Home Life in Colonial Days

by Alice Morse Earle

As comparatively few New England families in the seventeenth century owned churns, I cannot think that many made butter; of course families of wealth ate it, but it was not common as to-day. In the inventories of the property of the early settlers of Maine there is but one churn named. Butter was worth from threepence to sixpence a pound. As cattle increased the duties of the dairy grew, and soon were never-ceasing and ever-tiring. The care of cream and making of butter was in the eighteenth century the duty of every good wife and dame in the country, and usually in the town.

Though the shape and ease of action of churns varied, still butter-making itself varied little from the same work to-day. Several old-time churns are shown, the revolving one being the most unusual.

Cheese was plentiful and good in all the Northern colonies. It was also an unending care from the time the milk was set over the fire to warm and then to curdle; through the breaking of the curds in the cheese-basket; through shaping into cheeses and pressing in the cheese-press, placing them on the cheese-ladders, and constantly turning and rubbing them. An old cheese-press, cheese-ladder, and cheese-basket from Deerfield Memorial Hall are shown in the illustration.

In all households, even in those of great wealth and many servants, assistance was given in all housewifery by the daughters of the household. In the South it was chiefly by superintendence and teaching through actual exposition the negro slaves; in the North it was by the careful performance of the work.

The manuscript cooking receipt-book of many an ancient dame shows the great care they took in family cooking. English methods of cooking at the time of the settlement of this country were very complicated and very laborious.

It was a day of hashes, ragouts, soups, hotch-pots, etc. There were no great joints served until the time of Charles the First. In almost every sixteenth-century receipt for cooking meat, appear some such directions as these: "Y-mynce it, smyte them on gobbets, hew them on gobbets, chop on gobbets, hew small, dyce them, skern them to dyce, kerf it to dyce, grind all to dust, smyte on peces, parcel-hem; hew small on morselyen, hack them small, cut them on culpons." Great amounts of spices were used, even perfumes; and as there was no preservation of meat by ice, perhaps the spices and perfumes were necessary.

Of course the colonists were forced to adopt simpler ways of cooking, but as towns and commerce increased there were many kitchen duties which made much tedious work. Many pickles, spiced fruits, preserves, candied fruits and flowers, and marmalades were made.

Preserving was a very different art from canning fruit to-day. There were no hermetically sealed jars, no chemical methods, no quick work about it. Vast jars were filled with preserves so rich that there was no need of keeping the air from them; they could be opened, that is, the paper cover taken off, and used as desired; there was no fear of fermentation, souring, or moulding.

The housewives pickled samphire, fennel, purple cabbage, nasturtium-buds, green walnuts, lemons, radish-pods, barberries, elder-buds, parsley, mushrooms, asparagus, and many kinds of fish and fruit. They candied fruits and nuts, made many marmalades and quiddonies, and a vast number of fruit wines and cordials. Even their cakes, pies, and puddings were most complicated, and humble households were lavish in the various kinds they manufactured and ate.

They collared and potted many kinds of fish and game, and they salted and soused. Salted meat was eaten, and very little fresh meat; for there were no means of keeping meat after it was killed. Every well-to-do family had a "powdering-tub," in which meat was "powdered," that is, salted and pickled. Many families had a smoke-house, in which beef, ham, and bacon were smoked.