Lyddie, Chapter 8: What New Englanders Ate in the Early 1800s

A "Voices from the Field" essay for chapter 8 of Katherine Paterson's novel Lyddie*, from Lowell National Historical Park's Books to Parks series, by the food historians Keith Stavely and Kathleen Fitzgerald.*

Food and cooking run all through Lyddie: the bear that knocks over the jar of apple butter, the birch tea Lyddie shares with Ezekial, Willie the servant boy stealing bread, the miller's wife stirring a bubbling stew over an open fire. What was it like to eat as a New Englander in the early nineteenth century?

A plain, repetitive diet

Bread was scarce, the authors explain, because wheat grew poorly in the region, and the chocolate candy and layer cakes we know today had not been invented. Until after the Civil War, when changes in farming and transport brought more kinds of food at lower prices, most people ate much the same thing every day.

Ovens and stoves

Wealthy homes and taverns had brick bake ovens — Cutler's Tavern had one — but well into the 1800s many families did not. Each week they carried their brown bread and pots of beans to the local tavern to be baked.

Cast-iron cookstoves were being made in the 1820s and 1830s, but at first only well-off households and large establishments, such as Lyddie's Lowell boardinghouse, put them in. Some people, like Triphena at the tavern, thought food cooked in cast iron did not taste as good as food cooked over an open fire. Stoves won out in the end: the cook could stand instead of stooping over the fire, and could use lighter pots.

Eating in Lowell

At the boardinghouse Lyddie sees a huge iron stove for the first time, and eats a wider range of food than she ever had on the farm or at the tavern: heaped plates of pork and beans, codfish, apple pie, baked Indian pudding, plum cake (a fruitcake) and more. But when the mill's profits fall and the workers are sped up, the boardinghouse meals suffer too — the meat is tainted and the potatoes mouldy.

Keeping food

With no refrigerators or canned food — both came later in the century — most families preserved their own, and it took days:

• Meat was salted and smoked.
• Vegetables were pickled, and fruit and berries put up in batches.
• Apples, which grew well in New England, were pressed for cider, stored in barrels or dried for pies.
• Milk was churned into cheese and butter, which kept longer.
• Maple sap was tapped on northern farms and boiled down into syrup and sugar, a job of several weeks in early spring.

Lard, butter and eggs cost more for people in cities than in the country. City markets sold imported tea, coffee, drinking chocolate, spices and tropical fruit, but only the rich could enjoy them.

What food shows in the novel

In Lyddie's story, the authors write, food shows how New Englanders' lives were changing as many left farms for factory towns like Lowell to find work. City workers often had more to choose from, and sometimes more money and opportunity, but they paid for it with the farm life they loved.

Sources

• Keith Stavely and Kathleen Fitzgerald, "Lyddie: Voices from the Field - Chapter 08 Food in New England", Lowell National Historical Park, National Park Service. https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/lyddie-voices-food.htm — the authors also wrote United Tastes: The Making of the First American Cookbook (2017), Northern Hospitality: Cooking by the Book in New England (2011) and America's Founding Food: The Story of New England Cooking (2004).
• The source page's portrait of the authors is not reproduced.
• Words on this page from people and organisations outside the federal government are paraphrased; rewritten in hubnx's own words.