“Hoe Cake and Pickerel” Cooking Traditions, Community, and Agency at a Nineteenth Century Nipmuc Farmstead

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Chapter 9

“Hoe Cake and Pickerel”Cooking Traditions, Community, and Agency at a

Nineteenth-Century Nipmuc Farmstead

Guido PezzarossiStanford University

Ryan KennedyIndiana University

Heather LawUniversity of California Berkeley

Cooking practices and the foods they produce are particularly important arenas for exploring the experiences and daily routines of colonial populations. Both the biological and social necessities that compel the production and consumption of the quotidian meal are crucial to “constructing and punctuating the rhythms and regime of life” (Hastorf and Weismantel 2007:309–310; Braudel 1981; Giard 1998; Parker Pearson 2003). Thus, it is the daily repetitions of cooking and eating that cast foodways as a critical part of the production of habitus, a central influ-ence in the process of social “distinction” and the formation of social identities (Barthes 1979:32; Hastorf and Weismantel 2007:309; Voss 2008:233; Dietler 2007:222; Bourdieu 1977, 1984). Within the range of repetitive food-related activities, the practice of cooking in particular sits at a blurred, ambiguous inter-face between tradition, innovation, and (re)production. From this intersection emerges a space for agency that, despite context-contingent structural boundar-ies (as per Abarca 2003), serves as a locus for the appropriation and production of new cultural forms and the inspiration for micro- and macro-scale “habits, customs and preferences” (Giard 1998:186). The importance of food and cook-ing to everyday life and their articulation with broader social and temporal scales

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Guido Pezzarossi, Ryan Kennedy, and Heather Law

give them great promise for exploring the creation and maintenance of new and existing identities within colonial contexts.

Recent archaeological studies have explored the relationship between food, cooking, and identity in colonial contexts in a nuanced manner (e.g., Twiss 2007; Voss 2008, Silliman 2004; Trigg 2004:126–130). The strength of these studies comes in part from the influence of indigenous and subaltern archaeologies that attempt to break away from acculturative models (Voss 2005:424) that dichoto-mize continuity and change (see Silliman 2009; Dietler 2007:225). Such stud-ies do not privilege the origin of material practices to define “authenticity” and cultural “loss,” but instead focus on the context and meaning of material culture to those who used it. In this chapter we examine the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century colonial cooking practices of the Native inhabitants of a single site in New England. We look at the role that cooks and the act of cooking had on the creation of new forms of Native practices and identities at the site, and we attempt to tie this process into both long-term and short-term historical trajec-tories of food and cooking in the region. Ultimately, we show how Native cooks at the site engaged both fashionable “Euro-American” food practices and typi-cally “non-European” cooking and eating practices and explore the processes by which this engagement fostered the emergence of new Native foodways. While these distinctly colonial foodways were clearly influenced by both past and pres-ent European, Native, and African cooking traditions, rather than attempting to untangle these influences we instead explore the character of foodways at the site as the “original” productions of the inhabitants of the site.

By emphasizing the heterogeneity and fluidity of colonial processes and experiences, we hope to show that it is not the origins of food-related artifacts and cooking practices in colonial settings that are of greatest social, cultural and analytical importance, but rather the meaning of materials and practices to the people who produced, performed, and consumed them. We engage with these issues through the cooking practices at the Sarah Boston Farmstead site, an eigh-teenth- and nineteenth-century Nipmuc household located on Keith Hill in Grafton, Massachusetts (figure 9.1), through an array of material culture catego-ries associated both with the production and the consumption of food.

On the AgenCy Of COOks And their (re)MAking Of trAditiOn

A focus on cooking and production is not meant to devalue the consumption of food but is instead an attempt to more fully appreciate the “tension” (Stahl 2002:842) of its dialectical relationship with consumption (Rodríguez-Alegría and Graff, this volume; Dietler 2007:222–223). De Certeau’s (1984) reframing of the seemingly insignificant act of consumption as a form of active, appropria-

