I’m not a picky eater; I don’t like to eat organs (I’m looking at you, liver), blood, and guts (no offal for me, thankyouverymuch), but I’m pretty game to try most “normal” cuisine.
But, I worry that if I ever get a chance to travel in time back to the American Revolution (say, in and around New York, Boston, and Philadelphia), I may have to pack along some beef jerky, since I may not be able to digest the local cuisine well. I’d hate to waste such an interesting trip stuck at the outhouse.
I assume that water is definitely out (some form of Montezumas’ revenge), and I should stick with beer. But what about the food? Will it give me digestive problems, since it’s probably not stored, cleaned, or prepared in ways I’m accustomed? Will I find it exceedingly bland, since there is a dearth of the spices I’m used to? Or, since it is invariably fresh and homemade, will I discover that food used to be really good, we are really missing out, and you just have to try the Slave Pudding when you are at Monticello.
The water could be fine. No shortage of safe wells and springs. Though as you posit a city beer and ales would be safer. Another fun alternative would be ginger beer.
Food will be mixed and very seasonal. But hey, lots of seafood would be very inexpensive at the time as stocks were full and lobster and many other delicacies of today were not yet delicacies. Expect your bread to be gritty in this time. Meats need to be fresh or salted. I have a crappy stomach and would probably be in trouble if I had to spend much time in 1780 but I think anyone with a good stomach would do fine. I would be more worried about ailments, especially smallpox.
Colonial America in and around the bigger cities wasn’t that primitive in terms of cuisine and drink. White and black settlers had already been in the U.S. for about 150 years at that point and built of plenty of infrastructure and culinary traditions often based around British cuisine (with many African influences in the South) adapted to local ingredients and whatever could be shipped in from Europe and the Caribbean. They had hotels, restaurants and taverns even in the smaller towns by that point. These aren’t the Pilgrims we are talking about.
Some of the dishes like baked beans, roasts and some desserts are still known today and they wouldn’t cause stomach problems for any normal person. The biggest problems would be that you may find some of it a little too bland and only certain types of vegetables could be stored over the long New England winter but the same thing could be said all the way in the 20th century as well.
There are some establishments in the Boston area that serve Colonial era meals that are as faithful to the period as possible. Below are links to many Colonial era recipes. Some of them are still served the same way today (boiled lobster with butter for examples) while others may have been modified or fallen out of style but are still prepared in the same basic form.
Wasn’t a big reason spices were so important back then was because the meat was usually rotting by the time people ate it and the spices covered the taste? If so, was that problem fixed by the 18th century?
I think people used to eat a lot more birds than we do nowadays. One reason passenger pigeons were hunted to extinction was for their meat.
Meat that wasn’t eaten fresh was dried, smoked, and salted. The final product would resemble a big chunk of salt-encrusted jerky. The meat had to be washed and soaked for several hours before it could be eaten.
Perhaps so at the time of the American Revolution. But if you go back just a few years earlier, say just before the Boston Tea Party, spices might have been more plentiful.
Food was abundant. Plenty of meat including horse. Most fresh meat would have been incorporated in stews and soups, and the organ meat would have been included. Plenty of other meat would be smoked, dried, or salted, in whole or sausage form. I do recall a reference to 2 inch thick beef steaks, served at a Philadelphia restaurant I think. Most people wouldn’t eat that much meat since it was expensive, the stews and soups were probably heavy with vegetables. Seafood would also be plentiful since most of the population wasn’t far from Atlantic, and it would have been inexpensive.
Some spices may have been expensive, locally grown seasonings were probably more common. Lard would have been used heavily. There would be a lot of pickled vegetables , fruit preserves, and potted meat also. Without refrigeration these were common means of preserving food.
That could be the case in certain times and places but it wasn’t a general rule. I believe you are thinking more about the Middle Ages and the very early Colonial period (1600’s). By the time of the American Revolution, many American cities were very prosperous in general at least for the period. Many if not most of the people that lived outside of the cities either lived on working farms or had direct access to them through trade. That allowed ready access to fresh food although it was highly seasonal, very expensive in today’s terms and very labor intensive but the flip side was that human labor to prepare it was also extremely cheap for those of any means.
Life was hard in general for much of the population but they generally weren’t starving and many ate quite well during good crop years and passably during bad ones. Again, most people were not truly poor relatively speaking or especially primitive at the time of the American Revolution. There are still more currently inhabited pre-Revolutionary War houses in New England than you can count and most of them are rather large even in today’s terms . They generally have large kitchens, multiple fireplaces sometimes with cooking hooks and eating facilities to accommodate large families. The only things that have to be added to make them modern houses is plumbing and electricity which isn’t as hard as it sounds. I owned one built circa 1760 and still mostly original including its original hand-dug wells from the Colonial period and they still have potable water.The family that built it and used the property as a working farm wasn’t hurting for anything except when diseases came around to kill many of them off yet again.
It isn’t a straight line to prosperity especially when it comes to food when you look at American history. Later pre-Colonial times on the East Coast were fairly prosperous which is a big reason the early Americans thought that they could rebel and get away with it.
There are lots of inventions and developments that made the food supply more affordable and stable over time but most of the big ones like refrigeration didn’t become common until well into the 20th century. The basic practices of sustenance farming were mostly the same in 1790 as they were in 1890 or even the early 20th century for most farmers. They had to run a farm-to-table operation in order to survive during a time when refrigeration was mostly non-existent and transportation lines were still rather short. During that long period, there were times when abundant fresh food, especially fresh meat, became a luxury for many people but it wasn’t common for people to eat meat that was literally spoiled.
People of means almost always had access to whatever they wanted within reason especially in the larger cities and they had good cooks then just as they do today. For example, New Orleans was a very wealthy city in the 1700’s and received an influx on top chefs from France fleeing the French Revolution. They developed unique cooking styles based on the new ingredients that were available that are still world famous today. The Cajuns and Creoles did something similar. Granted, Louisiana wasn’t part of the U.S at the time but the basic idea still holds unless you want to make the (very reasonable) argument that French versus British cooking isn’t a fair fight no matter what the year.
In summary, yes, you could find some really fresh, good food in 1780 if you had the money to pay for it including really good New England seafood to complicated Louisiana-French dishes to early forms of North Carolina BBQ if you knew where to look.
A lot of people lose their sense of timescale when they talk about things that they perceived as happening a really long time ago. As a point of reference, we are closer in time today to the outbreak of the American Civil War in 1861 (154 years) than the Revolutionary War soldiers were to the early colonists at Jamestown in 1607. A person in 1780 was closer to us in time than they were to the Mayflower passengers that landed in 1620. John Tyler, 10th president of the U.S. born in 1790, still has two living grandsons.
My point to those factoids is that the U.S. in the late 18th century was hardly some primitive and impoverished backwater especially on the East Coast. It already had more than a century and a half to develop cities, infrastructure, food supply lines and even luxuries that are recognizable even today. People were fleeing Europe in droves to come to America because the word got out that it was the land of plenty ripe for the picking.
A contract between a servant girl and her employer in the Massachusetts Bay Colony specified that she wouldn’t have to eat lobster for dinner more than three times a week.
The lack of sugar would probably be the biggest difference. And seeing more dried fruit and veggies on the table, especially in winter. I was thinking that citrus fruits would be uncommon, especially in New England, but that’s probably not accurate - New England’s biggest trading partner were the Caribbean islands. Pineapple was very exotic, but lemons were a common ingredient in alcoholic punches.