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Cooking in New England
A plain Puritan people with a plain Puritan ethic brought a plain Puritan aesthetic to the shores of New England. Like much American cooking, New England has produced a local cuisine that exercises frugality and simplicity in the face of seemingly unending abundance of the New World. For better or worse, English cooking was the model -- boiled meats, casseroles, and puddings -- heavy, filling foods that combat the cold and don`t offend God by being too fussy and decadent. Native Americans also had an influence on colonial cuisine, both in the ingredients they introduced, such as corn, beans, and maple sugars, and the methods they used. Their frequent use of maple syrup to flavor foods, nearly as often as we now use salt, may be why American food so tends towards the sweet: yams, honey-roasted ham, sweet relishes with roasted meats. Despite its meager, rocky soil, New England proffered a bounty of raw ingredients, fish of all kinds -- especially cod, which was salted for the winter -- and shellfish. One colonial diarist moans that he is forced to eat lobster for every meal: lobster lobster lobster! Game, too, filled the air and the fields: venison, goose, turkey, and pheasant. All sorts of berries (cranberries, blueberries, strawberries) and nuts covered the hills. Pigs thrive in most every condition, and the harsh New England winters made no exception. Salt pork seems the one ingredient that no recipe lacks. For many years, New England was the launching site for migrations into uncharted country, and her tastes traveled as far as the Pacific Northwest, where you can still get a blueberry cobbler made from an old Maine recipe. Famous still are one-pot stews that can be made year-round. Succotash combines lima beans, hominy (called "samp" when made from white corn and "hulled corn" when made from yellow corn) and a goodly amount of salt pork. Stewed in a hundred and one variations, Succotash became a beloved staple of the diet. Baked beans, too, combine beans and salt pork, and there are great debates over the proportions between the two. The mix of beans and pork is traditionally put into a cast iron pot, and buried, Native American-style, in a deep, coal-filled fire pit. Or, the beans are cooked in a brick oven. Boiled puddings combined English dessert with Native American ingredients; corn flour and molasses were staple favorites, and the Indian puddings and steamed brown bread still survive, ever popular. In these foods, you can taste the British and colonial fondness for Indian spices: mace, cinnamon, cloves, and ginger. Chowder, with its characteristic Puritan blandness (which is not to say it is not delicious), or fish cakes might introduce a New England boiled dinner whose only zap of flavoring comes from a dollop of mustard or a splash of vinegar. While simple, New England cooking at its best creates that full-bodied honesty that comes from the combination of bounty and basics. |
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