• DOI:10.1353/eal.2003.0041
• Corpus ID: 161615724

Distant Tables: Food and the Novel in Early America

@article{McWilliams2003DistantTF,
  title={Distant Tables: Food and the Novel in Early America},
  author={Mark McWilliams},
  journal={Early American Literature},
  year={2003},
  volume={38},
  pages={365 - 393}
}

• Mark McWilliams
• Published 20 November 2003
• History
• Early American Literature

After the Revolution, some citizens of the new United States were worried about what to eat. What would be proper food for a new republic? With old English ways now tainted by association with monarchy and new French alternatives already marked by continental decadence, foodways became part of a larger debate between luxury and virtue. In the end, rather than change eating habits shaped through years of adapting local ingredients to British tastes, Americans sought to redescribe them, to claim an American identity for foodways that would remain fundamentally British well into the nineteenth century. American cuisine was thus born in the anxiety of identity. While this debate occurred in newspapers, club literature, and even poetry—Joel Barlow’s ‘‘The Hasty Pudding’’ celebrates a kind of culinary nativism—such discussions did not appear in early American novels like The Coquette orCharlotte Temple. In the opening decades of the nineteenth century, however, food became much more important in the historical fiction that helped create a national literature. As part of the emerging myth of republican simplicity, novelists like Lydia Maria Child, James Fenimore Cooper, and Catharine Maria Sedgwick introduced fictive representations of local food and reimagined the role of domestic labor—and, in the process, helped define American culture by encoding food with social and moral meaning. Just as in dress or manners, choices in what and how to eat helped locate individuals and the nation itself within the central debate between what came to be seen as European luxury and what was claimed as American virtue. The Declaration of Independence did not extend to American cookery. In the early republic—and indeed through the Civil War—eating habits in the new nation largely followed patterns established by the colonists, who had responded to the abundance of the NewWorld by doggedly recreating British cuisine. The first English settlers in North America found an extraordinary variety of new foods that they refused to eat. Drawing on what