Americans introduced the English to corn, tomatoes, and pumpkins.
Unlike their English cousins, the Virginia settlers adopted these
foods immediately. In the long run, most of the natives disappeared,
were pushed out, or died of disease, but their crops were
enthusiastically adopted and became staples among the colonists. The other factor affecting Virginian cooking is that there was a
large number of poorer Englishmen—or sometimes Scots or Scots-
Irish—who came to Virginia either as indentured servants or to start
small subsistence farms or to work in cities. Necessity forced these
people to make use of anything they could grow, and it seems like
they were the fi rst people to meld all of the disparate traditions,
which eventually become standard among all levels of society.
The most prevalent meat eaten in the south is not beef or lamb
or any kind of expensive meat eaten fresh—it’s pork. This has
something to do with the abundance of corn used as feed for hogs.
Rice also becomes very important to the South in general because
it grows well in the marshy Carolinas. The English settlers had no
idea how to grow it, but the African slaves did (and had been doing
so for centuries).
Virginia is part of a large empire that by the 18th century includes
footholds in India, the Caribbean, and the Mediterranean. The
English own Gibraltar and control much of the trade, so we fi nd
lemons, anchovies, and currants in Virginia, pineapples and allspice
from Jamaica, sugarloaves from Barbados, pepper and cinnamon
from Ceylon, and ketchup from Indonesia.
The combination of all these disparate ingredients with some
very sturdy English foods—including smoked hams and bacon,
chickens, beef and mutton—becomes matter of course, as it still is
in this country. There are also native ingredients, including oysters,
crabs, fi sh, deer, rabbit, beaver, ducks, geese, and turkeys. Virginian
cuisine becomes as complex and rich as English cuisine and uses
many of the same imports, but they put them together in very
unique ways, given the odd mix of peoples.