Diet in the Transatlantic World During the Long Eighteenth Century Lindsey Nicole Phillips

Florida State University Libraries Electronic Theses, Treatises and Dissertations The Graduate School 2012 Edible Economies and Tasteful Rhetoric: Diet in the Transatlantic World during the Long Eighteenth Century Lindsey Nicole Phillips Follow this and additional works at the FSU Digital Library. For more information, please contact [email protected] THE FLORIDA STATE UNIVERSITY COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES EDIBLE ECONOMIES AND TASTEFUL RHETORIC: DIET IN THE TRANSATLANTIC WORLD DURING THE LONG EIGHTEENTH CENTURY By LINDSEY NICOLE PHILLIPS A Dissertation submitted to the Department of English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Degree Awarded: Fall Semester, 2012 Lindsey Nicole Phillips defended this dissertation on October 10, 2012. The members of the supervisory committee were: Candace Ward Professor Directing Dissertation Martin Munro University Representative Meegan Kennedy Hanson Committee Member Jerrilyn McGregory Committee Member Cristobal Silva Committee Member The Graduate School has verified and approved the above-named committee members, and certifies that the dissertation has been approved in accordance with university requirements. ii To my fellow gardeners and cooks because through our gardens and kitchens we taste the world iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I want to thank Candace Ward for her support, encouragement, and guidance throughout my graduate studies. My discussions with her shaped my project from its earliest phases to its final days, and her insights are evident at every turn. This project would not have gone forward without her. I would also like to thank the other members of my committee: Cristobal Silva, Meegan Kennedy, Jerrilyn McGregory, and Martin Munro. Their advice and support has been invaluable to me. I am grateful to the Chawton House Library for providing me with a fellowship, which enabled me to gain a better understanding of eighteenth-century female cookery books. I am also grateful for my parents, who instilled a hunger for knowledge in me from an early age. Our kitchen-table conversations entertained, inspired, and challenged me. I want to thank both my parents and Arturo for being excited about my project and motivating me even when the task seemed never-ending. Without their unconditional support and guidance, this project would not have materialized. I am also grateful for my mom and Arturo, who selfishly served as my unofficial editors. Most of all, I want to thank Arturo, my partner in life, whose continuous encouragement and support keeps me going. I know with you by my side I will never lose my hunger for life. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS List of Figures............................................................................................................................... vii Abstract........................................................................................................................................ viii INTRODUCTION ...........................................................................................................................1 CHAPTER ONE: “THE INDIANS QUICKLY SPREAD THEMSELVES OVER THE DESERTED ENGLISH FIELDS”: (RE)KNITTING THE DIETARY AND COLONIAL FRONTIER IN MARY ROWLANDSON’S CAPTIVITY NARRATIVE...................................17 Ambiguous Aftertaste: Eating Away Exceptionalism...........................................................23 Body Politic and Abject Foods..............................................................................................26 (Re)Knitting Colonial Roles..................................................................................................32 Dietary Transculturation........................................................................................................36 Freeing the Cultural Captive .................................................................................................40 CHAPTER TWO: TASTING THE “FRUITFUL SOIL”: AGRICULTURAL ENLIGHTENMENT IN JOHN LOCKE, EDWARD LONG, AND PATRICK BROWNE........43 Green Gold: Agrarian Concerns and Capitalistic Origins.....................................................47 The Science of “Enlightened” Planting.................................................................................57 Agricultural Enlightenment and Erasure...............................................................................60 CHAPTER THREE: DIETARY DIS-EASE: GEOPHAGY, SENSIBILITY, AND SLAVERY IN EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY MEDICAL AND COLONIAL WRITINGS ..............................75 Colonial Consumption...........................................................................................................76 Self-Consumptive Bodies......................................................................................................80 Dietary Dis-ease and Disruption ..........................................................................................83 “Master is more dirt than I am”: English Dirt-Eaters in Hamel, the Obeah Man .................98 A Dirt-Cake a Day Keeps Alterity Away? .........................................................................110 CHAPTER FOUR: “THE WHOLE ISLAND IS A GARDEN”: CURIOUS CONSUMPTION IN EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY COOKERY BOOKS AND THE TRANSATLANTIC JOURNALS OF JANET SCHAW AND MARIA NUGENT ..........................................................................112 (Re)Tasting Transatlantic Cookery .....................................................................................114 Appropriating Recipes: Mastering the Art of Transatlantic Cooking .................................122 Curious Consumption of the Caribbean ..............................................................................128 Consuming (An)Other’s Cooking ......................................................................................132 CHAPTER FIVE: DIVIDED SELVES: THE CHANGING TASTES OF TRANSATLANTIC COMMERCE IN LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN FARMER, THE INTERESTING NARRATIVE OF THE LIFE OF OLAUDAH EQUIANO, AND MARLY ...................................141 Divided Selves ....................................................................................................................144 Disrupting the Agrarian Ideal..............................................................................................148 Trading Tastes .....................................................................................................................160 The Paradox of the Self-Made (Hum)Man in the Americas ...............................................170 v CONCLUSION: FEEDING THE DIASPORA: PLANTATION SOCIETY AND FOOD IMAGERY IN SALT AND THE RAINMAKER’S MISTAKE......................................................174 NOTES.........................................................................................................................................191 BIBLIOGRAPHY........................................................................................................................215 BIBLIOGRAPHIC SKETCH .....................................................................................................228 vi LIST OF FIGURES 1. Poem and image by “Thomas Turtle” enclosed in Elizabeth Fuller’s Collection of Cookery and Medical Receipts. Reproduced courtesy of the Wellcome Library, London. ......................113 2. Title page of Amelia Simmons’s American Cookery (Hartford, 1796). .............................120 3. Elizabeth Fuller’s “To Make a Pepper Pot” recipe found in her Collection of Cookery and Medical Receipts. Reproduced courtesy of the Wellcome Library, London...............................125 vii ABSTRACT This dissertation resists the tendency to focus on metropolitan patterns of consumption of major export goods like sugar and tea in order to account for the laboring bodies producing these colonial commodities, which scholars such as Alan Bewell and Charlotte Sussman ignore in their discussion on the cultural and political discourse surrounding colonialism and eighteenth-century diet. The central premise of my dissertation revolves around creole food consumption and production. Creole, a geocultural designation, refers to a fusion of people, foods, and cultures in the Atlantic rim. In the eighteenth century, colonialism functioned as a burgeoning modern system, one where both the enslaved and colonists forged new identities and foodways. In pointing out the transatlantic relationship between foodways, this dissertation broadens the “Caribbean cultural paradigm,” to borrow Maureen Warner-Lewis’s phrasing, to include Africa, which is often omitted. In this project, I achieve two aims. First, by reading literary texts alongside other genres such as travel narratives, captivity narratives, medical documents, and cookbooks, I uncover literary tropes embedded in archival documents such as the use of sentimentality in eighteenth-century medical writings and travelogues. Secondly, my project, drawing on Paul Gilroy’s Black Atlantic and notions of “rootlessness,” reassesses the colonial past from a new angle—one of creation— thereby generating new questions of what it meant to consume a creole diet, how colonial labor and diet impacted eighteenth-century identities and markets, and how racialized dietary myths were created. In so doing, I do not ignore colonialism’s violence but demonstrate that creative culinary acts were one response to this violence, thereby countering the hegemonic and single story of consumption and production that often arises out of colonial stereotypes and one-sided perceptions

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