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Post by ljunlogged on Jan 11, 2007 9:33:36 GMT -5
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Post by ljunlogged on Jan 11, 2007 9:37:41 GMT -5
Breakfast Foods
A twenty-first-century American might find a typical Pilgrim breakfast of cider, cornmeal mush, and maple syrup a bit spartan, but it would be recognizable. However, to a Pilgrim, a twenty-first-century breakfast of corn flakes with sliced banana, a toaster pastry, and a glass of orange juice would be almost incomprehensible. How we went from one to the other is the story of breakfast in America. And like the stories of many American foods, it involves a new continent, a mixture of scientific discoveries, vast waves of immigration from around the globe, with the addition of the Industrial Revolution and the American propensity for advertising and marketing.
When the first colonists arrived in the New World from Europe, one of the things they quickly discovered was that the foods they were used to were no longer available. Wheat for bread and porridge was difficult to grow. The pigs and hens that might provide breakfast meats and eggs were scarce. Milk cows were few and far between. Coffee and tea were simply too expensive and exotic to be imported. What the colonists did find in the new land was a new grain: Indian corn, or maize. And though at first they longed for their Old World wheat, they found that maize could be baked into bread, cooked into porridge, and prepared in many new ways, demonstrating that maize not only staved off hunger, it was also an appealing food.
The Native Americans showed the colonists not only how to grow the corn but also how to prepare it and grind it, how to cook it into cakes and pones, and how to stew it into what the Europeans had called porridge but which became known by the American term “mush.” Cornmeal mixed with water and a little salt and cooked into cakes or into mush was a typical breakfast throughout the early settlements. When fat was available, pieces of mush could be fried to an appealing crispness. As soon as the colonists had sweeteners—once they learned how to extract syrup from maple trees and once the beehives imported from Europe were producing honey—they used them to add interest and calories to their corn-based preparations.
In the new American colonies, the breakfast drink of choice for most was either hard cider or low-alcohol beer. Although the idea of starting the day with an alcoholic drink seems strange to us, at that time it made a great deal of sense: water contained no nutrients and was very often polluted; milk was considered a drink only for babies; and coffee and tea were expensive or nonexistent. But hard cider and beer, if drunk in moderation, were not high enough in alcohol content to be debilitating. They were cheap to make from easily available ingredients and, because of their natural yeasts and ferments, were rich in essential nutrients.
In this article from The Oxford Encyclopedia of Food & Drink in America, Sylvia Lovegren details the history of the first meal of the day. Bon Appetit!
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