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“Hoe Cake and Pickerel”

tive “production” can be extended to the cook and the act of cooking, which has also been portrayed as a “menial,” passive, and unreflective practice despite the clearly productive and knowledge-dependent nature of cooking. In an eth-nographic reappraisal of the cook as an agent of change, continuity, and inno-vation, Abarca (2003) provides several important points that archaeologists can readily engage with. While not explicitly drawing on practice theories (e.g., Bourdieu 1977; Giddens 1984; de Certeau 1984), Abarca nonetheless engages with issues of agency and culture change through daily practice within the con-fines of “tradition” and discourses of authenticity. Specifically, Abarca explores how cooking traditions are reproduced and the ways in which new “original” tra-ditions emerge. She asserts that change in cultural practices occurs inevitably as these practices “fluctuate” diachronically between and within individuals, fam-ily units, communities, and other social groupings (Abarca 2003:10, 12). Thus, we can consider attempts to define “authenticity” as misguided and power-laden political maneuvers that freeze fluid processes of cultural change and attempt to delimit the “true” authenticity of subaltern populations. Such a fluid view of cultural change articulates closely with archaeological critiques of acculturative frameworks that have frequently been applied in the study of colonial Indigenous populations.

The act of cooking is an “intellectual knowledge, skillful manual process and personal as well as historical, political and social” practice (ibid.:3). As with Pauketat’s (2001:4–6) argument for the importance of history and historical

Figure 9.1. Map of New England showing project location (heavy dot) in Grafton, Massachusetts.

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contingencies in the way traditions are structured and enacted, both Abarca (2003) and Giard (1998:151–157) highlight the personal histories of cooks as crucial to the formation of cooking practices and new ways of cooking and eating. It is at the moment of cooking that the cook’s “situated knowledge[s]” and social/material constraints come to bear on the embodied practice and unique products of cooking (ibid.:186). The conceptualization of the “art of cooking” as “poetic ways of ‘making do’ (bricolage)” (de Certeau 1984:xv; see also Levi-Strauss 1966) serves as a vehicle to discuss the potential of cooks to modify or reproduce (and in the process change) traditional dishes and the means and meanings of produc-ing them. Moreover, a cook’s agency and the palatable innovations/changes that emerge from the practice of cooking may serve as critical loci for the elaboration of the “practical politics” of personal or group identity expression (Twiss 2007).

Reframing cooking as a learned, knowledge-dependent “intellectual” and embodied praxis indexes the power (as in Foucault 1977) of cooks and under-mines the characterization of cooking as a “menial art” (Rodríguez-Alegría and Graff, this volume). Indeed, the knowledge and power of cooks and their cen-tral place in the production of food complements the argument by Hastorf (this volume) that identifies the power of the cook through their physically central “panoptic” place in the home. Cooks are uniquely positioned to directly influ-ence the types of ingredients and specific combinations of foods incorporated into the daily practice of individuals and families (Voss 2008:245), and from such a position cooks are central catalysts in the transition of “new” foodways from heterodoxic to doxic status (as per Bourdieu 1977; Silliman 2001). The place of cooks, then, gives them considerable power and control over not just the food consumption practices of a household but, following food’s important role in identity creation and maintenance, an important role in the creation of cultural identity itself.

By using an agent-centered framework we aim neither to project Western subjectivities onto indigenous populations in the past (as per Spivak 1988) nor to push modern Epicurean biases that laud cuisine innovation onto the past (as per Parker Pearson 2003:4). Instead, we take this approach to more fully examine the historical trajectories of the Nipmuc inhabitants of the Sarah Boston Farmstead, which are characterized by sustained and intensive participation in individual ownership of land and other property in the European tradition that is itself founded on Western “sovereign” possessive subjectivities. The engagement of Western subjectivities does not imply a replacement of preexisting Nipmuc sub-jectivities, but rather addresses the possibility of multiple, synchronic Nipmuc subject positions, some of which may not necessarily be rooted in the individual (e.g., Strathern 1988).

Consideration of the potential construction of “micro” traditions and prac-tices that operate within broader social groupings allows the intrasocietal het-

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erogeneity in foodways to be more fully grasped. While many of these “micro” traditions and practices, particularly those of short duration, may leave only ephemeral traces in the archaeological record, those of a more durable nature are approachable in two broad lines of inquiry by archaeologists: first, examination of differences in cooking practices in distinct social groupings, such as household and community, at an archaeological site; and, second, identification of variations and innovations in cooking that become traditions central to daily practice and the (re)production of identities. In this chapter we focus on the latter by inves-tigating how the incorporation and reconfiguration of Euro-American culinary practices into colonial Nipmuc foodways by cooks gave rise to a suite of culinary practices that were ingrained facets of Nipmuc traditions in the colonial period. By investigating the smaller scales of cooking in addition to large-scale pattern-ing (i.e., the influence of economic necessity, supply, and broader colonial cook-ing practices), it becomes possible to more rigorously engage the scalar spectrum from local to global and account for the variability of “micro” scale processes that are effaced when totalizing notions of diet or cuisine are employed. Moreover, such an approach attempts to build on and move beyond an interpretive reliance on ethnicity, acculturation, and economics as causal factors used to explain varia-tions and the emergence of new traditions in cooking and food-related practices across and between social groupings in colonial contexts.

