Today’s optional topic: historical foods. There are a whole slew of websites, podcasts and YouTube channels devoted to recreating historical dishes, from pre-modern recipes to early versions of food you’d find today, and it’s always fun to ponder how the tastes of the past differed from today.
Americans, since colonial times, have been known for a hearty (some might say gluttonous) appetite, often with a wide variety of food on offer at individual meals. That doesn’t mean, of course, that the actual food is to all tastes, or even edible. Henry Adams records the appalled reaction of a visiting French gourmand to the common meal of an 18th Century American household. His description is enough to make even the least finicky eater reach for the Tums:
“I will venture to say,” declared Volney, “that if a prize were proposed for the scheme of a regimen most calculated to injure the stomach, the teeth, and the health in general, no better could be invented than that of the Americans. In the morning at breakfast they deluge their stomach with a quart of hot water, impregnated with tea, or so slightly with coffee that it is mere colored water; and they swallow, almost without chewing, hot bread, half baked, toast soaked in butter, cheese of the fattest kind, slices of salt or hung beef, ham, etc., all which are nearly insoluble. At dinner they have boiled pastes under the name of puddings, and the fattest are esteemed the most delicious; all their sauces, even for roast beef, are melted butter; their turnips and potatoes swim in hog’s lard, butter, or fat; under the name of pie or pumpkin, their pastry is nothing but a greasy paste, never sufficiently baked. To digest these viscous substances they take tea almost instantly after dinner, making it so strong that it is absolutely bitter to the taste, in which state it affects the nerves so powerfully that even the English find it brings on a more obstinate restlessness than coffee. Supper again introduces salt meats or oysters. As Chastellux says, the whole day passes in heaping indigestions on one another; and to give tone to the poor, relaxed, and wearied stomach, they drink Madeira, rum, French brandy, gin, or malt spirits, which complete the ruin of the nervous system.”
Mmm mmm, good!