Salted fish was as carefully prepared and amiably regarded in New York as in England and Holland at the same date. The ling and herring of the old country gave place in New York to shad. The greatest pains was taken in preparing, drying, and salting the plentiful shad. It is said that in towns, as in New York and Brooklyn, great heaps of shad were left when purchased at each door, and that the necessary cleaning and preparation was done on the street. As all housewives purchased shad and salted and packed at about the same time, those public scavengers, the domestic hogs, who roamed the town-streets unchecked (and ever welcomed), must have been specially useful at shad-time.
At a very early date apple-trees were set out and cultivated with much care and much success. Nowhere else, says Dankers, had he seen such fine apples. He notes the Double Paradise. The Newtown pippin, the Kingston spitzenburgh, the Poughkeepsie swaar-apple, the red-streak, guelderleng, and others of well-known name, show New York’s attention to apple-raising. Kalm, the Swedish naturalist, spoke of the splendid apple-orchards throughout New York in 1749, and told of the horse-press for making cider. Cider soon rivalled in domestic use the beer of the Fatherland. It was constantly used during the winter season, and, diluted with water, sweetened, and flavored with nutmeg, made a grateful summer drink.
Peaches were in such lavish abundance as to become uncared for. The roads were covered with fallen peaches which even the ever-filled hogs would not eat. Plums were equally plentiful. Cherry-trees were planted in good numbers and produced in great quantities. “All travellers and passers-by could pick and eat at will,” says Kalm. Comparatively scanty and poor are peaches, plums, and cherries in New York State to-day.
There were also plenty of vegetables: cibollen (chibbals), peasen (pease), chicoreye (chiccory), karoten (carrots), artichock (artichoke), lattouwe (lettuce), beeten (beets), pastinaken (parsnips), radys (radish), and many others. Pumpkins and squashes abounded, but do not appear to have been in as universal use as in New England. Quaasiens were so easily cooked “they were a favorite with the young women,” says one authority; they “grew rapidly and digested well,” also were qualities accorded in their favor. Under the name of askutasquash, or vine-apples, Roger Williams sung their praises. Musk-melons, water-melons, and cucumbers were grown in large number and excellent quality. Whether they cooked the Duyvel’s broodt, the picturesque Dutch name for mushrooms, I know not, but the teeming woods of the Hudson valley offered them rich and abundant store of this dainty food.
The Swedish naturalist, Kalm, visited Albany in 1749. He has left to us a very full account of Albany food and fashions of serving at that time. He found the Albanians faring as did their great grandfathers in the Netherlands, who were sneeringly called “milk and cheese men,” and he found them rasping their cheese as had their far-away forbears in Holland, and as do their descendants in Holland to this day. He writes thus:—
“The inhabitants of Albany are much more sparing than the English. The meat which is served up is often insufficient to satisfy the stomach, and the bowl does not circulate so freely as among the English.... Their meat and manner of dressing it is very different from that of the English. Their Breakfast is tea, commonly without milk. About thirty or forty years ago, tea was unknown to them, and they breakfasted either upon bread and butter or bread and milk. They never put sugar into the cup but put a small bit of it into their mouths while they drink. Along with the tea they eat bread and butter with slices of hung beef. Coffee is not usual here: they breakfast generally about seven. Their dinner is buttermilk and bread to which they sometimes add sugar, and then it is a delicious dish to them: or fresh milk and bread: or boiled or roasted flesh. They sometimes make use of buttermilk instead of fresh milk to boil a thin kind of porridge with, which tastes very sour but not disagreeable in hot weather. To each dinner they have a great salad prepared with abundance of vinegar and little or no oil. They frequently eat buttermilk, bread and salad, one mouthful after another. Their supper is generally bread and butter, or milk and bread. They sometimes eat cheese at breakfast and at dinner: it is not in slices but scraped or rasped so as to resemble coarse flour, which they pretend adds to the good taste of cheese. They commonly drink very small beer or pure water.”
The “great salad dressed with vinegar” was doubtless “koolslaa,” shredded cabbage, which we to-day call coleslaw. It was a universal dish also at that time in Holland. A woman-traveller there in 1756 wrote:—
“Everything of vivers is dear in Holland except vegetables, upon which the commons live all summer, and the better sort a great deall. Every body, great and small, sups on sallad with oil and vinegar.”
The Dutch were famously fond of “bakers-meats,”—all cakes and breads,—and excelled in making them, and made them in great variety. There was early legislation with regard to bakers, that they use just weights and good materials. In 1656 they were ordered to bake twice a week “both coarse and white loaves, both for Christians and Indians,” at these prices: Fourteen stuyvers for a double coarse loaf of eight pounds, with smaller loaves at proportionate prices; and eight stuyvers for a white loaf of two pounds. Two years later the coarse wheat loaf of eight pounds was definitely priced at fourteen stuyvers in sea-want, ten in beavers, and seven in silver. The bakers complained, and a new assize of bread was established at a slightly higher rate. Under Dongan’s charter bread-viewers were appointed; then the bread had to be marked with the baker’s initials. I have puzzled over a prohibition of any bakers selling koeckjes, jumbles, and sweet cakes, unless he also had coarse bread for sale; and fancy it was that the extravagant and careless purchaser might not be tempted or forced to buy too costly food. One baker was prosecuted for having gingerbread in his window when he had no coarse bread. There were also “pye-women” as well as bakers.
Favorite articles of food were three kinds of fried cakes of close kinship, thus described by Irving,—“the doughty doughnut, the tender olykoek, the crisp and crumbling cruller.” The doughnut was an equal favorite in New England, and was in some localities called a simball, or simblin; which was a New England variant, a Puritan degradent of the simbling-cake, or simnel, of the English Mid-Lent Sunday. In New England country-houses doughnuts were eaten, indeed, are eaten, all the year around three meals a day; but Mrs. Vanderbilt says the Dutch in Flatbush only made them from November through January, because at that period the lard in which they were cooked was still fresh. She also says they were limited in their public appearance to the tea-table or for children to eat “between-meals.” I don’t know that I am willing to acquiesce in her assumption that when the Pilgrims were in Holland the English goodwives learned to make doughnuts from the Dutch vrouws, and thus be forced to yield doughnuts to the other triumphs of “Dutch colonial influence.”