A Revolution In Eating: How the Quest for Food Shaped America (Arts and Traditions of the Table) [Hardcover]

James E. McWilliams (Author)

Book Description

Series: Arts and Traditions of the Table: Perspectives on Culinary History | Publication Date: May 25, 2005

Sugar, pork, beer, corn, cider, scrapple, and hoppin' John all became staples in the diet of colonial America. The ways Americans cultivated and prepared food and the values they attributed to it played an important role in shaping the identity of the newborn nation. In A Revolution in Eating, James E. McWilliams presents a colorful and spirited tour of culinary attitudes, tastes, and techniques throughout colonial America.

Confronted by strange new animals, plants, and landscapes, settlers in the colonies and West Indies found new ways to produce food. Integrating their British and European tastes with the demands and bounty of the rugged American environment, early Americans developed a range of regional cuisines. From the kitchen tables of typical Puritan families to Iroquois longhouses in the backcountry and slave kitchens on southern plantations, McWilliams portrays the grand variety and inventiveness that characterized colonial cuisine. As colonial America grew, so did its palate, as interactions among European settlers, Native Americans, and African slaves created new dishes and attitudes about food. McWilliams considers how Indian corn, once thought by the colonists as "fit for swine," became a fixture in the colonial diet. He also examines the ways in which African slaves influenced West Indian and American southern cuisine.

While a mania for all things British was a unifying feature of eighteenth-century cuisine, the colonies discovered a national beverage in domestically brewed beer, which came to symbolize solidarity and loyalty to the patriotic cause in the Revolutionary era. The beer and alcohol industry also instigated unprecedented trade among the colonies and further integrated colonial habits and tastes. Victory in the American Revolution initiated a "culinary declaration of independence," prompting the antimonarchical habits of simplicity, frugality, and frontier ruggedness to define American cuisine. McWilliams demonstrates that this was a shift not so much in new ingredients or cooking methods, as in the way Americans imbued food and cuisine with values that continue to shape American attitudes to this day.

(4/29/05)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

"[T]he way [colonial] Americans thought about food was integral to the way they thought about politics," McWilliams persuasively argues in this survey of the creation of American cuisine. The Texas State University–San Marcos history professor explores what the colonists ate and why, how that affected their emerging political and cultural values, how their farms and their rights intersected and how "food remained at the core of America's Revolution." At the root of American cuisine, McWilliams finds, is the immeasurable impact of Native American agricultural practices. He explores the effect of the staple crop peculiar to each area of colonial America upon the development of regional foodways, as well as upon their economic and social practices. With remarkable clarity, he delineates the technical aspects of various agricultural tasks, from crop cultivation (sugar cane, rice, tobacco, corn, wheat) to more domestic work (building a kitchen garden, churning butter). The broad range of scholarship, the smooth weaving of political and social history and the full notes and fat bibliography will inform historians, while the lucid style and jaunty tone (the Quakers were "a people who made a virtue of frugality while making frugality more elaborate than anyone could have imagined") make this accessible to all. (July)
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Review

The lucid style and jaunty tone...make this accessible to all.

(Publishers Weekly 9/5/05)

Delicious from start to finish.

(Kirkus Reviews 8/14/05)

Meticulously researched and packed with fascinating detail, this book provides an excellent account of the culinary development of Colonial America.

(Library Journal 8/28/05)

A Revolution in Eating, a lively new tour of Colonial American 'foodways.'

(Joshua Glenn Boston Globe 10/23/05)

Flexibility, even tolerance may well have contributed to the uniqueness of American food, according to historian McWilliams in this extremely rich, readable book.

(The FOOD Museum Online 11/13/05)

Fascinating...Anyone curious about the cultural history of that meatloaf on the dinner plate will gobble it up.

(Tina Jordan Entertainment Weekly 10/13/05)

McWilliams presents a colorful and spirited tour of culinary attitudes, tastes, and techniques through out colonial America.

(Staten Island Star Reporter ?)

McWilliams's examination of the culinary history of Colonial America is more than a... gastronomic tour... A lively and informative read.

(New Yorker 11/1/05)

[A] fresh perspective is well worth the read. Instead of learning our origins through a well-worn trail of war and peace on a time line, it takes us on a more pleasant route from pewter spoon to mouth.

(Shelley Preston Ledger 12/16/2005)

A Revolution in Eating gives its readers much to chew over, and whets the appetite for further work on the development of American Cooking.

(Claire Hopley The Washington Times 1/2/06)

McWilliams has penned an illuminating account of the evolution of foodways in the colonial Americas.

(Josh Friedland Washington Post Book World 2/3/2006)

Pleasingly filling.

(Susannah Meadows New York Times Book Review 6/1/2006)

For the cook who likes history or the history buff who likes to cook.

(Linda Bassett Georgetown Record 10/1/2006)

McWilliams vividly illustrates the intimate knowledge and relationship colonial Americans had with their food.

