Backcountry Food Ways: North British Origins of Southern Highland Cooking

In regard to diet, the southern back settlements differed fundamentally from other regions of British America. Samuel Kercheval recalled that the “standard” supper dish in the mid-eighteenth century was a wooden bowl of milk and mush—seasoned with a splash of bear oil. The Anglican missionary Charles Wood-mason regarded these backcountry meals with horror, and complained incessantly about what he was expected to eat. “Clabber, butter, fat mushy bacon, cornbread,” he wrote, “as for tea and coffee they know it not … neither beef nor mutton nor beer, cyder or anything better than water.” When he visited a community of Ulster emigrants, Woodmason noted that “the people are all from Ireland, and live wholly on butter, milk, clabber and what in England is given to hogs.”¹

Many visitors remarked that backsettlers ate food which other English-speaking people fed to their animals. This observation was repeated so often that it became a cliché of travel literature in the southern highlands. It is interesting to discover that precisely the same statements were made by English travelers in the borderlands of North Britain.²

Backcountry food ways are sometimes thought to be the product of frontier conditions. So they were, in some degree. But mainly they were an expression of the folk customs that had been carried from the borders of North Britain. Strong continuities appeared in favored foodstuffs, in methods of cooking and also in the manner of eating.

One important staple of this diet was clabber, a dish of sour milk, curds and whey which was eaten by youngsters and adults throughout the backcountry, as it had been in North Britain for many centuries. In southern England it was called “spoiled milk” and fed to animals; in the borderlands it was “bonny clabber” and served to people. Travelers found this dish so repellent that some preferred to go hungry.³

Another important foodstuff in the borderlands and the back settlements was the potato. This American vegetable had been widely introduced to western Europe during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and became especially popular in Ireland, Scotland and the north of England. Despite its American origins, the potato had been uncommon in the English colonies until the North Britons arrived during the eighteenth century, and made it an important part of backcountry diet.⁴

Yet another staple was a family of breadstuffs variously called “clapbread,” “haverbread,” “hearth bread,” “griddle cakes,” and “pancakes.” Sometimes they were also called scones, after an old Norse word for crust. Ingredients varied, but methods of cooking were often the same: small cakes of unleavened dough were baked on a flat bakestone or a circular griddle in an open hearth. These breadstuffs were brought from the borderlands to the backcountry, where they remained a major part of regional cuisine for many generations.⁵

In other respects, backcountry food ways necessarily departed from the customs of North Britain. Oats yielded to maize, which was pounded into cornmeal and cooked by boiling. But this was merely a change from oatmeal mush to cornmeal mush, or “grits” as it was called in the southern highlands. The ingredients changed, but the texture of the dish remained the same.

Another change occurred in the consumption of meat. The people of North Britain had rarely eaten pork at home. Pigs’ flesh was as loathesome to the borderers as it had been to the children of Abraham and Allah. But that taboo did not survive in the New World, where sheep were difficult to maintain and swine multiplied even more rapidly than the humans who fed upon them. Pork rapidly replaced mutton on backcountry tables, but it continued to be boiled and fried in traditional border ways.⁶

New American vegetables also appeared on backcountry tables. Most families kept a “truck-patch,” in which they raised squashes, cushaws (a relative of squash), pumpkins, gourds, beans and sweet roasting ears of Indian corn. Many families also raised “sal-let” greens, cress, poke and bear’s lettuce. Here again, the ingredients were new, but the consumption of “sallet” and “greens” was much the same as in the old country.⁷

The distinctive backcountry beverage was whiskey. A taste for liquor distilled from grain was uncommon in the south and east of England. But it was highly developed in north Britain, and was brought to the American backcountry by the people of that region. “‘Wheyski,’” the Marquis de Chastelleux wrote in back-country Virginia, “was our only drink, as it was on the three days following. We managed however to make a tolerable towdy [toddy] of it.”⁸

A change of ingredients was made necessary by the new environment.

In the back settlements Scotch whiskey (which had been distilled from barley) yielded to Bourbon whiskey (which was made mainly from corn and rye). But there was no other change from the borders, except perhaps in the quantity of consumption. Whiskey became a common table drink in the backcountry. Even little children were served whiskey at table, with a little sugar to sweeten its bitter taste.⁹ Temperance took on a special meaning in this society. Appalachia’s idea of a moderate drinker was the mountain man who limited himself to a single quart at a sitting, explaining that more “might fly to my head.”¹⁰

Other beverages were regarded with contempt in the back-country. “Tea and coffee were only slops,” Kercheval remembered, “ … they were designated only for persons of quality who did not labor, or the sick. A genuine backwoodsman would have thought himself disgraced by showing a fondness for these slops. Indeed many of them have to this day very little respect for them.”¹¹

Methods of food preparation also showed strong continuities from the borderlands to the back settlements. In the southern highlands, backcountry cooking ran more to boiling than to baking or roasting. This had also been the case in North Britain. Studies of regional cooking methods in Britain, as we have seen, find that the south and west of England had a taste for frying; East Anglia, a preference for baking; and the North, a penchant for boiling. The “simmering pot” became a cliché of border poets and antiquarians. John Gough observed that border breakfasts consisted “chiefly of porridge … boiled in milk.” Many travelers to the backcountry noted the taste for “mush boiled in milk.” Both borderers and backcountry people also consumed soups, stews and potpies for their second meal.¹²

Backcountry cuisine was less fastidious than that of other Anglo-American cultures—“all the cooking of these people being exceedingly filthy and most execrable,” Woodmason grumbled.¹³ This observation was made by many travelers in the American back settlements, and in the British borderlands. One visitor was astonished when his hostess proceeded to wash her feet in the cookpot. Another was given the tablecloth for a bedsheet. The folklore of that region actively discouraged cleanliness. To wash a milk churn was thought to be unlucky. Frogs were dropped into the milk to make it thicken. The quality of butter was believed to be improved in proportion to the number of human hairs embedded in it. “The mair dirt the less hurt,” Appalachian housewives liked to say.¹⁴

The backsettlers also differed from other cultures in their eating habits. They tended to take only two meals a day—a plain breakfast and a hearty meal in mid-afternoon. “These people eat twice a day only,” Woodmason declared, and complained that he was unable to find a proper English breakfast, lunch and dinner. The rhythm of two daily meals was a North British custom, carried to the interior of America by the border people.¹⁵

Tables were set with trenchers and noggins of wood and pewter. The utensils were two-tonged forks, heavy spoons and hunting knives. Kercheval remembered that the use of china was actively opposed. “The introduction of delft ware was considered by many of the backwoods people as a culpable innovation,” he wrote. “It was too easily broken, and the plates of that ware dulled their scalping and clasp knives.”¹⁶

There was much feasting in the back settlements. On these grand occasions, the major dishes were not baked as in New England, or roasted as in Virginia, but boiled in black-iron cooking pots which hung over backcountry hearths. Kercheval remembered that “the standard dinner dish” for a “log-rolling, or house-raising and harvest-day” was a “pot-pie, or what in other countries is called sea-pie.”¹⁷ There was little of the dietary asceticism that marked the food ways of Puritans and Quakers. When backsettlers and borderers could eat and drink abundantly they did so with high enthusiasm. Altogether, the food ways of these people were the product of a cultural tradition which had a long past in the British borderlands, and a long future in America’s southern highlands.¹⁸