by Bill Bryson
Soon every city had to have a freeway of its own, even if it meant scything through old neighbourhoods, as with Boston’s destructive Downtown Artery, or slicing into a beauty spot like Fairmont Park with the Schuylkill (popularly known as the ‘Sure-Kill’) Expressway in Philadelphia. At one time there was even a plan to drive a freeway through New Orleans’s French Quarter.
As the freeways remodelled cities, so the new interstates dealt a blow to the old two-lane highways that stretched between them. Had it not been for the distraction of World War II, America almost certainly would have had a network of superhighways much earlier. The idea was really the brainchild of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who saw the construction of a national high-speed highway system as the ultimate public works project. By the 1950s, Eisenhower saw in it the additional virtue of enhancing America’s defence capabilities. Bridge and tunnel clearances were designed not for trucks but for the movement of intercontinental ballistic missiles. During the quarter-century beginning in 1956, America spent $118 billion on interstate highways. It was, as Phil Patton has put it, the ‘last programme of the New Deal and the first space programme’.45
In less than two decades, America’s modern interstate highways drained the life from thousands of towns. No longer was it necessary – and before long often not even possible – to partake of the traditional offerings of two-lane America: motels with cherishably inane names like the Nite-E-Nite Motor Court and the Dew Drop Inn, roadside diners with blinking neon signs and a mysterious fondness for meat loaf and mashed potatoes, two-pump gas stations built in the cosy style of a rustic cottage. Today in western Nebraska the old Lincoln Highway, or Route 30, is so little used that grass grows in its cracks. At the state border with Wyoming, it disappears altogether, abruptly and unceremoniously buried beneath the white concrete of Interstate 80. Like Route 66, the Dixie Highway and other once great roads, it has become a fading memory, and what a sad loss that is.
11
What’s Cooking?: Eating in America
I
To the first Pilgrims, the gustatory possibilities of the New World were slow in revealing themselves. Though the woods of New England abounded in hearty sustenance – wild duck and turkey, partridge, venison, wild plums and cherries, mushrooms, all manner of nuts and berries – and though the waters teemed with fish, the Pilgrims showed a grim reluctance to eat anything that did not come from their dwindling stockpile of salt pork (which they called ‘salt horse’), salt fish and salt beef, hard tack (a kind of biscuit baked so hard that it became more or less impervious to mould, weevils and human teeth), dried peas and dried beans, ‘almost preferring’, in the words of one historian, ‘to starve in the midst of plenty rather than experiment with the strange but kindly fruits of the earth’.1 Or as another put it: The first settlers had come upon a land of plenty. They nearly starved in it.‘2
Lobster was so plentiful that ‘the least boy in the Plantation may both catch and eat what he will of them’, but hardly any did. John Winthrop lamented in a letter home that he could not have his beloved mutton but only such impoverished fare as oysters, duck, salmon and scallops. Clams and mussels they did not eat at all, but fed to their pigs. To their chagrin the colonists discovered that English wheat was unsuited to the soil and climate of New England. The crops were repeatedly devastated by a disease called smut. For the better part of two centuries wheat would remain a luxury in the colonies. Even their first crop of peas failed, a consequence not so much of the challenges of the New England climate as of their own inexperience as farmers. With their food stocks dwindling and their aptitude as hunter-gatherers sorely taxed, the outlook for this small group of blundering, inexperienced, hopelessly under-prepared immigrants was bleak indeed.
Fortunately, there were Indians to save them. The Indians of the New World were already eating better than any European. Native Americans enjoyed some two thousand different foods, a number that even the wealthiest denizen of the Old World would have found unimaginably varied. Among the delicacies unique to the New World were the white and sweet potato, the peanut, the pumpkin and its cousin the squash, the persimmon (or ‘putchamin’ as the first colonists recorded it), the avocado, pineapple, chocolate and vanilla, cassava (source of tapioca), chilli peppers, sunflowers and the tomato – though of course not all of these were known everywhere. Even those plants that already existed in Europe were often of a superior variety in the New World. American green beans were far plumper and richer, and soon displaced the fibrous, chewy variety previously grown in Europe. Likewise, once Europeans got sight and taste of the fat, sumptuous strawberries that grew wild in Virginia, they gladly forsook the mushy little button strawberries that had theretofore been all they had known. The Indians’ diet was healthier, too. At a time when even well-heeled Europeans routinely fell prey to scurvy and watched helplessly as their teeth fell from spongy gums, the Indians knew instinctively that a healthy body required a well-balanced diet.
