The Secret History of Food

by Matt Siegel

  And cooking also gave us more to do with our brains. Charles Darwin called the discovery of fire (“by which hard and stringy roots75 can be rendered digestible, and poisonous roots or herbs innocuous”) “probably the greatest ever made76 by man, excepting language.” Yet we wouldn’t have modern language without cooking—as heating our foods by fire not only reduced chewing times and the amount of time we spent searching for food but also gave off crucial light that extended our “daytime” hours, which vastly expanded our bandwidth for free time, socialization, and the shared development of things such as art and technology.77 At the same time, thanks to softer and more available foods, children could be weaned more quickly78 and surplus food shared with others, thus clearing the path for larger families and social circles. And cooking fires or hearths would have provided a warm and protected place to gather and socialize, while fueling and tending these fires (and breaking down animals to be transported, cooked, and shared around the fire versus eating them fresh immediately following a kill) would have required a level of complex collaboration and division of labor that would have been impossible without the development of language.

  So cooking was really the perfect activity that brought all of the ingredients for modern language and society together: larger brains, larger gatherings, more free time, and more collaboration. This isn’t to suggest that there was no language before cooking,79 but cooking certainly fed the development of complex language—just as the development of language fed the development of complex cooking.

  By the same token, cooking also softened us psychologically80 by giving the advantage to those who could get along and work and live closely together without killing each other. This was essentially the same process used to domesticate wolves as, over time, natural and human selection favored wolves that were calm81 and mild-tempered enough to approach human fires and settlements and offer their protection, hunting skills, and companionship—a word that, poignantly, comes from the Latin com (“together”)82 and pānis (“bread”)—in exchange for human food scraps. And the same thing happened with other animals, such as domesticated goats and sheep, which submitted to human milking and shearing in exchange for grain or leftovers (or, in some cases, for the salt content in human urine, which our ancestors learned could be used to lure reindeer, similar to modern salt licks).83 So survival became less about one’s brawn and capacity for killing and more about one’s capacity for companionship and prehistoric table manners, and just as fire enabled man to tame nature (from wild wolves to poisonous vegetables), it also tamed us.

  Granted, this was a gradual process that is still going on. It wasn’t until seventeenth-century France, for example, that we started rounding the tips of our dinner knives84 to cut down on tableside stabbings (though much of Asia was a few thousand years ahead85 on this, having largely replaced bladed utensils with chopsticks for much the same reason); even today, some people still chew with their mouths open, eat their pizza with forks, and don’t recycle, so we still have a ways to go.

  Similarly, as we’ll read in the following chapters, our relationship with food is not always one of sharing and companionship; certainly, it’s had its low points—among them overfishing, the use of foods such as honey and hot peppers for ritual torture, vast divisions in the distribution and availability of food that leads some to starve while others grow fat, cannibalism, forced labor, British food . . .

  But we wouldn’t be where we are today—or be who we are—if food were just a passive source of energy and not a central part of our lives: simultaneously an obsession, hobby, competitive sport, and profession; a seasonal calendar and nostalgic time capsule; a social lubricant and peace offering; a family heirloom; a drug and spiritual rite.

  Nor would food be where it is today, for better or worse, without our having planted the seeds, stoked the fire, and stirred the pot, both literally and figuratively.

  Chapter 2

  Pie, Progress, and Plymouth Rock

  Take anything away, but leave pie.1 Americans can stand the prohibition of intoxicating drinks; but I believe the prohibition of pie would precipitate a revolution.

  —David Macrae

  And we must have a pie. Stress cannot exist2 in the presence of a pie.

  —David Mamet

  Remember when we learned about the Boston Tea Party in middle school—how a secret society of armed radicals bled 342 casks of tea valued at roughly £9,6503 into Boston Harbor? And how that single act of defiance was supposed to represent the sum of the American spirit at conflict with the insufferable evils of British tyranny, thus charting a course for revolution?

  Well, it was pretty damn American, sure, especially the parts about Bostonians polluting their own harbor and painting their faces with coal dust to disguise themselves as Native Americans; however, it wasn’t the only symbolic food fight to represent, and fuel, the fight for American independence—nor was it the most impactful.