Still, in reconsidering the desires that shape cooking practices we must remain aware of the influence that economic constraints and social/cultural norms have in guiding and structuring the agency of cooks. As argued above, cooks have great potential to define new cultural practices and to “invent” or reconfigure new culinary traditions out of existing food-related cultural norms at a micro scale (as per Hobsbawm and Ranger 1992). However, it is essential to stress that such innovations are not made in a vacuum but are always born of broader culi-nary practices, cultural norms, and fashionable trends in cuisine, both past and present, that structure the cook’s practice. Equally so, cooks’ decisions and goals can be constrained or enabled by economic or other factors that limit or enable their choices. In the context of this chapter, Native cooks’ engagement of their economic reality and food-related cultural norms of the eighteenth-nineteenth century was an important influence on the foodways observed archaeologically. However, we argue that this engagement was not a simple determining force or the result of passive acculturation to Euro-American norms, but rather serves as a powerful example of the ways in which Native cooks as agents came to incor-porate, change, and modify new and old cooking practices and in the process produce new traditions that may have been active on a variety of scales.

We argue that the foods that were cooked and eaten by the inhabitants of the Sarah Boston Farmstead (SBFS) serve as a critical entry point into the exploration of a single Nipmuc household’s appropriation of colonial practices and materials.

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Agency enacted through daily performance and innovation enabled Nipmuc cooks to engage in broader colonial cooking trends while recontextualizing them as explicitly Nipmuc practices. Ultimately, the agency of cooks at SBFS played an important role in the production of a Nipmuc identity distinctly different from that of both contemporary Europeans and their own Nipmuc ancestors through the innovation and repetition that define the “art” of cooking.

histOriCAl COntext Of the sArAh BOstOn fArMsteAd

The colonial history of the Hassanamesit Nipmuc begins, in part, in 1727, when the Nipmuc inhabitants of Hassanamesit, present-day Grafton, Massachusetts (figure 9.1), were approached by the Massachusetts Bay Colony to sell their 7,500 acres of land. As part of the conditions of the sale, the courts set aside 1,200 acres for the private ownership of seven known Hassanamesit families. One of the original seven parcels set aside in Grafton was the Peter Muckamaug and Sarah Robins property, which serves as the focus of the archaeological and historical investigations detailed in this chapter. This parcel of land was passed down matri-lineally for more than 100 years, a fact that is borne out by a documented his-tory of female-headed households on the property, from Sarah Robins in 1727 to Sarah Muckamaug, Sarah Philips, and finally Sarah Boston in 1837 (table 9.1).

Sarah Robins, the first matriarch of the property, and her husband, Peter, likely lived in or near Providence, Rhode Island, at the time of the Hassanamesit land sale, likely as a result of the displacement of Native families caused by King Phillip’s war (1675–1676) (Mandell 2004). In 1729 Peter and Sarah returned to Hassanamesit after the sale of land to the Massachusetts Bay Colony to claim their plot of close to 100 acres outside of Grafton on what is today known as Keith Hill (Earle Papers, box 1, folder 2). In returning to Hassanamesit, Sarah and Peter left behind their daughter, Sarah Muckamaug, who was apprenticed as a servant to the Brown family in Providence (Mandell 1998). Sarah Muckamaug’s apprenticeship in the Brown household (Earle Papers 1:4; Law 2008:37, 41) may have laid the foundation for the knowledge and skills of cooking in the emerging Euro-American fashion that, as the archaeology will show, came to be tradition in

Table 9.1. Birth and Death Dates of the Four Nipmuc Landowners of the Land Parcel at the Sarah Boston Farmstead Site

Owner Birth Death

Sarah Robins Unknown 1749

Sarah Muckamaug Unknown 1751

Sarah Burnee 1744 ca. 1812

Sarah “Boston” Phillips ca. 1790 1837

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the Nipmuc household on Keith Hill. At some point after Peter’s death, probably around 1744, young Sarah, then at least between fifteen and twenty years old, returned from Providence to help care for her elderly mother (Mandell 1998).