(Claudia Kousoulas Books-for-cooks.com: Appetite for Books 11/1/2006)

McWilliam's perspective... provides an essential link from the past to the present and into the future. It's a fascinating foray.

(Dona's Kitchen Kapers March/April '07)

McWilliams manages to be simultaneously instructive and entertaining.

(MM Pack Austin Chronicle )

McWilliams brings colonial times to life through vivid detail.

(William R. Wood Kalamazoo Gazette )

Don't let the fact that its publisher is Columbia University Press fool you into thinking this is a book for scholars only.

(Margot Cleary Daily Hampshire Gazette )

McWilliams manages to show food and drink as an integral part of history... Recommended.

(Choice )

[An] exciting work of comparative colonial history.

(Journal of Popular Culture )

McWilliams has contributed a valuable book to early American history.

(Michael A. LaCombe The Journal of Southern History )

A lively investigation of Colonial eating habits and how they shaped the revolutionary views of the new Americans.

(Paulette Beete American Spirit )

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 400 pages
• Publisher: Columbia University Press; 1ST edition (May 25, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0231129920
• ISBN-13: 978-0231129923
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.3 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,089,659 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

13 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars The New World according to food., January 16, 2006

By 

Julius Kusuma (Cambridge, MA, USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: A Revolution In Eating: How the Quest for Food Shaped America (Arts and Traditions of the Table) (Hardcover)

McWilliams' book is an exposition of how and why "traditional American" food as we know it today evolved in various places, and how and why these culinary evolutions in turn influenced historical movements.

We tend to take the task of gathering, planting, processing, and preserving food for granted in our 21st century lives; in truth, these are the most important tasks for our survival! McWilliams adeptly compared how culinary traditions evolved and developed distinct characters in New England, the Caribbeans, and everything in-between, depending on local resources and the people who lived in those areas. The latter part is determined by relations between the white settlers and the native Americans, and the West African slaves forcefully translated to the New World.

One fascinating aspect of the book is how closely the nature of work (or in many cases here, forced labor) and food are interconnected. Areas that grow sugar as a cash crop develop culinary traditions distinct from those that grow tobacco, and not only because of the obvious geographical difference. Social reality also had a strong interconnection to how food is cultivated or gathered.

McWilliams interspersed interesting re-examinations of the menu items that we take for granted today: How did smoked meats enter the American tradition? Why is Hoopin' John historically significant? What about the New England vegetable gardens come about?

Unfortunately, McWilliams tend to rely too much on including quotations of diary entries of people of the different eras. Rarely a page goes without any exultation of some random dairy farmer, or plantation operator, or inspector, or European visitor, on the "bountiful harvest of dis [sic] soiles [sic] .... " and "... are very resorrsful [sic] in gathering ... " After a while these quotations lose their charm and become bothersome and unnecessarily slows the pace of the main story.

Overall, this is an excellent and educational read. The subjects are well-researched and gives a fresh perspective of the "traditional" American cuisine as we know it today.

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars A tad clunky, July 24, 2008

By 

jannnnn (Los Angeles) - See all my reviews

This review is from: A Revolution In Eating: How the Quest for Food Shaped America (Arts and Traditions of the Table) (Hardcover)

I quite like food history and environmental history and so came to this book with high expectations, based on the very positive reviews here.

On the whole, it does a credible job of giving a detailed, source-based overview of food in the American British colonies from settlement through the first post-revolutionary generation.

Yet, the while the descriptions are rich on detail, a poor editing decision to remove any call-outs for endnotes makes sourcing those details cumbersome and annoying. And when I did look through some of the endnotes, I found that quite a number of the primary sources were being cited only via other secondary literature.

This all the more disappointing as the author rarely interrogates such sources or questions the qualities of evidence they demonstrate or the viewpoints at stake. With some of the sources, his interpretations seem quite solid, but with other topics, such as the issue of Native American temperance movements in particular, his readings are frustratingly surface-level.

And when we pull back from the details, we see that they are assembled mostly in a descriptive fashion, such that they don't seem to this reader to actually prove the author's theses conclusively, while the theses themselves are at times so bland or vague that they feel merely tacked on.

So while I did enjoy the book enough to read it as my main accompanying pleasure literature for three months, by the end of the experience, I cannot say that I was left all that satisfied.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The link between food and freedom., June 28, 2006

By 

R. Ray (Ft. Lauderdale, FL USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: A Revolution In Eating: How the Quest for Food Shaped America (Arts and Traditions of the Table) (Hardcover)

McWilliams' book is fascinating and completely unexpected. I'd never given a thought to what explorers, settlers, slaves, and/or Native Americans ate beyond the traditional stuff of Thanksgiving. A Revolution in Eating starts with survival basics and takes you through New World regional "foodways" and drinking habits to a new undestanding of all sorts of familiar American traditions and beliefs about people, places, and things that turn out to be fundamental to our social, economic, and political independence as a nation. I couldn't put it down.