  In fact, some people, like nineteenth-century physician F. W. Searle4, might argue that the American Revolution would never have happened had it not been for the influence of pie, a dish often served as breakfast, lunch, dinner, and midnight snack in the colonies.

  A learned doctor, Searle wrote about pie as though it were the stuff of Arthurian legend, crediting it with the colonies’ “indomitable perseverance, never failing strength, and don’t-know-when-you’r beaten courage” and predicting that “when the history of New England shall be written in that spirit of careful investigation and research, and with that calm and dispassionate temper, which ought to animate every historian, then it will undoubtedly be found that the indigestible pie has exerted a mighty influence in the development and utilization of the resources of our country, and that pie and progress have always gone hand in hand.”

  Searle believed “that a certain amount of irritation within ‘the inwards’ of a man” made him tougher and more resilient, that American pie had a tendency to irritate a man’s inwards “just sufficiently to make him wide awake, resourceful, and aggressive” and that calling pie “indigestible” was therefore a compliment.

  “The brave men who made up the Boston Tea Party,” he writes, “and who defied the whole English nation rather than pay an unjust tax, were pie-biters from Boston. The bands of untrained stragglers who defeated a disciplined army at Concord, at Lexington and Bunker Hill, sprung from the Puritan stock which introduced and made famous the American pie. The history of New England shows conclusively that the Yankee pie is a mighty stimulator of energy and that it is conducive to vigilance, aggressiveness and longevity.”

  This was all published as scientific fact in 1898’s Journal of Medicine and Science.

  And Searle wasn’t wrong;* the history he describes has just been largely forgotten.

  Indeed, pie—particularly apple pie—has an important place in American history. It’s as American as, well, apple pie: the ultimate symbol, and product, of American independence, innovation, experimentation, and excess.

  And what makes it so American isn’t its lineage—as the first recipe for a crude apple pie comes from 1381 England,5 while the apple itself originated from the mountainous regions of Central Asia known today as Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan6—but rather the fact that we stole it from the British along with our independence, thus liberating it from the tyranny of British cooking, which at the time consisted primarily of pies stuffed with birds and nightmarish sea creatures. Consider the British eel pie, lamprey pie, pigeon pie, and swan pie, traditionally served cold.

  Did you know that the secret to a nice lamprey pie, according to a recipe from 1737 London, is to “cleanse them well from the slime”7 before you mix their blood with cinnamon? If you plan on helping yourself to a slice afterward, it’s probably also a good idea not to stare too long into their jawless parasitic sucker heads.

  The trick with pigeon pie, in case you’re curious, is to add lamb’s stones, also known as lamb’s testicles, or to top it with a “ragoo” of cocks-combs.8

&nb
sp; Of course, other recipes were simpler, say, for example, that for the English hare pie, comprising just six steps: “Get a hare, cut it in pieces,9 break the bones, and season it to your taste, and lay it in the pye with sliced lemon, and butter and close the same.”

  Because forks weren’t common before industrialization*10,11 and most people ate with their hands or a pair of knives, a lot of early pie recipes called for keeping the bones inside12, as this gave diners something to hold on to—and, as a bonus, imparted more flavor and gelatin (for thickening). Meanwhile, to “close” the pie meant closing the “coffyn,” which was what the British appropriately called their inedible crusts. This wasn’t an insult or a jab; rather, their crusts were intentionally inedible. Thick, hard, and meant to be tossed uneaten, they were viewed merely as disposable vessels for baking, handling, and storing their innards in the absence of modern bakeware or aluminum foil. This is why even today, British pie crusts are thicker and harder than American crusts, a relic of their heritage as the inedible Tupperware of the Dark Ages—which were, indeed, dark times for pie. So saying that British pies belong in coffyns would have been accurate on several levels.

