Imagine you are an early American settler about to have breakfast. You only have time for a cup of warm apple cider and some cornmeal mush. As a married colonist, you share a small home with your young wife and your two small children.
One of your foremost concerns at all times is how to keep your family alive. In order to fulfill this obligation, you need to preserve a large supply of food. One strategy your family uses to make the most of a meager supply of food is to consume many pies. Meat pies are an easy and inexpensive meal your wife makes in a tasty crust. She creates her signature chicken pot pies by setting the leftover parts of the chicken, along with odds and ends of vegetables left over from other meals, and baking them into a pie for your whole family to enjoy. Pies give your family the right amount of nutrients, flavor, and are a great option to reserve for future meals.
Because there is no refrigeration or other modern technology, your family benefits from knowing how to preserve food. During your early days in this strange new land, you learn how to use natural resources, and how to grow food in your fields and gardens. You also learn how to cure meat from local native tribes. This method of food preservation gives your family more food choices. Some foods that you dry during the spring include blueberries, blackberries, string beans, fruit slices, corn, and much more.
Another method you find helpful for preserving food is salting your provisions to keep them from rotting. By salting your meats and fish, you safeguard against bacteria. Certain meats, like beef and pork, are smoked as well as salted. The meats you string up in your smokehouse acquire a rich, smoky aroma. Since you recently learned how to pickle provisions, you will now pickle foods like beef, walnuts, corn, cabbage, fish, mushrooms, and cucumbers. Before storing your food items, you need to set them in a mixture of salt and vinegar. This enables them to keep longer, so you’ll have them for lean times.
To this day in the United States, we consume a variety of pies, cured meats, and pickled foods, which shows how much we’ve inherited our eating habits from these early Americans. Much of what we know about food today was passed down by our colonial counterparts.
Here are a few tasty recipes handed down from colonial times:
Shepherd’s Pie
Indian Pudding
Shepherd’s Pie
Whipped Syllabub
Indian Pudding
Whipped Syllabub
Photo courtesy of The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation.
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