Introduction

Abstract

The burgeoning American republic of the nineteenth century saw many aesthetic movements aimed at distinguishing U.S. culture from that of its English and Continental cultural forebears. While Ralph Waldo Emerson’s declaration of literary and philosophical independence from Europe was most emphatically announced in his “The American Scholar” (1837), American authors were also proclaiming a culinary declaration of independence, articulating national ideologies of consumption unique to the nation’s plenitude. As novelists, poets, essayists, letter correspondents, diarists, and domestic manual writers considered the manner in which Americans might best cultivate their harvest, the idea of taste developed in relation to a vast set of palates, and as observed by recent critics of food culture, transferred aesthetic deliberation from the sublime (of art and artfulness) to the more commonplace (of cooking and eating).¹ These homegrown American writers’ various social and sensory perceptions of how food was served and savored—namely, their estimations of culinary aesthetics—reflected the multifaceted and idiosyncratic practices of American cookery. But their culinary manifestos, promoting the idea of national culinary superiority, could boost confidence in an emerging American culture.

& the American table, taken as a whole, is inferior to that of England or France. It presents a fine abundance of material, carelessly and poorly treated. The management of food is nowhere in the world, perhaps, more slovenly and wasteful. Everything betokens that want of care that waits on abundance; there are great capabilities and poor execution.

—Harriet Beecher Stowe, House and Home Papers, 1865 (229)