  Other recipes from the same cookbook—verbosely titled The Whole Duty of a Woman: or, an Infallible Guide to the Fair Sex. Containing, Rules, Directions, and Observations, for their Conduct and Behaviour through All Ages and Circumstances of Life, as Virgins, Wives, or Widows. With Directions, How to Obtain All Useful and Fashionable Accomplishments Suitable to the Sex. In Which Are Comprised All Parts of Good Housewifry, Particularly Rules and Receipts in Every Kind of Cookery—include those for pies made of lamb, veal, calves’ foot, calf’s head, squab, venison, goose, giblet, pigeon, rabbit, turkey, eel, trout, and oyster.

  But not apple.

  And when the English did use apples, in their pies or elsewhere, they treated them largely as vegetables,13 adding them to various meat concoctions alongside onions or potatoes. Even English applesauce was savory rather than sweet. Called apulmose, it was traditionally made with beef broth14 or, during Lent, with cod’s liver.15

  So pie, in precolonial England, was largely utilitarian: far from being a delicacy or dessert, it was merely a convenient way of congealing various bits of bird and beast into something portable and relatively stable. Its name comes from the magpie16, a member of the crow family that was commonly colloquialized as pie in the Middle Ages, though it’s unclear whether this namesake had to do with baking magpies in coffyns or the birds’ reputation for stealing random objects to incorporate into their nests in much the same way British cooks tossed random animal parts into pies. (Nests and early pies would have also shared a rough resemblance owing to their rustic layers and golden-brown coloring.)

  It would make sense if the phrase “eating humble pie” had been coined to describe these humble roots and practices, but the truth is, perhaps, less appetizing, as the word humble comes from the Middle English umble,17 which refers to the inner waste parts of animals. So umble pie was what servants made for themselves using the pig or deer guts left over from the fancier lord’s or noble’s pies described earlier.

  Yet all of this changed with the colonization of America—an experiment not just in democracy and liberty but in survival, scale, excess, and New World cookery.

  “When European colonists first landed18 in America they found not only Indians, virgin lands, and an alien style of life,” writes historian Sally Smith Booth, “but the world’s largest outdoor supermarket. Ducks, geese, and pigeons by the millions filled the skies. Forests abounded with deer, hare, squirrels, and quail. In rivers and on seashores thrived giant shad, eels, mussels, lobsters five feet long, and crabs said to be big enough to feed four men each. Trees hung heavy with wild fruits and berries. Vegetables, such as potatoes, squash, corn, and pumpkin, covered the rolling meadows.”

  This New World wasn’t rich just in spices but in fish, game, birds, berries, vegetables, and grain; the lands and waters were teeming with new ingredients the colonists had never seen or heard of, and the ingredients they had seen before tended to be larger, sweeter, and more plentiful than their European counterparts.

  Still, there’s a reason these first few years were called the “starving times”;19 however, the staggering number of early colonists who starved to death did so not because of a lack of food but because of a lack of skill in acquiring it, an unwillingness to heed the advice of the natives, whom they saw as uncivilized savages, and a reluctance to try new foods. Surrounded by birds they couldn’t catch, fish they couldn’t hook, deer they couldn’t shoot, and corn they were afraid to eat, they initially survived by eating whatever they could scavenge, which often meant things like acorns, ants, bats, cats, dogs, horses, and boiled shoe leather.

  “Though there be fish20 in the sea, foules in the ayre, and beasts in the woods,” writes John Smith in 1608, “their bounds are so large, they so wilde, and we so weake and ignorant, we cannot much trouble them.”

  Smith recounts, for example, coming across waters so thick with fish that their heads stuck out above the water, yet being unable to catch any “for want of nets.”

  “We attempted to catch21 them with a frying pan,” he writes, “but we found it a bad instrument to catch fish with: neither better fish, more plenty, nor more variety for smal fish, had any of us ever seene in any place so swimming in the water, but they are not to be caught with frying pans.”

  Yet within a generation, people were eating better in the New World22 than in the Old World they’d left behind, having acquired not just a taste for New World foods but the skill and equipment (e.g., fishing nets) by which to acquire them.

  In 1614, just six years after his failed attempt to fish with frying pans, Smith describes hooking fish with such ease that even “a little boye”23 could do it.

