| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.3

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

James E. McWilliams. A Revolution in Eating: How the Quest for Food Shaped America. (Arts and Traditions of the Table: Perspectives on Culinary History.) New York: Columbia University Press. 2005. Pp. 386. $29.95.
James E. McWilliams aims to explore "not only what colonial Americans ate but also why they ate it" (p. 16). The result is an engagingly written book that examines culinary themes within the larger context of colonial development and, ultimately, revolution. Like colonial history more generally, the culinary history of early America reflected a mixture of Native American, African, and European influences that, upon contact with different physical environments, produced regional variations on a set of common themes.	1
Much of the book is devoted to elucidating those regional distinctions. In each case, McWilliams pays attention not only to what foods were produced but also to who produced and prepared them and how this was done. He identifies a spectrum of foodways based on the extent to which English culinary practices were modified by New World conditions. At one extreme was New England, whose colonists most closely replicated the English diet of meat, grain, and vegetables by following familiar English agricultural practices. At the other end were the West Indies, distinguished by the evolution of an Afro-Caribbean cuisine invented by slaves required to provision themselves. In between one finds the Middle Colonies, Chesapeake, and Carolina, each with cuisines that reflected different blends of the culinary traditions of their inhabitants.	. . .

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