reakfast 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.
0198601751breakfastfoods1 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.
Early New England
As the colonies took hold and grew richer, the diets of the colonists improved and expanded. In New England, cornmeal mush—known as hasty pudding—was still popular, served with maple syrup or, later, with molasses. But with prosperity, the colonists added coffee and tea to their breakfasts. Breads, meat, and fruit pies became part of the breakfast menu as well. The breads were often cornmeal mixed with other grains, such as “rye ‘n’ injun” (hearth-baked corn-and-rye bread) or brown bread (steamed bread made with rye, corn, and wheat). The meat was likely to be salt pork. Exactly why fruit pies came to be such popular breakfast items in early American life has never been studied, but the answers are not difficult to guess: a pie made the day before could sit overnight without spoiling and was readily available to eat upon demand in the morning, with no further cooking. It was filling and relatively nutritious—containing fruit, sweetener, fat, and grain—and it tasted good. Breakfast in New England was typically an early affair, partaken when the farmers rose to begin their chores.
Early South
In the southern colonies, the settlers added tea and coffee to their cornmeal breakfasts, rounding them out more luxuriously than their northern cousins with eggs, meats, fruit, breads, and cheese. As slavery and the plantation system grew, the difference between northern and southern eating habits grew as well. The southern plantation owner would rise early to survey his holdings, perhaps breaking his fast with a julep—because the drink was supposed to protect against malaria—but his first real meal would be eaten later in the morning. With servants or slaves to help with the cooking, the southern kitchen became famous for its breakfasts: grits lavishly dappled with butter, succulent pieces of fried ham and redeye gravy, spoon bread or hominy soufflé, eggs and toast, grilled chicken or game, fried shrimps or oysters, and as many different types of sweet breads as the cook could imagine. When chocolate became known in the late 1700s, the expensive hot drink became another part of the sumptuous feast.
While the New England colonies had been settled by Protestants from England, whose frugal attitudes were reflected in their foods, the southern colonies were settled by widely differing groups. There the English colonists were often from wealthy families, and they proudly tried to duplicate the hunt breakfasts and landed-gentry style of the old country. Protestant refugees from France, known as Huguenots, also settled the area, adding a French touch to the emerging local cooking. Slaves from Africa and the West Indies not only added more elements to the southern cuisine, they provided leisure time for the slave owners to enjoy lavish meals.
Early Mid-Atlantic Region
In the Mid-Atlantic colonies the early settlers were the common-sense, middle-class Dutch and Swedes, followed by English settlers, who tended to be much more moderate than their northern neighbors and more middle class than their southern counterparts. The English colonists welcomed settlers from other lands, and soon the Mid-Atlantic areas filled up with Welsh, Irish, and Germans. Like their neighbors north and south, this very practical group of people ate cornmeal mush and cornbreads washed down with beer or cider, but they also brought with them a number of new foods that became identified with American breakfasts. The best known of these foods was the Dutch waffle.
Although in Europe waffles were primarily a dessert and feast food—dusted with powdered sugar or lavished with whipped cream—in America they were treated like many other quick breads and were served for breakfast garnished with syrup, either maple or the molasses that was appearing as a result of the slave trade in the West Indies. Waffles also became popular as a sort of bread, served topped with creamed items such as chicken or chipped beef.
Oliebollen (oil balls)—doughnuts without the hole—were another Dutch food that became common Mid-Atlantic breakfast fare. The New England doughnut with the hole in the middle was the one that became a regular part of American breakfasts, but some theorists believe that the Pilgrim settlers became fond of doughnuts during their stay in Holland and brought them to the New World. Dutch cooks also introduced deep-fried crullers sprinkled with powdered sugar.
Buckwheat pancakes were popular in the middle Atlantic region as well as in New England. Traditionally, they were made with a slightly sour yeast starter, and the batter had to be mixed at least twenty-four hours before the pancakes were cooked. Because the pancakes were considered heating to the system and the buckwheat grain was not harvested until late in the year, raised buckwheat pancakes were a winter breakfast dish. They were enormously popular throughout the United States in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, so much so that the English traveler George Makepeace Towle said in 1870, “It is hard for the American to rise from his winter breakfast without his buckwheat cakes” (Mariani, 1983). However, by the middle of the twentieth century buckwheat cakes had become something of an anachronism.
Breakfast in the Developing Nation
As the colonies developed into a nation, immigrants continued to enrich the American breakfast table. The Moravians settled in Pennsylvania, Georgia, and North Carolina, bringing with them a sweet, yeast-raised coffee cake, known as Moravian sugar cake. In Philadelphia, where Ben Franklin was defending the American breakfast of coffee and corn cakes to mocking Englishmen, the yeast-raised Philadelphia sticky—or cinnamon—bun, a specialty of the Swiss and Germans, became breakfast staple.
In the South, the breakfast tradition of lavish hot breads continued. Beaten biscuits—so called because the dough was literally beaten with a rolling pin for thirty minutes or more—were the sure sign of a genteel, and slave-filled, kitchen. With the advent of chemical leavens at the end of the 1700s, the popularity of quick breads accelerated. Biscuits, pancakes, and waffles (which had formerly been raised with either yeast or beaten egg whites), chemically raised cornbreads, and cakes all became popular breakfast fare.
When Louisiana became part of the growing country in 1803, another rich contribution was made to the breakfast table. With its exotic mix of French, Indian, Spanish, French Acadians (or Cajuns), and free and enslaved Africans, Louisiana’s unique cuisine gave us French doughnuts, or beignets; calas (deep fried rice cakes dusted with powdered sugar); and pain perdu (French toast), all served up with Louisiana-style café au lait enriched with bitter chicory. The Louisiana breakfast table was also likely to feature pork sausage, grits and grillades (braised beef or veal with gravy), biscuits, and eggs. Another interesting dish was called coush coush, a kind of cornmeal mush enriched with eggs and served with molasses.
To visiting Europeans, the lavish American breakfasts were quite startling. One Scotsman reported on a visit he made to a humble backwoods home in the United