Within three years of her return to Hassanamesit, Sarah Muckamaug met an African American man, Fortune Burnee, and the couple had a daughter who, following her Nipmuc family’s tradition, was named Sarah (ibid.:97). In 1749 Sarah Robins died and left the family property to Sarah Muckamaug, who lived on the land for two or three more years with her family before herself dying in 1751 of what is described as a “long sickness” (Massachusetts Archives Collection 32:592). At the time of Sarah Muckamaug’s death, her seven-year-old daughter, Sarah Burnee, was too young to claim her inheritance, and she stayed in the care of her father, Fortune, and a network of Native community members. In 1765, at the age of twenty-one, Sarah Burnee declared sole ownership of her family’s remaining land (Mandell 1999:81; Earle Papers 1:3) and in 1786 married a man named Boston Phillips, with whom she had two children, Ben and Sarah, before Phillips died in 1798 (Mandell 1998). This Sarah would come to be called “Sarah Boston.”

What remained of the family’s original property passed to Sarah “Boston” Phillips, renowned in Grafton’s local histories as the last matriarch of her family’s plot on Keith Hill. Local and published documents alike describe Sarah through anecdotes, descriptions of her house and her physique, and even her cooking. She was known locally to sell baskets throughout the region and to have helped farm-ers with their field labor, and in local accounts she is described as being “gigantic,” wearing men’s clothing, and being capable of “men’s work” (Forbes 1889). Sarah was also known to have taken good care of her homestead and to have had an exceptional garden that she maintained with great care (ibid.:179). There is also evidence of Sarah’s hospitality as an entertainer within the documentary record. In an account of a visit with his mother to Sarah’s house for tea, an elderly Grafton community member recalled that they had “hoe cake and pickerel, cooked by the open fire place, and nothing ever tasted better” (Fiske, n.d.:6).

At the time of Sarah Boston’s death in 1837, her family’s original 106-acre plot had been whittled down over the years to less than 20 acres, primarily as a result of economic hardships affecting the family that necessitated the selling of family land. Among these was the mounting debt brought on by the need to pay medical expenses for sick family members, funeral costs, food, supplies, clothing, and house repairs. One particular episode poignantly illustrates these hardships, as in 1795 Sarah Boston petitioned to sell 20 acres of the family land in order to support her family, make repairs to the homestead, and pay off debts incurred during her husband’s “last sickness” (Earle Papers, box 1, folder 5; Pezzarossi 2008). Such evidence of hardship informs our interpretation of this family’s history; yet it should not overtly determine it, as the archaeological material

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provides interesting and telling contradictions that force a move beyond strictly economic explanations for the food-related practices at the site.

the ArChAeOlOgy Of the sArAh BOstOn fArMsteAd

Intensive excavations and analysis of recovered material culture have been ongo-ing at the Sarah Boston Farmstead site since the summer of 2006. While prelimi-nary analysis of material recovered from more recent excavations is under way, the majority of the material analyzed for this chapter comes from the 2006 and 2007 field seasons. To date, the site has proven rich in cultural material; how-ever, extensive site disturbance associated with plowing and field clearing from orchard operations in the 1920s has resulted in few identified intact subsurface features. Despite this disturbance, a filled-in cellar (Feature 37) has been identi-fied, and excavations are ongoing. As a result of the overall lack of features and stratigraphic integrity, the archaeological assemblage has been treated as a single analytical unit of at least one household cycle dating to the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, a date arrived at through the use of ceramic dating techniques. While this lack of stratigraphic control has impeded our attempts to explore changes in Nipmuc cooking practices from the precolonial to and through the colonial period, the archaeological material recovered has never-theless provided a “snapshot” of one Nipmuc family’s colonial cooking practices from a time period for which little information is known archaeologically about Native cooking practices in New England.