Above all, however, their agriculture had a sophistication that European husbandry could not begin to compete with. They had learned empirically to plant beans among the corn, which not only permitted a greater yield from the same amount of land but also replenished the nitrogen that the corn took away. As a result, while Europeans struggled even in good years to scrape a living from the soil, the Indians of the New World enjoyed a constant bounty. That a single tribe in New England had sufficient surpluses to support a hundred helpless, unexpected visitors for the better part of a year is eloquent testimony of that.
The Indians’ single most important gift to the colonists – apart from not wiping them out – was corn. Corn began as a wild grass, probably in the Tehuacán Valley of central Mexico. Converting a straggly wild grass into the plump and nutritious foodstuff we know today was possibly the greatest of all precolonial achievements. Corn will grow almost anywhere, and by 1620 was a well-established crop throughout the New World. To the original colonists, ‘corn’ signified any common grain, as it still does in Britain. So they adopted the Spanish name maize (after a West Indian Taino word, mahiz). Since maize was in effect the only type of grain there was, ‘corn’ gradually came to signify it alone. Corn has been domesticated for so long – some seven thousand years – that it is now totally dependent on humankind for its continued existence. Left on its own, the kernels of each cob – its seeds – would be strangled by the husk. Even in colonial times it was a far more demanding plant than the colonists were used to. With their usual vexing ineptitude the first colonists tried sowing it by broadcast method, as they did with other grains, and were baffled that it didn’t grow. It took the natives to show them that corn flourished only when each seed was planted in a mound and helped along with a little fish-meal fertilizer.
By the early seventeenth century, many New World foods were already known in Europe, though not necessarily to the early English colonists. The first Pilgrims may have heard of, but almost certainly had never tasted, two New World foods: the tomato and white potato. Nor did they get the opportunity in their new-found land since these plants were unknown to the eastern seaboard. The Indians of the east coast did, however, have the sweet potato, and for almost two centuries when Americans talked of potatoes that was what they meant.
The white potato had reached England, via Spain, in the sixteenth century but suffered a crippling setback when the queen’s cook, with that knack for culinary misapprehension with which the English have long distinguished themselves, discarded the tubers and cooked the leaves. For well over a century, the white potato was grown strictly as an ornamental plant until Europeans at last began to appreciate its manifold possibilities as a foodstuff. The Irish developed a particular attachment to it, not so much because of its agreeable versatility as because it was one of the few plants that would prosper on Irish soil. Elsewhere in the British Isles it remained largely unknown. It made its first recorded appearance in the American colonies in 1719, in Boston, though it was not until a gentleman farmer in Virginia named Thomas Jefferson tried cultiva
ting the white potato – which he called the Irish potato – that it began to attract any attention in America as a potential food. Jefferson also appears to have been the first American to serve French fried potatoes – rather a daring thing to do since it was generally accepted that the tubers were toxic and that the only way to avoid a long and agonizing death was to boil them mercilessly. Until well into the 1800s almost no one dared to eat them any other way. It appears that the whole of Europe’s potato output at this time came from just two plants brought back by the Spanish; this lack of genetic diversity is very probably what led to Ireland’s devastating potato blight in the nineteenth century, with obvious consequences for American immigration. The word spud, incidentally, comes from the kind of spade with which potatoes were dug out. Though the word itself dates from the Middle Ages, it became associated with potatoes only in the 1840s.
The history of the tomato (from tomatl, like so many other food words a Nahuatl term) in the New World is strikingly similar to that of the potato. It was carried to Europe from South America by the Spanish, widely regarded as poisonous, treated for two centuries as a decorative curiosity, and finally rescued from obscurity by the ever industrious Thomas Jefferson, who made the first recorded mention of it in North America in 1781. He referred to it as the tomata. Until well into the nineteenth century it was regarded as dangerously exotic on its native soil, though a degree of caution is understandable since the tomato is after all a member of the nightshade family.
