Colonial Cooks Stir a Rich Mix

European settlers adapt Old World recipes to American produce, grain, meat and fish

By Alice Ross | Staff Writer

They carried their Englishness over the Atlantic and dreamed of re-creating the best of England in the New World. They brought the things they knew -- their religion, their language, a technology that included essential iron and brass cooking equipment, and, of course, their beloved recipes.

Although today it is hard to imagine, the English settlers of 17th- and 18th-Century Long Island enjoyed a sumptuous and wholesome table, characterized by the roasts, pies and puddings that set their table apart from other cuisines of the day. Those with means found a rich base of ingredients: world-class beef, game and seafood, fine kitchen garden and dairy products, various orchard fruits and berries, substantial wheat breads, ciders and ales, and the exotic seasonings of Far Eastern colonies.

Emigrants make do with what is at hand. Wheat, for example, was not easy to grow, so good sense dictated substitutions of native corn, attractive for its easy agriculture, nutrition and pleasing flavor. Settlers cast the new Indian staples of corn, beans, pumpkins and squash into their own forms. Indian cornbreads (dumplings, ash-baked cakes or pan-baked flatbreads) were transformed with European products -- yeast (and ultimately chemical leavenings), milk, eggs, fats and grains -- to resemble Old World breads. In the same ways, local pumpkin, squash and even clams made their way into traditional puddings and pie fillings. Beans replaced English pease (dried field peas) in soups, porridges and baked dishes. And quahogs (American hard-shelled clams) replaced fish in the fish-milk stews of coastal England and France to become New England chowder.

The Dutch on Long Island did much the same. They, too, grew New World foods alongside those from home, stored cranberries and pumpkins in root cellars chock-a-block with European cabbages, carrots, turnips, parsnips, and onions, and dished them up together in Old World ways. Thus the American citron, a species of watermelon characterized by a great deal of rind particularly suited to candying, replaced expensive imported candied citron in Dutch ``oley koeks,'' fried cakes or doughnuts. And cornmeal mushes often replaced more traditional buckwheat gruels.

This true melting pot, a combination of the best foods of two continents, spawned the colonial Long Island diet. Sometimes the wealth of flavors was enhanced by a shifting balance between luxuries and staples. For example, to the envy of less fortunate relatives at home, our ordinary farming folk enjoyed a great abundance of domesticated animals, wild game and fish; what with fresh butcherings and the preserved meats of smokehouses and brine kegs, they got to eat meat three times a day, and feasted on oysters at will. And when all else failed, there were salt cod and clams.

One English visitor noted that meats were eaten in larger quantities than vegetables. It would seem that assorted systems for holding hearth spits, long-legged spiders (frying pans), tin reflecting ovens, ceramic or iron stew pots and forged grid irons (broilers) were never idle.

Wood was another blessing. Colonial Long Island forests provided seemingly endless supplies of cordwood, enabling each family to fuel both its hearth and private bake oven. This was a distinct departure from Europe's commercial bakeries and trade-system control of grains and fuels. Indeed, most European women did not own a brick oven and had limited baking skills. However, once in the colonies, and with frontiers outpacing urban bakeries, American women tapped their own developing wheat and rye fields and wood lots. Easy access to inexpensive molasses from the Caribbean sugar mills encouraged the trend toward increased sweetening. Early Long Island recipe collections and diaries frequently included such baked goods as bread or ``soft'' and ``hard molasses cakes'' (cake and cookies), reflecting women's new cooking responsibilities and their growing international reputation as a nation of bakers.

Food historian Alice Ross' recent doctoral dissertation was about women, work and cookery in Suffolk County before 1920.