Events

Join us at Montgomery Place on Saturday, October 3 for a discussion of the foodways of the Colonial Period with historians Beth M. Forrest and Maureen Costura of the Culinary Institute of America. Amelia Simmons’s 1796 groundbreaking work American Cookery, is often celebrated as establishing culinary independence through local ingredients, including maize, cranberries, and pumpkin. However, Revolutionary-era foodways were vastly more complicated than Simmons’s text suggests. Her pages largely omit the essential contributions of enslaved and free African Americans, whose ingredients, labor, and culinary expertise fundamentally shaped and subverted the understandings and use of food in early American kitchens. Furthermore, food was deeply tied to medical and moral anxieties, including the persistent European belief in "colonial degeneracy"—the fear that the American climate and diet would enfeeble the mind and body. This talk-in-conversation considers what was “revolutionary” about a new cuisine in the new nation, alongside the limits of inclusion as a foundational national identity was being forged. 

Beth M. Forrest is a professor of history in the School of Applied Food Studies and Liberal Arts at the Culinary Institute of America. 
Maureen Costura is a professor of archaeology in the School of Applied Food Studies and Liberal Arts at the Culinary Institute of America.