The colonists were, however, well acquainted with a New World food that abounded along the eastern seaboard: the turkey. A not unreasonable question is how a native American bird came to be named for a country four thousand miles away. The answer is that when turkeys first appeared in England, some eighty years before the Mayflower set sail, they were mistakenly supposed to have come from Turkey. They had in fact come from Spain, brought there from Mexico by Hernan Cortes’s expedition of 1519. Many other European nations made a similar geographical error in naming the bird. The French thought they came from India and thus called them chickens ’d’Inde,’ from which comes the modern French dindon. The Germans, Dutch and Swedes were even more specifically inaccurate in their presumptions, tracing the bird to the Indian city of Calicut, and thus gave it the respective names Kalekuttisch Hün, kalkoen and kalkon. By the 1620s, the turkey was so well known in Europe, and its provenance had so long been assumed to be the Near East, that the Pilgrims were astounded to find them in abundance in their new-found land. A similar linguistic misunderstanding was obtained with another native American food, the Jerusalem artichoke, which is not an artichoke at all – indeed it doesn’t even look like an artichoke – but rather is the root of the sunflower Helianthus tuberosus. Jerusalem is merely a corruption of the Italian word for sunflower, girasole.
Under the patient tutelage of the Indians, the colonists gradually became acquainted with, and even developed a fondness for, native products like pumpkins, at first generally called pompions, and squashes, which the colonists confusingly also called pompions. Pumpkin pie became a big hit after the Pilgrims were introduced to it at their second Thanksgiving feast in 1623, but the conventional spelling didn’t become established until much later. As late as 1796, the first American cookbook – a slender volume with the dauntingly all-embracing title of American Cookery, or the Art of Dressing Viands, Fish, Poultry and Vegetables, and the Best Modes of Making Pâtés, Puffs, Pies, Tarts, Puddings, Custards and Preserves and All Kinds of Cakes, from the Imperial Plumb to Plain Cake, Adapted to this Country and All Grades of Life, by Amelia Simmons: An American Orphan – called the dish ‘pompkin pie’. Pumpkin pie was also called pumpkin pudding until the mid-1600s, pudding then suggesting a pie without a top crust.
The Indians introduced the colonists not only to new foods, but to more interesting ways of preparing them. Succotash, clam chowder, hominy, corn pone, cranberry sauce, johnnycakes, even Boston baked beans and Brunswick stew were all Indian dishes. In Virginia it was the Indians, not the white settlers, who invented Smithfield ham.3 Even with the constant advice and intervention of the Indians the Puritans stuck to a diet that was for the most part resolutely bland. Meat and vegetables were boiled without pity, deprived of seasonings and served lukewarm. Peas, once they got the hang of growing them, were eaten at almost every meal, and often served cold. The principal repast was taken at midday and called dinner. Supper, a word related to soup (and indeed at the time still often spelled souper), was often just that – a little soup with perhaps a piece of bread – and was consumed in the evening shortly before retiring. Lunch was a concept yet unknown, as was the idea of a snack. To the early colonists, ‘snack’ meant the bite of a dog.
Johnnycake is sometimes said to be a contraction of journey cake, the idea being that it was a food packed for journeys, but since it is a kind of corn-bread and corn-bread patently is not a travelling food, the explanation is unconvincing. Another suggestion is that it is a corruption of Shawnee cake. As Ciardi notes, in New England it was called jonakin or jonikin long before it was called johnnycake, suggesting that johnnycake is a folk etymology based on some earlier, forgotten Indian term.4 Two other travelling foods known to early Americans were pemmican and jerked beef. Despite the name, nothing is jerked to make jerked beef. The word comes from charqui, a Spanish adaptation of a Peruvian Indian word. Though the variant name jerky is etymologically closer to the Spanish original, it actually entered the language much later. Jerked beef was well established in the colonies by the early eighteenth century. Jerky is not attested before 1850. Pemmican, more straightforwardly, is from the Cree pimikân.
