Through the War of 1812, the territory of Alabama changed hands several times among the Spanish, the French, and the British, and it remained relatively unsettled compared with the bustling Atlantic seaboard. The conclusion of the war ushered in the era of “Alabama Fever,” a period when cotton-land speculation was widespread and the population of white and enslaved Americans expanded dramatically, culminating in the admission of Alabama as a state in 1819.
12
Within just a few years, the Alabama landscape transformed from dense wilderness frontier to cotton farms and small towns. Food production was often of secondary concern to cotton planting.
13
Even as the state’s population ballooned to 300,000 by 1830 and remained largely rural in character, food shortages persisted. A bushel of corn in the middle of the 1810s, for example, cost four dollars on the road from Huntsville to Tuscaloosa.
14
When food could be acquired, cuisine on antebellum American frontiers often left much to be desired. Into the 1840s, Alabama seemed rugged and wild compared with other places. As British traveler James Silk Buckingham rode through the southeast in 1842, he noted that in Alabama, “brooks ran with greater impetuosity, and the bridges over them were more rude than any we had yet seen.” The towns he visited were plain in character, consisting often of little more than a “blacksmith’s shop, a few log-huts, and a ‘confectionary,’ with the ever-ready poison of strong drink.” After staying at a boarding house en route to Montgomery, Buckingham remarked that only “a very rude breakfast was served,” likely comprising corn and various cheap cuts of meat.
15
As Buckingham observed, alcohol flowed freely on the Alabama frontier, and its production was prominent for reasons of economics and health alike. Maintaining hydration with alcoholic beverages was typically safer than drinking unpurified water that could be rife with disease.
16
Grain alcohol was especially widespread. More genteel settlers experimented with wine and brandy production, with mixed results. One farmer who attempted to produce wine had some success with American grape varietals such as Catawba and Herbemont’s Madeira, but he also acknowledged “we have long tried to introduce the foreign grape into this country, which has failed here, because the climate does not suit us. Our climate, like young America is restless.”
17
One German immigrant, though, had somewhat better luck, utilizing winemaking practices from the Rhine, known for its Riesling, to make brandy in in Tallapoosa County. “In addition to the enjoyment of its fine exhilarating flavor,” he wrote in the 1850s, “one drinking has the satisfaction of knowing that it is Alabama brandy, and a pure article, and not, as is now the brandy of commerce, a deleterious compound.”
18
Still, visitors in the 1850s viewed Alabama as unrefined, especially by comparison to the North. Traveling by steamboat to Mobile in 1854, Frederick Law Olmsted observed that the cotton-planters aboard were “usually well dressed, but were a rough, coarse style of people, drinking a great deal, and most of the time under a little alcoholic excitement.”
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Slaves aboard the steamboat dined separately on the cotton bales, away from white passengers and without standard dining utensils. Olmsted noted that “the food which was given to them in tubs, from the kitchen, was various and abundant, consisting of bean-porridge, bacon, corn bread, ship’s biscuit, potatoes, duff (pudding), and gravy.” But he also wrote that “there was one knife used only, among ten of them; the bacon was cut and torn into shares; splinters of bone and of fire-wood were used for forks; the porridge was passed from one to another, and drank out of the tub.”
20
As slavery became more entrenched in the Cotton Kingdom over the course of the first half of the nineteenth century, race and class distinctions like these became more prevalent, in public dining as in other areas of life.
Travelers did find somewhat better fare and accommodations in Alabama cities. Buckingham commented that one (unnamed) Montgomery hotel was the finest he had stayed in since he had been in New York, and that it was better than any in Charleston or Savannah.
21
Similarly, while Olmsted found Mobile to be “dirty, and noisy, with little elegance,” he noted that the Battle House was an excellent?if overpriced?hotel. Olmsted observed that “at a market-garden, near the town which I visited, I found most of the best Northern and Belgian pears fruiting well. . . . Figs are abundant and bananas and oranges are said to be grown with some care.”
22
Attending the Mobile Jockey Club Spring Races in 1857, a reporter commented on the boom and bustle of the port city. While at the market, a “noble green trout, some ten pounds” that he had wanted for dinner was stolen, only to have a friend tell him, “I can spot the man who stole it! I saw it in a large bunch of red snappers, pompano, and groopers [sic], carried into yonder oyster shop.”
23
If the story reflected the questionable morals and rapid pace of life in antebellum Mobile, it also demonstrated the variety and quality of goods available at the city’s fish markets.
Antebellum Alabama foodways were a melting pot of international cultures. European and African traditions became most pronounced. A Native American influence remained, even after the federal government dispossessed most Alabama tribes by the middle of the 1830s. In Dallas County in 1838, for example, Phillip Henry Gosse wrote of the presence of Dutch “woffles” for breakfast that utilized European techniques and Native American ingredients. “You see they are square thin cakes, like pancakes, divided on both sides into square cells by intersecting ridges,” he explained. Prepared with a waffle iron and served with butter, Gosse noted that “sometimes they are made of the meal of Indian corn (as so little wheat is grown here as to make wheat-flour be considered almost a luxury), but these are not nearly so nice, at least to an English palate.”
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In an era when few had regular access to ice, a hot and humid climate meant that food preservation techniques in the antebellum period were at a premium. These, too, drew on various cultural traditions to provide salient characteristics to Alabama foodways. Foods were salted, smoked, dried, pickled, and stored in root cellars, often using variations of African and Native American practices of drying fruits and beans for future use.
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Still, the cultural melange of Alabama’s foodways could not disguise the kinds of disparities that Olmsted saw on his steamboat voyage. Thomas Hubbard Hobbs, who belonged to a planter family from Athens, Alabama, recalled in his 1847 diary eating boiled eggs or sardines at times when he stayed out too late at night or failed to return home in time for supper. He also reported studying, hunting, fishing, and making social calls. He attended barbecues where he courted young women, and generally his meals, like those of others in his class, consisted of formal affairs. Elites in Alabama often ate imported items like wheat flour that were unavailable or unaffordable for most Alabamians.
26
By contrast, enslaved people ate less formally and with less variety. Wooden spoons were often the only servingware or utensils allotted to the enslaved, and rations were sparing.
27
Near the end of his life, Henry Barnes of Suggsville recalled that when he was young, his master would slaughter eight to ten “set-down” hogs at a time. These were hogs that had been fed so much corn that they could no longer stand on their legs. Barnes remembered that “us had all us could eat den, an’ plenty sugar-cane to make ‘lasses outten. An’ dey made up biscuits in de big wood trays. Dem trays was made outten tupelo gum an’ dey was light as a fedder.”
28
Normally, however, Barnes, like other enslaved people where he lived, received three pounds of meat and a peck of cornmeal to last a week.
29
Cull Taylor of Augusta County remembered somewhat more generous rations: six or seven pounds of meat and one peck of meal per week for each man. But the allocation Barnes remembered seems to have been far more typical, with a few pounds of meat offering some protein and corn providing the starch.
30
Holidays, celebrations, and harvest times were special occasions in antebellum Alabama for slaves and masters alike. Whatever boundaries usually separated the foodways of white and black blurred somewhat. At weddings and on Christmas, hogs, turkeys, and chickens formed the foundation of a communal feast. Chickens and biscuits might be distributed to enslaved people on Christmas or on Sundays, and cotton-picking, hog-killing, and corn-shucking provided excuses for festivities that often included singing, dancing, and meals that went on through the night. At these events, enslaved women often dedicated themselves to frying and baking in quantities well beyond their usual output.
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