What Animals Lived In The 13 Colonies

What people ate in colonial America largely depended on where they lived. Due to differences in climate, available natural resource and cultural heritage of the colonists themselves, the daily diet of a New Englander differed greatly from his counterparts in the Middle Colonies—New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Delaware—and even more than and so from those in the South.

Merely ane constant across all of the 13 colonies was that bated from imported appurtenances such equally spices, molasses and rum, people in the pre-Revolutionary War era mostly consumed food they produced themselves. They sowed corn, caught fish, hunted wild game and raised farm animals for meat, every bit well every bit milk to make their own butter and cheese. They planted vegetables in their kitchen gardens, brewed their own beer and pressed their own cider.

Though regional, seasonal and other differences make it hard to generalize most a typical colonial diet, the following seven foods and beverages are a modest sample of what might accept been institute on many colonial tables.

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Indian Corn

A bunch of flint corn.

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With its multicolored white, blue, red and dark-brown hues, flint corn—too known as Indian corn—is i of the oldest varieties of corn. It was a staple nutrient for Native Americans, who essentially saved the earliest colonists from starvation by teaching them how to found the ingather, when to harvest it and how to grind it into meal. Corn became a dietary staple beyond all xiii colonies, with cornmeal used in favorite recipes such as hasty pudding (corn boiled in milk) and johnnycakes, a fortifying and highly portable food similar to pancakes.

READ MORE: 6 Common Jobs in Colonial America

Wild Game (Including Pigeon)

An 1896 drawing of the Passenger Pigeon, which was hunted into extinction.

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Colonial forests were packed with wild game, and turkey, venison, rabbit and duck were staples of the colonists' meat-heavy diets. In addition to these amend-known (by modernistic standards) options, many colonists enjoyed eating passenger pigeons. The birds were incredibly plentiful in colonial times, and their meat was prepared in many ways—including boiled, roasted and baked into pie—similar to the style we use chicken today. Passenger pigeon was such a popular dish, in fact, that the birds eventually went extinct; the last known passenger pigeon died in 1914.

Whorl to Continue

Like many colonial dishes, pigeon pie had British roots, and a recipe was included in Eliza Smith'southward The Compleat Housewife : or Achieved Gentlewoman's Companion, a cookbook originally published in London that became the starting time to be published in the colonies in 1742. The popularity of Smith'south book reflected the dominant influence of British cuisine on the colonial diet. The Compleat Housewife would likely accept been found in whatever well-to-do household in the tardily colonial era, when the mid-mean solar day "dinner" could consist of three courses, with multiple dishes per grade.

"They are eating high-cease British food," says Lavada Nahon, a culinary historian specializing in the Mid-Atlantic region from the 17th-19th centuries. "We're not talking almost mail service-industrial British cuisine here—this is the height of British food."

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Potted Meat

In an era long earlier refrigeration, pop methods of nutrient preservation included drying, salting, smoking and brining, or some combination of these. Some other method used to preserve meat was potting. This involved cooking the meat and packing it tightly into a jar, and then covering information technology with butter, lard or tallow (beef fatty) earlier capping it. Potting kept meat safe for weeks or even months; cooks would and so open up the pot and slice off pieces to serve for a meal.

Pickles

Some other common style of preserving nutrient was pickling, an ancient method that colonists used for everything from meat and fish to fruits and vegetables. A dish of pickled vegetables was a favorite side dish on colonial tables, while beef was ordinarily pickled in vinegar and alkali and preserved in big wooden barrels. Colonial brines were likely flavored with common salt, saltpeter and spices, but they would not have contained garlic, which Nahon says was seen as purely medicinal until the 19th century.

Jumble Cookies

Jumble cookies—sometimes spelled "jumbal"—can be considered the ancestors of modern sugar cookies, though far less sweet. Recipes appeared in cookbooks in England as early equally 1585, and the cookies became a popular staple in the colonies. "Y'all will find recipes for jumble cookies by the thousands," says Nahon; even Martha Washington was said to take her ain. A recipe in The Compleat Housewife calls for egg whites, flour, carbohydrate and caraway seeds mashed into a paste, and Nahon says colonial cooks often flavored their jumble cookies with rosewater, a Eye Eastern import that reflected the vibrant trade and open-minded culture Dutch settlers had established in the Middle Colonies from the start. "There were a variety of foodways hither," says Nahon. "When you say the colonial era, everyone thinks everything is grayness, but that is so non true. We have a lot of richness here."

Pepper Cake

Blackness pepper's antibacterial properties get in a good preservative, and this imported spice took center stage in the pepper cake, a gingerbread-similar loaf flavored with black pepper and molasses and studded with candied fruits. The classic colonial-era recipe for "pepper cakes ye will keep halfe a year" was included in The Book of Cookery , a handwritten manuscript given to Martha Washington on the occasion of her matrimony to her kickoff husband, Daniel Custis, in 1749.

Syllabub

Syllabub is a traditional English dessert made with whipped cream and booze.

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Colonial Americans drank a lot of alcohol, and this pop drink-dessert dating to the 18th century combined sweetened whipped foam with vino or hard cider. The resulting frothy concoction was ofttimes served on special occasions. Amelia Simmons' American Cookery, which in 1796 became the first cookbook past an American to exist published in the The states, included a recipe for syllabub that chosen for the melt to flavor cider with carbohydrate, grate nutmeg into it—and milk a cow directly into the liquor.

Source: https://www.history.com/news/13-colonies-food-drink

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