The Pilgrims naturally brought many Old World dishes with them, among them flummery (a sweet dish made of flour or cornstarch, sufficiently insipid to still be eaten in England, where it is called blancmange), dunderfunk (a kind of hard-tack hash fractionally enlivened with molasses), frumenty (a milky mush), hoe-cake (another kind of mush), and that mysterious compound of the Little Miss Muffett nursery rhyme, curds and whey. (For the record, curds are the coagulated residue of milk and whey the watery remains created while making cheese.) Curds were also used to make syllabub, another sweet dish.
Pudding signified not just a dessert (a word that had recently entered the language from France and was pronounced ‘duh-zart‘) but a wider range of dishes, from black or blood pudding to hasty pudding (a cornmeal mush so named because it could be prepared quickly). Cranberries were at first also called craneberries, cramberries or bounce-berries because you bounced them to see if they were fresh. Fool, as in gooseberry fool, meant clotted cream. Duff, as in plum duff, merely reflected a variant pronunciation of dough. Doughnuts, which the Puritans had discovered from the Dutch during their years in Holland, did not have the hole with which we associate them now, but were small balls – ’nuts’ in the parlance of the time – of fried dough. They also ate doughboys, often spelled ‘dowboys’, a dumpling made of flour or cornmeal.
Until 1624, when the first shipment of cows reached Plymouth, the colony’s supply of livestock consisted of only half a dozen goats, fifty pigs and about as many chickens, but by the mid-1630s matters were improving rapidly. By then, with the population of Massachusetts standing at more than 4,000, the colony could boast 1,500 cows, 4,000 goats and ‘swine innumerable’. Cows primarily had a dairy role. For a very long while meat came almost exclusively in the form of pork – indeed, in the South ‘meat’ and ‘pork’ were used interchangeably.
As time moved on, the diet of the average American became heartier if not a great deal more appealing. In an environment where women devoted their lives to an endless, exhausting round of doing everything from weaving to making soap and candles to salting and pickling anything that could be preserved, it is hardly surprising that quality cooking was at a premium and that most people were, in the words of Thomas Jefferson, ‘illy fed’. None the less, by the late eighteenth century, portions for almost everyone were abundant, and visitors from the Old World commonly remarked
on the size of meals in even the humblest households. For the wealthier families, dishes were varied and, by earlier standards, exotic. The cookbook kept at Mount Vernon, written by George Washington’s mother, tells us much about both the variety of foods eaten and their sometimes curious spelling and pronunciation, notably ‘mushrumps’, ‘hartichocke pie’, ‘fryckecy of chicken’, and ‘lettice tart’.
By the time of the Revolution, the main meal was taken between two and four o’clock in the afternoon, and eaten in an order that strikes us today as a trifle odd. A typical meal might consist of salted beef with potatoes and peas, followed by baked or fried eggs, fish and salad, with a variety of sweets, puddings, cheeses and pastries to finish, all washed down with quantities of alcohol that would leave most of us today unable to rise from the table.5 Meat was consumed in quantities that left European observers slack-jawed in astonishment. By the early 1800s the average American was eating almost 180 lb. of meat a year, 48 lb. more than people were consuming a century later, but fresh meat remained largely unknown because of the difficulty of keeping it fresh. Even city people often had chickens in the yard and a hog or two left to scavenge in the street. Until well into the nineteenth century visitors to New York remarked on the hazard to traffic presented by wandering hogs along Broadway. Even in the more temperate north, meat would go off in a day in summer, and milk would curdle in as little as an hour. Spoiled food was a daily hazard for the wealthy as much as for the poor. One guest at a dinner party given by the Washingtons noted with a certain vicious relish that the General discreetly pushed his plate of sherry trifle to one side when he discovered that the cream was distinctly iffy but that the less discerning Martha continued shovelling it away with gusto. Ice-cream was a safer option. It was first mentioned in America in the 1740s when a guest at a banquet given by the governor of Maryland wrote about this novelty which, he noted, ‘eat most deliciously’.
