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DC Railways Changed Food & Diet

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DC Railways Changed Food & Diet HOW THE RAILROAD CHANGED FOOD & DIET IN WASHINGTON DC If we are what we eat, Americans must have experienced a major body remake during the century after the nation’s capital opened for business in 1800. What they ate, where they got it, and how they prepared it changed dramatically as the years unfolded. New foods appeared, edibles once grown locally began showing up from faraway places, seasonal treats became year-round options. Food and drink once laboriously prepared at home became available in packages or bottles from the local market. In barely a century the local and limited menu of the Colonial American kitchen had traveled into the modern era. Increasingly it made the journey in railroad boxcars. Between 1825 and 1915, the United States went from having zero miles of railroad track to having 254,000 miles, as much as the rest of the world combined. Railroads tied together a national transport web of rivers, canals, roads, and coastal waters. They also provided a far faster and cheaper method of transporting every imaginable kind of product, from cast iron stoves to crates of oranges and kegs of beer. Washington, DC, as the nation’s capital, might have led this food revolution, and in fact one of the first American cookbooks was published here in 1824. That was the 2 3 exception, however, and the District remained a culinary backwater compared with its big sisters up north. Partly that came from mindset, the District being notoriously a provincial Southern town through the antebellum years. Partly also it came from the limitations of its transportation infrastructure. In Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New York, government and private initiatives were investing in the construction of railroads as vital connectors of the transport network, but Washington had no comparable vision and staked its future heavily on the C&O Canal and the Potomac River. Poorly connected with the emerging national railroad net, Washingtonians risked becoming isolated from the riches of the booming American economy and its food cornucopia. Such deprivation was unacceptable once the nation began to fulfill its manifest destiny after the Civil War. A capital worthy of the nation would need to exchange its traditional edibles and diet for the emerging culture of factory food produced in superabundance. The question was simply when and how. The answer emerged quickly after the war, driven by the District’s growing size and affluence and by the ambitions of the railroads themselves. 4 5 WIKIMEDIA corn fields, and swamps . Sometimes Margaret Smith’s Washington, 1833 Food in Old Washington a whole square would be taken up by “City of Washington When the District became a a peach or apple orchard.” Washingto- from Beyond the Navy Yard,” by George functioning capital in 1800, its residents nians typically drove to Georgetown to Cooke, 1833. The had food options hardly different from buy flour, potatoes (from Maine), and view, from the south those of their colonial-era other foodstuffs. side of the Anacostia River, shows the forebears. Life moved at the Into this bucolic domain of a few Navy Yard, Capitol, speed of horses and the wind, thousand souls came Margaret Bayard and White House as defining features. and food could travel no fast- Smith (1778-1844) and her husband, Fields and empty land er from grower to consumer. journalist Samuel Harrison Smith, cover most of Buzzard Point and environs The new national capital, founder of the city’s first newspaper, in the middle left. connected to the world with the National Intelligencer. They arrived INSET: REDWOOD LIBRARY AND ATHENAEUM; IMAGE BY NEW-YORK HISTORICAL HISTORICAL NEW-YORK BY IMAGE AND ATHENAEUM; LIBRARY REDWOOD INSET: a few bad roads and the Poto- from Philadelphia in 1800, even ear- mac River, was an overgrown lier than the Colonel’s memory could village dotted with fields and reach. Margaret, whose circle of friends farms and lacking an ade- included Thomas Jefferson, chronicled quate food infrastructure of her decades-long life in the District in grocery stores, wholesalers, innumerable letters to relatives and and public markets. Old-tim- friends. Missives dating from her first ers like Col. James A. Tait of decade in the city suggest that food was A Distinguished Capitol Hill could recall life in the 1830s, not something taken for granted. Soon Resident and Author in the New Capital when “South Washington, or what was after settling in Washington, for exam- Margaret Bayard Smith, formerly known as the Island, was in ple, she began visiting neighbors in an painting by Charles Bird King, ca. 1829. those days a succession of wheat and unspecified area that probably lay near 6 7 the Navy Yard. A Mrs. Bell