to new colonies – Maryland, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, New Haven – driving the Native Americans out of their territories and consolidating the European hold on America.42 By adopting this mode of farming, the settlers hardly lived up to the claim that they were improving the land.
The grandiose plans to ‘improve’ America may not have been realised, but New England did offer humble men like Roger Clap and Joseph Holloway the opportunity to realise the dream of becoming prosperous and independent yeomen. Roger married four years after arriving in the colony and he and his wife had 14 children. He joined the militia and served as the representative for Dorchester in the colonial assembly. When Joseph Holloway died at the age of 42, he owned a farm of 30 acres, 19 cattle and two horses. He had served as a constable and member of the local militia and in 1647 had been appointed surveyor of the town’s highways. He slept in a feather bed, drank his beer from a pewter vessel and ate a nourishing and plentiful diet.43 While in England rural labourers, paid ever lower wages and deprived of their ability to keep cows by enclosures, were losing their access to meat and dairy products, the American settlers had managed to secure for themselves an almost ideal English diet rich in beef, milk, butter and cheese. Indeed, by the end of the seventeenth century, colonial Americans were probably the best-fed people on the planet. A traveller in Pennsylvania in the 1750s noted that ‘even in the humblest or poorest houses, no meals are served without a meat course; and no one eats bread without butter or cheese’.44 The superiority of American nutrition was revealed by the height of American soldiers during the War of Independence, when they were on average 3.5 inches taller than their British counterparts.45
Joseph Holloway’s estate was valued at over £200. This was substantially more than the average New Englander was worth. It is unlikely that he achieved his wealth solely by farming. In the West Country he had worked as a millwright, and he probably plied his trade in the new country, where millwrights were in demand to build saw and water mills to process lumber and grind corn.46 Although he lived as a yeoman, Joseph supported himself by his industry. In the same way, New England prided itself on its self-sufficiency but depended on trade for its prosperity. By 1700, the colony’s inhabitants felt that they had succeeded in achieving their forefathers’ dream of living independently on the land.47 They grew enough corn, rye and oats to supply their wants for bread-making. The introduction of clover and English meadow grasses meant that the farmers were able to make enough hay to overwinter their cattle. Butter, cheese and beef were plentiful and kitchen gardens supplied a sufficient bounty of vegetables to lay up a store to see them through the winter.48 But if they were self-sufficient in staple foods, New Englanders were voracious consumers of English manufactured goods, ranging from practical equipment such as farm implements to frivolities like parrot cages.49 Early American colonial homes were sparsely furnished; even the better off often only possessed a cupboard, a chest and a few cooking implements. At night families ‘pigged’ together on old blankets on the floor.50 But as they became more affluent, they bought feather beds, pewter plates, silver spoons and chairs.51 In the old country a farmer might wear a velvet coat and drink from a pewter goblet, but his reputation rested on the state of his land and livestock and his relationships with his neighbours.52 In the new world of untidy fields and semi-wild cattle, possessions became important markers of gentility. In order to buy all these goods, New Englanders needed to generate an income.
The colony of family farms had little to sell other than surplus food supplies, mainly barrels of salt beef. These they sold to the increasingly prosperous West Indian sugar islands. But New England’s salt beef was considered ‘coarse, black, and much inferior to the Irish’. An Antiguan planter complained to his supplier that the beef he had sent him ‘does by no means ansr yr kind intention of regailing our palates; for if it be sound, it be too hard & salt; but generally it stinks’.53 Still, although for the time being Ireland remained the West Indies’ main supplier, salt beef became the second most valuable of all New England’s exports. Its prime export, however, was salt fish. In the 1640s, the New England fishery boomed, benefiting from the disruption of the Newfoundland trade when the English Civil War prevented many West Country fishermen from making their annual migration. New England now joined the Atlantic triangle of trade, sending its best-quality product to southern Europe and the wine islands and over 3,500 barrels of second-rate fish a year to Jamaica to feed the African slaves on the island’s newly established sugar plantations.54
It was ironic that the commodity that New England relied upon to balance its financial books was fish. The colony’s coastal fishing communities were the epitome of everything the settlers had rejected when they emigrated. The fishermen were a motley selection of men who happened to have washed up on New England’s shores and decided to settle. Religion was of little interest to them and they did not share the Puritan values of many of the settlers. The farmers regarded the fishing villages as ungodly centres of iniquity and drunkenness, rough and ready outposts that disrupted the harmony of New England’s properly ordered agricultural society.55 But they generated 35 per cent of New England’s export income.56
The provisions trade spawned a shipbuilding industry. As the farmers cleared their land, they produced plentiful quantities of timber, and by the end of the seventeenth century, Boston had 15 shipyards, making it the Empire’s second shipbuilding centre after London. A thriving community of shipwrights, artisans, master mariners and merchants emerged in New England’s towns. By 1700, the freight charges for carrying goods on American vessels probably earned New England more than its exports of provisions.57 Trade with the West Indies dominated, and New England developed in symbiosis with the sugar islands. The two economies were held together by a dense web of trading links, which are exemplified by the business dealings of the Rhode Island merchant Peleg Sandford.
The son of the founder of New England’s Portsmouth colony, Sandford travelled to Barbados in the early 1650s to work as an agent for a Rhode Island-based merchant. Having learned the business, in 1666 he returned to Rhode Island, where he set himself up as an independent trader in Newport. His two brothers, William and Elisha, remained in Barbados to act as his agents. Sandford imported English dry goods such as nails, knives, kettles, pistols and hardware and sold them in his store. With the profits he bought locally produced timber, salt meat, dried peas and butter to send to his brothers in Barbados. Elisha and William sold the American provisions and in turn bought sugar to ship to London to pay for the purchase of yet more English dry goods. They also sent sugar, rum and molasses directly from Barbados to New England. By the time Sandford was made governor of Rhode Island in 1680, more than half the ships arriving and leaving Boston harbour were engaged in trade with the Caribbean, which was becoming the trading hub of the Atlantic Empire.58
New England’s first settlers sought to establish a society where the middling farmer could enjoy his freedom and independence. Their aim was to secure for themselves a way of life that was becoming increasingly precarious in England.59 Out of this grew a powerful ideology celebrating the yeoman farmer and idealising the family farm. J. Hector St John Crèvecoeur, the son of a French immigrant and a gentleman farmer in the Hudson valley, expressed this idea in 1770 when he wrote that ‘this formerly rude soil has been converted by my father into a pleasant farm and in return, it has established all our rights; on it is founded our rank, our freedom, our power as citizens’.60 After American independence it became a central tenet of American politics that it was the role of government to protect the citizen’s right to live an independent and self-sufficient life on a farmstead.61 This way of thinking still permeates American republicanism today.
At the heart of this ideology, however, lay a tangle of contradictions. Even though New England owed much of its prosperity to fishermen and cattle breeders, fishing and livestock farming were regarded as secondary and far less noble occupations. Cornbread and boiled dinners were interpreted as the wholesome foods of the family farm, and yet these dishes derived from the farming and food practices of the Native Americans. And while New England’s family farms were presented as free of the taint of slave labour, the market for their timber, shingles, salt beef and fish, corn, horses and cattle was the West Indies, where slave labour produced the sugar, molasses and rum that the plantations exchanged for these goods. New England and the West Indies formed a mutually sustaining whole, in which the prosperity of the American yeoman depended on the labour of the West African slave.62