Colonial Virginia was divided in many ways. Food was the great uniter.

The year 2026 marks the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. Cardinal News has embarked on a three-year project to tell the little-known stories of Virginia’s role in the march to independence. This project is supported, in part, by a grant from the Virginia American Revolution 250 Commission. You can sign up to receive a free monthly newsletter with updates. Find all our stories from this project on the Cardinal 250 page.

Frank Clark has many jobs, and one of them is gently correcting misconceptions he hears about food in Colonial America. One of the most common is that before refrigeration, people used a lot of spices in their cooking to cover up the taste of rancid meat.

Not so, Clark says. The animal protein our ancestors consumed was often well-preserved, and when meat came fresh, it had often been clucking or bleating just hours — and sometimes minutes — before. There’s little opportunity for spoilage, much less food poisoning, within such a system of consumption.

Clark is Colonial Williamsburg’s master of historic foodways, a trade program that interprets colonial cuisine for visitors to the 18th-century living history museum. When folks stop in to see Clark and his crew of tradesmen at work, there’s an air of mystery and exoticism in the vignette — after all, they’re using period iron cookware over an open flame. But behind the veil of time, there’s something else in that display, too: recognition. Most of the foods that Colonial Americans ate wouldn’t be out of place on our dinner table today.

Just as the task of inventorying a modern grocery store would be a monumental endeavor, so too is it too exhaustive a chore to list every food that people in colonial America ate. Suffice it to say, however, there was a wide range of familiar meats, vegetables and starches, as a 1656 observation from Englishman John Hammond illustrates less than a half-century after the founding of Jamestown:

“Cattle and Hogs are every where, which yield beef, veal, milk, butter, cheese and other made dishes, … these with the help of Orchards and Gardens, Oysters, Fish, Fowle and Venison.”

There’s another parallel between then and now, too. Colonial American diets reflected the melting pot that the continent became during the Colonial era. Although distinctions of race and class were rigid in Colonial America, everyone had to eat. Food often transcended nourishment and became an instrument of politics, resistance and power.

Englishmen who settled in Virginia in the 17th century found out the hard way that their system of food production needed modification if they were to survive. The humid climate did not favor wheat, England’s preferred grain, and salt-preserved meat didn’t keep indefinitely with so much moisture in the air.

But the Powhatan Indians had perfected their food production over millennia, and were practicing agriculture, hunting and fishing when Europeans showed up. The staples of their diet included corn, beans, squash and pumpkins, along with fish and game they harvested, according to Roger Ballance, a historical interpreter at Paspahegh Town, a recreated Powhatan Indian community at Jamestown Settlement near Williamsburg.

In fact, Native foodways were so effective they were adopted by Europeans, which is why a popular food like the country ham uses both the English method of salting and the Native method of smoking for its long-term preservation, Ballance says. 

But at a more basic level, many Native American foods became mainstays of American cuisine into modern times. “Corn is everywhere in the American diet, even in something like a soda, sweetened with high-fructose corn syrup,” Ballance says.

Other crops that originated in more distant Native American communities, among them potatoes and chocolate, have also had a major influence on cuisine worldwide.

Africans and their descendants likewise contributed heartily to American cuisine, according to Michael Twitty, author of “The Cooking Gene: A Journey Through African American Culinary History in the Old South,” which won the 2018 James Beard Foundation’s book of the year award. Africans brought with them crops like black-eyed peas, okra and, importantly, rice. Southern colonies consumed and exported rice in vast quantities. “Africans had been eating rice for 5,000 years,” Twitty says.

Black men and, especially, women were among the most common cooks in formative years of American cuisine, so they influenced how food was made and presented, according to Twitty. There was a shared sense of camaraderie and empathy with poor whites and Native Americans. Into this cauldron, American food began to take shape, and we have numerous methods for preparing food, such as barbecue, to thank for this association.

And it wasn’t just the laboring classes that enjoyed what was cooked up. One of George Washington’s favorite foods was hoecakes — a cornmeal-based flatbread frequently eaten in enslaved and Native communities. Thomas Jefferson was fond of guinea fowl, poultry of west African origin.

Black Americans were all too familiar with the cash crops of plantation agriculture such as tobacco, indigo and rice, but even in the context of the backbreaking labor they endured to line planters’ pockets, they often had a small but meaningful measure of control over their day-to-day lives: their garden.

Gardens were full of plants that had originated on several continents, including Africa. “Plants have enormous ceremonial and symbolic value in various west African cultures,” Twitty says. “It was a way to remember their culture and keep it alive.”

What’s more, the garden was a symbol of resistance, a way for them to take control of part of a diet that was based on a ration system of bland and predictable food such as cornmeal and small amounts of preserved protein. “They didn’t speak in terms of health, but they sure felt it,” Twitty says. “Having something fresh from the garden — they felt that in their bodies.”

In fact, many Colonial Americans, the vast majority of whom practiced agriculture, had sizable kitchen gardens they tended alongside their bread-and-butter commodities. The gardens provided food that could be prepared fresh on the dinner table or preserved for the bleak, lean times of winter.

The range of food available in the 18th century was reflected by the first contemporary cookbook to be widely distributed and used, “The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy” by Hannah Glasse, published in 1747.

Glasse noted in her introduction that she wrote the cookbook with the intention “to instruct the lower sort,” a clear (if a little crude to modern ears) attempt to signify that the work was meant for those who weren’t among the privileged classes. That’s why there were chapters devoted to commonly-enjoyed dishes in the 18th century, sections with simple names such as “To dress Fish,” “Of Soops and Broths,” “Of Puddings” and “Of Pies.”

But Glasse was explicit that much of the content was also intended for servants in the aristocratic homes of the day, which is why she included chapters such as “To make a Number of pretty little Dishes for Supper or Side-dish, and little Corner-dishes for a great Table.”

As much as those fancy displays were there to provide sustenance, they also had another role for wealthy Americans. One of the sites where Clark, of Colonial Williamsburg, works in the restored town is the kitchen of the Governor’s Palace, the recreated mansion of the colony of Virginia’s royal governor. There, interpretive staff prepares food that would have been fit for a table of such status.

“The governor used that table in many ways, one of which was to impress people with his wealth and thereby the wealth of the king and the empire,” Clark says.