America's Founding Fathers didn't spend the Fourth of July in the backyard standing over a hot grill.
It is more likely that the founding wives and mothers or their servants spent the day in front of a hearth, where temperatures might reach 170 degrees, juggling cast-iron and copper cookware over an open flame.
The Fourth of July in the late 1700s wasn't celebrated with hot dogs and hamburgers. And there was no corn on the cob, except maybe in the American frontier, which in 1776 might have been just to the left of Pittsburgh.
The only holiday menu item we have in common with our forebears might be the beverages - beer, wine and alcoholic fruit drinks.
In the centuries before safe drinking water, pasteurized milk and fake IDs, even the kids drank hard cider, though the alcohol content was maybe 2 percent.
"John Adams had a tankard of hard cider every morning to get him started," says food historian Andrew F. Smith, editor of the newly published Oxford Companion to American Food and Drink.
"And George Washington had his distillery. That's how he kept Mount Vernon solvent while he was off at war."
Washington's penchant for cornmeal pancakes for breakfast, swimming in melted butter and honey, according to descriptions of the time, was considered a family embarrassment. Americans craved breads made with wheat like their English cousins.
"Corn was for the livestock. And it was not proper to consume anything with the hands or fingers, although forks were just showing up in high society," says Smith. Instead, the colonists used spoons and very broad knives.
"Corn was considered poverty food," says Joyce White, an expert in early American foodways who works at Riversdale House Museum, a historic home in Prince George's County, and consults at the William Paca House in Annapolis.
In the years immediately after the Declaration of Independence was signed, the Fourth of July was often celebrated simply, perhaps with a reading of the document in the public square.
According to Smith's mammoth compendium of America's food history, it soon became customary to fire 13 cannonades and drink 13 toasts. The celebrations then moved from the taverns to the outdoors, which could accommodate more people and more food.
The menu might have included several different meats and poultry, plus fruit and vegetables in season. And because the colonists brought with them their English sweet tooth, there were lots of cakes, pies, cobblers and small cakes that we might call cookies or muffins today.
"Sweet pies were a major contribution from British cuisine," said Smith. "The British loved all things sweet."
Food has become the currency of holidays in this country, and the Fourth of July is no exception. Today, a typical July 4 menu would likely reflect family traditions and ethnic heritage, as well as what is plentiful locally.
It was no different for the Early Americans. They brought with them from England a long list of food preferences - such as sweets, beer and tea.
Add to that the contributions of the Native Americans, such as corn, cranberries, leeks, onions and artichokes, and of the slaves, such as chili peppers, sweet potatoes, peanuts, okra and rice.
As is the case today, food was a way to celebrate in the 18th century. But it was also a way to distinguish the classes.
According to White, the lower classes - the tenant farmers and the slaves - had the original "set-it-and-forget-it." It was a cast-iron pot set over a fire and allowed to simmer all day while the family worked.
"The women would stoke the fire and check it, adding whatever they had on hand that day," said White.
Pork, corn, beans and squash were staples, along with whatever other vegetables the family grew. While tradesmen and the middle class townspeople had small gardens and access to markets, those on farms had to be self-sufficient.
Smith describes a time when chickens and hogs were allowed to roam the woods and forage for food because the lower classes had neither the space to pen them up nor the time and money to feed them. "When you wanted a chicken for dinner, you went out that morning and killed one," he said.
By contrast, those in the upper classes would consume a large, elaborate meal at about 2 p.m., an array of dishes in several courses and including several meats, soup, "forced meats" that were like a pate or meatball, stews and meat pies.
Though each course included sweet cakes or biscuits, the third course was a dessert course with sweets, ice creams, sorbet and gelatins.
Dinner was more like the English tea time, with light fare, and breakfast was often leftovers, because preserving cooked food was difficult.
The wealthy liked organ meats such as thyroid or kidney, plus delicacies like calf's head or sheep's head and tongue.
Thomas Jefferson often wrote his daughter in New England, asking her to send hogs' tongues and other organs called air bladders. She complied, but usually with an expression of disgust, according to White's research.
Jefferson enjoyed the pasta he was served on his trips abroad and even designed a pasta-making machine. A letter written by a White House guest during his presidency described a dinner at which the guests were served "macaroni pie."
Jefferson liked French wines, too, but his attempts to establish a vineyard at Monticello were not particularly successful. He also imported the Italian olive oil and the French mustards he encountered on his travels abroad.
Most colonists drank the fortified English wines, like madeira, claret and port, that could more readily make the journey across the ocean. Hearty British ales and beers were imported, too, though Americans soon learned to make their own. Whiskey was one of the happy byproducts of corn production.
In Maryland, there was plenty of shellfish, and oysters were very popular. Turtle soup was a mainstay, though lobster was considered poverty food. There are few crab shells found in archaeological digs, White said, suggesting that the colonists ate them as soft shells.
All of this is known, White says, because the wealthy were fond of reading homemaking books and cookbooks. Correspondence often included descriptions of meals and menus.
The recipes were nothing like the precise measurements and step-by-step directions of today. They often were written in a conversational tone, and amounts were rarely specified.
One recipe, for the chicken fricassee that Jefferson favored, called for the addition of a cup of wine early in the process, but with this admonition at the end: "Do not put the wine in 'till just before you dish it."
Recipes often were plagiarized and rarely tested, and they assumed skill and knowledge on the part of the cook, such as this one for a beef stew: "Let it stew over a slow fire for three hours till tender, then make a good sauce with rich gravey, Morrells, Truffles and Mushrooms over it."
The recipes also called for a great many eggs - 40 for the Martha Washington Cake, which White has re-created. But those eggs were much smaller than those we eat today.
Interestingly, the colonists often ate soft-boiled eggs for breakfast with toast strips, but there is no evidence that anybody scrambled their eggs.
There were shortages during the Revolutionary War, of course, especially for the soldiers. During the harshest times, the soldiers lived on something called fire cakes: flour and water rolled in ashes and then baked on hot stones.
But throughout the war, Americans drank tea, said Smith. "The idea that it was un-American to drink tea or that Americans boycotted it is a myth," he said.
"Nobody did without their tea."
Or their rum.
Most of it came from Barbados, but New Englanders produced an off-brand from imported molasses that was not particularly well-received.
A British tax on that molasses fueled Colonial unrest as much as any tax on tea, according to Smith's work on American food and drink.
And, supposedly, Washington agreed to take command of the rag-tag Continental Army over a tankard of rum punch.
susan.reimer@baltsun.com
Seed cakes
Makes 24 mini cakes
1 cup butter
2 cups sugar
3 cups flour
4 eggs
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1 teaspoon ground mace
6 tablespoons caraway seeds
Preheat oven to 375 degrees. Beat all ingredients together and bake in small tart pan or patty pan molds greased with butter or lard (spray oil is a good modern substitute). Bake for about 25 to 30 minutes.
This recipe also can be made as one large cake in a bundt-type cake pan. Bake for 50 to 60 minutes.
Adapted by Joyce White of Riversdale House Museum from American Cookery by Amelia Simmons, 1796
Per serving: 206 calories, 3 grams protein, 9 grams fat, 5 grams saturated fat, 30 grams carbohydrate, 1 gram fiber, 55 milligrams cholesterol, 13 milligrams sodium