05/20/2026
I have about 20-30 historic cookbooks with the about 300 others in my collection. Always inspiration and revelation!!
In 1750s Williamsburg, Virginia, the same tavern that served roast pigeon, syllabub and imported Madeira to wealthy planters and colonial officials was feeding its own workers hoecakes, salt fish and small beer. Same building, just a completely different table.
The food culture of colonial Virginia is one of the most thoroughly documented in American history, largely because Colonial Williamsburg's research department has spent decades cross-referencing 18th century cookbooks, household inventories, tavern records and archaeological evidence to reconstruct exactly what people were eating and who was eating what.
The two primary cookbook sources in active circulation in 1750s Williamsburg were E. Smith's The Compleat Housewife, the first cookbook printed in America, published in Williamsburg in 1742, and Hannah Glasse's The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy, published in 1747, which was explicitly written for servants and domestic cooks rather than the gentry. Both are freely available in full on Internet Archive. The gentry dining at the King's Arms Tavern or Shields Tavern were eating from menus that drew on those books. Roast capon with oyster sauce. Syllabub. Food designed to impress.
The workers in those same establishments ate something else entirely. Salt pork was so universal in colonial Virginia that guests in private homes and public taverns found salted meat on the menu at nearly every meal. The practice of preserving it with salt was so widespread that virtually no fresh meat was served in summer because of the heat. Tavern workers ate hoecakes, the cornmeal flatbread cooked on a griddle in lard that George Washington ate for breakfast every morning of his adult life and that working Virginians of every background ate daily. Salt fish, soaked overnight to draw out the brine and then dressed simply with melted butter. Small beer, a lightly fermented low-alcohol grain drink brewed from whatever was available, consumed at every meal including breakfast by men, women and children because it was safer than the water. The contrast between the syllabub and the hoecake, produced in the same kitchen for people sitting in the same building, is the entire class structure of colonial Virginia in two dishes.
I am planning to recreate a full colonial Williamsburg tavern meal from both sides of that divide soon, sourcing the recipes directly from the 1742 and 1747 cookbooks that were actually in use in those kitchens. Should I do this? And which side of the table would you have been sitting on?
-Donnie
eatshistory.com