returned the visit, in mid-November 1800, bringing Kitchen Labor suitable gifts: a basket of sweet potatoes Once gotten, the food had to be and cabbages. On another occasion prepared, and here too the DC home- Margaret and Mrs. Tingey, wife of the maker faced challenges. Preparation superintendent of the Navy Yard, went required an enormous amount of work shopping in Georgetown and then by later standards. This can be seen from stopped at Mrs. Bell’s on the way back. the many recipes for preserving foods The hostess treated them to lunch and offered by Mary Randolph (1762-1828), then gave Margaret some cake, apples, who ran an upscale boardinghouse in a bottle of milk, and a bottle of yeast. the District in the 1820s and wrote the She also gave her a bundle of hops. nation’s first regional cookbook, The Evidently Mrs. Bell brewed beer and Virginia Housewife or Methodical Cook, assumed her friend did too. published in 1824 in the District and Washingtonians in Margaret Smith’s enjoying many reprints. day ate many of the foods that were Randolph’s recipe for curing available in later decades. Beef, pork, beef, to cite only one, advises the OF VIRGINIA 2009”/LIBRARY IN HISTORY “VIRGINIA WOMEN lamb, and veal homemaker to prepare the brine figured high among in mid-October, in the following meats, while fish and manner. Get a 30-gallon cask, poultry included remove one head and fill it with shad, rock, catfish, a pound of saltpeter, 15 quarts of chicken, turkey, salt, and 15 gallons of cold water. ducks, and pigeon. This would produce enough Finding the food brine to cure “all the beef which could be a chal- a private family can use in the lenge, however, as course of a winter.” Even assum- BOYD’S WASHINGTON AND GEORGETOWN DIRECTORY/SMITHSONIAN LIBRARIES DIRECTORY/SMITHSONIAN AND GEORGETOWN WASHINGTON BOYD’S a British diplomat ing the servants did the heavy discovered during lifting, it meant a large invest- Fine Groceries in his posting from 1822 to 1825. Henry ment of household labor, but DC’s Cookbook, 1824 1860 Advertisement Unwin Addington wrote that in 1822 the there was more. To salt the beef, saw a The first regional by King & Burchell, cookbook written in an upscale grocer local market was ill-supplied with fresh molasses hogshead in half to provide the United States. in Washington that meat, vegetables, and fruit during the a tub for laying out the beef after it has This is the title page sold a variety of of the third edition. food items from the summer. As testimony to the justice of been rubbed with fine Liverpool salt. US and abroad. his complaint, he cited an exchange with After removing it 10 days later, put it in his cook, whom he had sent to market the brine and leave it for about 10 days to buy food for dinner. “The market was more, when it will be fit to eat. very poor today, sir,” explained the cook, The housewife could not be squea- who could find only some stale catfish, mish about blood and guts, as is a little poor-looking veal, and no beef at evident from the cookbook’s advice on all. “What the deuce have you got then?” how to make black puddings: “Catch demanded Addington. A forequarter of the blood as it runs from the hog, stir it lamb and two small chickens was the continually till cold to prevent its coag- reply. And for vegetables? “I have got ulating …” And she needed a surgeon’s some potatoes, sir, and a few beans, and steady hand and anatomical knowledge an eggplant. There was nothing else. when cutting up organs. To make calf’s And I have bought a muskmelon and a heart, “a nice dish . take the heart and few peaches.” liver from the harslet [organs], and cut 8 9 HOW STUFF WORKS STUFF HOW off the windpipe, boil the lights [lungs] when the Evening Star asked, “Where very tender, and cut them in small Do the Supplies Come From?” It noted PINTEREST pieces.” After making a gravy, cut the that “three or four of the leading hotel ventricle out of the heart, wash it, coat proprietors have their own market farms it with lard, fill the cavity with stuffing, and gardens in the neighborhood of the put it in a pan and bake it. city, from whence they draw supplies, References from Margaret Smith’s let- and where stock is kept to be killed as The Wooden Box ters describe a domestic situation com- needed for the table. The Willard’s have Boxes, like barrels, were common patible with that presumed in Randolph’s a farm north of Twentieth street, where packaging devices for cookbook. In a letter of Jan. 23, 1804, they have at the present time several all kinds of products, from beer to fruit. Margaret explained that she had begun hundred turkeys, pigs, &c.” Senate beer was a baking her own bread and breakfast rolls, Many residents raised livestock product of the Heurich Brewery, a mainstay in addition to preparing the main meal and poultry or kept cows for milk.
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