  “You shall scarce finde any baye, shallow shore, or cove of sand,” he writes, “where you may not take many clampes, or lobsters, or both at your pleasure, and in many places lode your boat if you please; nor iles where you finde not fruits, birds, crabs, and muskles, or all of them, for taking, at a lowe water. And in the harbors we frequented, a little boye might take of cunners, and pinacks, and such delicate fish, at the ships sterne, more then sixe or tenne can eate in a daie.”

  And the amount of food the weakest boy could take home seems to have been a common measurement in the colonies. Francis Higginson, the first Puritan minister of Salem, writes in 1629 of lobsters so great, fat, and luscious, and the waters so full of them, that “the least boy in the plantation may both catch and eat what he will of them,”24 while he complains of becoming “cloyed with them.” Others describe lobsters six feet long25, weighing up to twenty-five pounds and washing up on beaches in piles two feet high.

  All this while most of Europe was living on bread and porridge.26

  The same abundance held true for crab, mussels, bass, salmon, flounder, and herring. John Lawson, who kept a journal of almost everything he ate in his eight years in Carolina (he once ate “fat barbacu’d Venison”27 on a Thursday),* describes a single cockle the size of five or six in England,28 stingrays at almost every door, and oysters or mussels, as many as you please, in every pond or creek.

  And that was just the fish menu.

  Others describe great migrations of birds so numerous29 they were forced to roost on top of one another, downing giant oaks from their weight and covering the forest in four inches of droppings. John James Audubon later described flocks so dense they eclipsed the sun and estimated seeing more than a billion pigeons in a three-hour span. To save on gunpowder and ammunition, colonists would often net and club birds to death, capturing some fifteen hundred at a time.

  And perhaps more impressive than the number of birds was their size. Colonists describe mystery birds with heads “as big as a child’s30 of a year old” and flocks of five hundred wild turkeys weighing forty to sixty pounds each. Lawson writes of half a turkey feeding eight hungry men two meals31 each, and Higginson, the same guy who complain
ed of becoming cloyed on lobster, describes their meat as exceedingly “fat, sweet and fleshy.”32

  And don’t get the colonists started on the superiority of American bear meat.

  “The Flesh of this Beast33 is very good, and nourishing, and not inferiour to the best Pork in Taste,” writes Lawson. “It stands betwixt Beef and Pork, and the young Cubs are a Dish for the greatest Epicure living. I prefer their Flesh before any Beef, Veal, Pork, or Mutton; and they look as well as they eat, their fat being as white as Snow, and the sweetest of any Creature’s in the World. . . . Those that are Strangers to it, may judge otherwise; But I who have eaten a great deal of Bears Flesh in my Life-time (since my being an Inhabitant in America) do think it equalizes, if not excels, any Meat I ever eat in Europe. The Bacon made thereof is extraordinary Meat.”

  And if this weren’t reason enough to eat bear meat, it was also believed to give those who consumed it “great sexual prowess,”34 while bear oil (meaning its melted caul fat) was good for drinking (Lawson describes drinking a quart of it35 without vomiting!) and for rubbing on your skin to ward off mosquitoes.

  So there was plenty to eat in terms of both quality and quantity. In fact, in 1765, several years before the Boston Tea Party, a writer in London36 pompously argued that colonists would never survive without British tea, suggesting it was the only decent food staple the colonies had—which prompted Benjamin Franklin, of all people, to pen an open letter in response:

  Does he imagine we can get nothing else37 for breakfast?—Did he never hear that we have oatmeal in plenty, for water gruel or burgoo; as good wheat, rye and barley as the world affords, to make frumenty; or toast and ale; that there is every where plenty of milk, butter and cheese; that rice is one of our staple commodities; that for tea, we have sage and bawm* in our gardens, the young leaves of the sweet hickory or walnut, and above all, the buds of our pine, infinitely preferable to any tea from the Indies; while the islands yield us plenty of coffee and chocolate?—Let the gentleman do us the honour of a visit in America, and I will engage to breakfast him every day in the month with a fresh variety, without offering him either tea or Indian corn.