Colonial Cooking at Home and on the Frontier

"What's there to eat?"

In colonial American there wasn't a great deal of difference between cooking at home and at a frontier outpost. Unless you lived in one of the few large port cities with access to foodstuffs imported from Europe, the Carribbean and elsewhere you pretty much ate what you could grow, raise yourself or could barter for. Accustomed as we are to a diet that includes foods from every corner of the globe and fresh produce from the bountiful farms of modern America the diet of colonials seems awfully limited and downright bland. Residents of New York, Boston, Philidelphia or Charles Town could liven up their plates with delicacies of all sorts but most Americans depended on the fruits and vegetables they grew themselves, livestock they raised and the game that abounded in the huge forests that thickly covered their new land. Many of the plants they brought from their native countries didn't grow as well as they had back home but there were new things too in America that had been cultivated by Native Americans for hundreds of years. In short order corn, squashes like pumpkin, beans and others took their place at the colonial table. Plentiful and fresh at harvest time they could be preserved and eaten during the winter. Yes, this new land was one where no one need go hungry. Here are a few of the dishes one might find on the table in early America.