Where are the foods of yesteryear?

"Hard Times and Hardtack" was going to be the title of my article on Civil

War food for Historical Times Magazine. The title apparently failed to please but the magazine and the article will be out on August 1, 2022. 

https://online.1stflip.com/dssx/3jfn/  

I learned fascinating things while writing it. The following tidbits are among the 3,000 words I cut: 

 American cuisine did not spring into existence with the first colonists. They brought their cookbooks and their ideas of what food should be with them, whether they came from Great Britain, France, Spain, Holland (New York City was originally New Amsterdam, founded by the Dutch), or Africa (via the slave ships). 

The first American cookbook was published in 1796 and almost all of the recipes came from English cookbooks. In fact, even in the mid-nineteenth century, American breakfasts did not vary much from those suggested in the preeminent Victorian cookbook, Mrs. Beeton’s Book of Household Management (1861). Any cold meat from the larder “can do duty at the breakfast table”, Isabella Beeton advises, as can potted meat or fish and meat pies. For hot dishes she recommends fish, kidneys, mutton chops, rump-steaks, eggs, muffins, toast, marmalade, butter, etc. The only real distinguishing feature of an American breakfast was the occasional appearance of corn, rice, and sweet potatoes. 

Mutton ham used to be a common dish in this country, as it was in Great Britain. Potted meat, potted pig’s head, salt cod, and cold mush sliced and fried appeared regularly in cookbooks. So did corn fritters, oddly renamed hush puppies in the late nineteenth century.  

A letter from Alexis de Tocqueville to his father dated December 20, 1831, written at Memphis, Tennessee after a trek through the wilderness shows us how primitive frontier food could be: 

…we happened upon a log cabin with chinks on every side through which a big fire could be seen crackling…Picture a fireplace half the width of the room…a bed; a few chairs; a six-foot-long carbine; a hunter’s accoutrements hanging on the log wall and dancing in the draught…the [two or three] poor Blacks served us at his behest: one presented us glasses of whisky, and another corncakes and a plate of venison. The third was sent off to fetch more wood. 

 From https://hudsonreview.com/2013/03/letters-from-america/#.YkG5qOfMIdU, retrieved 3/28/2022.