Webography, Foodways
“Foodways” refers to the study of eighteenth-century cooking and
dining. Learn more about the cuisines that influenced Virginia cookery by investigating
the following bibliographic and textual resources.
Internet Resources from Colonial Williamsburg
Foodways
Program
Dining experience was important in colonial times. Read a short article
and listen to podcast interviews with Colonial Williamsburg Foodways staff.
Feeding
the Eighteenth-Century Town Folk, or, Whence the Beef?, by
Lorena S. Walsh
This talk was published in the Colonial Williamsburg Interpreter and is
based on the following NEH-funded research report.
Provisioning
Tidewater Towns
How did townspeople in Virginia and Maryland supply themselves with food
and fuel? This report surveys the preliminary results of an extended interdisciplinary
study, completed in 1997, of urban provisioning systems in the Chesapeake
region in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
Virginia Gazette
Browse through the want ads; use the alphabetical index for specific products
such as chocolate; for individual trades such as bakers; for slaves, women and
indentured servants.
York
County Probate Inventories, 1700-1780
These transcriptions of probate inventories list household possessions and
reveal patterns of consumption throughout the eighteenth century.
Diderot's
Encyclopedie Index to Illustrations
Search for images using words such as “ovens,” “bakery,”
“cheese-making,” “gardening,” “grain,” “molds,”
“potatoes,” “sugar,” and “wine-making.”
Trades
Index to Auction Catalogs
Sotheby's and Christie's catalogs (1990-1998) of eighteenth- and early
nineteenth-century drawings and paintings are indexed for objects of interest to tradespeople
of Colonial Williamsburg. Search “foodways” for a list of relevant
pictures.
Reports from the Research Department
Staff historians have studied colonial foodways in an effort to accurately
portray food and drink in Colonial Williamsburg. A few of these reports are
available online. Others can be obtained through interlibrary loan.
Hole, Donna C. Architectural Fittings in Colonial Kitchens. 1980.
Moorehead, Singleton P., 1900-1964. Architectural Report: Governor's Palace
Kitchen. 1951.
Moorehead, Singleton P., A. Lawrence Kocher and Howard Dearstyne.
Architectural
Report: Wythe House Outbuildings Block 21, The Kitchen - Building 7 ,
1940, 1951
Bowen, Joanne. Beef, Venison, and Imported Haddock in Colonial Virginia:
a Report on the Analysis of Faunal Remains from Jordan's Journey. 1996.
Brandau, Rosemary. The Butchering and Processing of Pork in Eighteenth
Century Williamsburg. 1984.
Brandau, Rosemary. Christmas Season Foods in Eighteenth Century Virginia.
1983.
Bullock, Helen. Governor's
Palace Kitchen Garden. 1934.
Bullock, Helen Claire Duprey. Kitchens in Colonial Virginia. 1931.
Bullock, Helen. The Williamsburg Art of Cookery, or, Accomplish'd Gentlewoman's
Companion. 1966.
Caldwell, Desiree B. Palace Kitchen Report. 1979.
Carson, Jane D. Colonial Virginia Cookery. 1968.
Carson, Jane D. Colonial Virginia Cookery: Procedures, Equipment, and Ingredients
in Colonial Cooking. 1984.
Department of Research. Governor's
Palace: Historical Notes . ca. 1930
Includes inventories from Spotswood, Fauquier and Botetourt and includes dinnerware,
and, in Botetourt’s case, the contents of his cellar; Some accounts of
the food purchased for the governor’s table. Subject index at the end
of the document.
Noël Hume, Audrey. Food. 1978.
Powers, Lou. The Palace Cellars: Foods and Beverages in the Botetourt Inventory.
1983.
Savedge, Catherine. The Brush-Everard Kitchen. 1969.
Stephenson, Mary A. Foods, entertainment and decorations for the table
: fashionable in Virginia and the Southern colonies in the eighteenth century
and early nineteenth century. 1948.
Articles from the Colonial Williamsburg Journal
“Rattle-Skull, Stonewall, Bogus, Blackstrap, Bombo, Mimbo,
Whistle Belly, Syllabub, Sling, Toddy, and Flip: Drinking in Colonial America,”
by Ed Crews, Holiday 2007.
“Kitchens,
Places Apart,” Michael Olmert, Summer 2007
“A
Much More Respectable Bird… a Bird of Courage: A Short History of the
Turkey,” Andrew G. Gardner, Holiday 2006
“Colonial
Foodways,” Ed Crews, Autumn 2004
Subjects related to Foodways include the following:
- African American cookery
- Beverages
- Cookery - Virginia
- Dinners and dining
- Food habits
- Indians of North America - Food
Other Internet Resources
American
Whiskey Trail
During the colonial era, whiskey had an important economic and social function
in the fabric of the community. The Gateway to the American Whiskey Trail
is the newly-reconstructed George Washington's Distillery at Historic Mount
Vernon.
Culinary History Online
This historic cooking web site contains thousands of links pertaining to
open hearth, bake oven, wood stove and other pre- WWI forms of cooking and
related subjects. Included are 500 e-text historic cookbooks and about 300
museums with cooking demos. Other topics range from mills which grind and
sell flours/cornmeals to inventories, glossaries, art, and more which are
on the web. Monthly topics deal with various subjects such as Rumford Baking
Powder, Wedding Cakes, the Codd bottle, New Years Cookies and what distinguishes
Christmas Plum Pudding from plum puddings.
Gunston Hall Plantation Probate Inventory Database, 1740-1810
This site has transcriptions of more than 300 probate inventories from selected
counties in Virginia and Maryland. The inventories are lists of the personal
and chattel property of the deceased at the time of death. Household furnishings
appearing in these inventories form the basis for an extensive database that
lists the kitchen equipment,
Monticello
Monticello offers a wiki with information that ranges from dining etiquette
to the mammoth cheese.
Food History
A guide to research using the collections of the Library of Congress. In
addition to books on cookery, scholarly treatises, bibliographies, travelers’
memoirs, letters and diaries.
Food
History News
offers a “Directory of Food and Beverage Museums and Collections.”
History
of English Cookery: A Glossary of Cookery and Other Terms
An accumulation of the glossaries compiled for six Prospect Books facsimile
reprints or transcripts of English cookery texts of the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries.
Historic
Food
The website of Ivan Day, scholar, for his research on British and European culinary
history.
Resources for Studying the History of Jamestown and Food in Virginia
A list of books recommended by the staff of the Peacock-Harper Culinary
Collection at Virginia Tech.
Subscription Resources (Available only to Colonial Williamsburg Staff)
America: History and Life
Indexes over 2,000 historical journals published worldwide. Approximately
16,000 new entries are added each year. A search for “food” or “cooking”
in the Subject box and “1700H” as the Time Period will yield citations
to some relevant articles.
Early
American Imprints, Series I: Evans, 1639-1800
Early
American Imprints, Series II: Shaw-Shoemaker, 1801-1819
Search these databases of full-text books, pamphlets, broadsides for cookery
books.
ECCO,
Eighteenth-Century Collections Online
This library of 150,000 printed volumes and more than 26 million pages can
be searched by author, title and keyword. A title search for “cookery”
yields more than 150 hits.
America's
Historical Newspapers, Series I, 1690-1876
The full text of hundreds of historic newspapers are indexed - find out what
foodstuffs were advertised for sale.
|