The mean ceramic date (MCD) calculated for the site is 1795, and taking into account Adams’s (2003) recommendation of adding fifteen years of “time lag” for the acquisition and deposition of ceramics on rural sites, we assume an effective date range of 1795–1810. Chronologically, the MCD ties the site to the household cycle(s) of Sarah Burnee (1744–ca. 1812) and her daughter Sarah Boston (1775[?]–1837), each of whom likely lived at the homestead following Sarah Boston’s birth until their respective deaths (Law 2008). Thus an expanded occupation time span for this one household can be conservatively established between 1775 and 1837. The number of people living in the household during this time span is difficult to estimate; however, documentary sources indicate that at least four people, and likely more, lived at the house together at some point between these years: Sarah Phillips; her husband, Boston Phillips; and their two children, Sarah Boston and Ben Boston (ibid.). The house itself was likely built sometime between 1749 and 1795, as receipts for materials and construction for each of these dates indicates English-style houses being built or substantially renovated on the original parcel deeded to Sarah Robins. Few artifacts assign-able to an earlier household cycle have been located, though a smattering of tin-glazed and white salt-glazed stonewares dating to the early to mid-eighteenth

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century have hinted at the remains of an earlier household possibly belonging to Sarah Muckamaug and/or Sarah Burnee located near the site. While excavation and analysis is ongoing, the lack of discernible earlier occupation levels and the association of these earlier artifacts with late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century pearlwares brings up the possibility that these earlier ceramics may have been curated by the family and transported from the site of an earlier homestead to the one referenced in the 1795 construction/repair receipt (Pezzarossi 2008). However, for the purposes of this chapter, the material recovered appears to have been purchased, used, and disposed of between 1775 and 1837, with the majority dating to between 1795 and 1810 as per MCD calculations.

AnAlysis Of MAteriAl Culture

Analysis of the archaeological assemblage from the 2006 and 2007 seasons is ongoing, and thus far the material culture recovered has proved to be both diverse and abundant. The analysis of the assemblage has rendered many insights into the colonial experience of the SBFS household, despite the moderate to poor preservation of the assemblage. With the exception of two sherds of preco-lonial Woodland-period cord-marked ceramics and a steatite bowl/mortar, most artifacts recovered from the site are of “European” of American manufacture or technology and provide insight into the dominant role that such materials came to play in Nipmuc lives and traditions in the colonial period. The most numer-ous artifacts are those associated with the daily practices of cooking and eat-ing. Ceramics of various kinds numerically dominate the assemblage, with over 24,000 sherds representing a minimum number of vessels of 220 recovered in the 2006 season alone (Pezzarossi 2008). Glass artifacts (tumblers, stemwares, and other tableware glass implements) were frequently recovered (Law 2008), as were faunal remains, iron cutlery, and cast-iron cooking implements such as kettles, kettle hooks, and pans (Law, Pezzarossi, and Mrozowski 2007). The discussion that follows provides the results of the analyses of these artifacts and a consid-eration of their combined interpretive potential for rendering insights into the cooking practices of the inhabitants of the site.

COOking And stOrAge Vessels

Study of the cooking and storage vessels from the Sarah Boston Farmstead site helps illuminate the cooking methods used and the types of foods prepared by cooks at the site. Iron kettles and pans recovered at the site, in particular, stand out as especially important. Over the course of four field seasons, numerous frag-ments of cast-iron cooking vessels were recovered, including three rim fragments of cast-iron kettles and a fragment of a cast-iron pan. At the broadest level we

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can begin to see the differentiation in cooking practices of the inhabitants of the site. Kettles would usually have been used for stewing, boiling, or otherwise slow-cooking stews, pottages, and other semiliquid food preparations. While the cast-irons pan may have also been used for such food types, it allows us to consider the investment in a different vessel form due to the more specific cooking styles it is associated with, namely “frying” or baking (see Simmons [1796] 1984:34). It is notable that all kettle and pan fragments were recovered within the occupation-related contexts identified at the site, implying the simultaneous use of both ket-tles and pan(s) and, presumably, a desire by cooks at the site to have access to spe-cialized cooking instruments useful in different methods of food preparation. In addition to iron cooking vessels, consideration must be given to the presence of ceramic cooking vessels recovered on-site (figures 9.2, 9.3). Coarse red earthen-ware “pan” and “pudding” cooking wares totaled 21 vessels, or 46 percent of the redware vessels and 24 percent of all vessels identifiable to functional category (per Beaudry et al.’s 1988 typological scheme). Their rather common presence implies a further level of differentiation and specialization in cooking practices on-site through the specificity of use for these vessels.

Beyond cooking vessels themselves, food storage containers identified in the ceramic assemblage suggest the use of food preservation techniques such as pick-ling, salting, and/or smoking being used on-site as a form of cooking. Storage wares from the site totaled 12 vessels, which constituted 14 percent of the ceramic vessels identifiable to functional category (figures 9.2, 9.3) and included primar-ily lead-glazed redware vessels, domestically produced brown-slipped coarse stonewares, and to a lesser degree imported stonewares. The significant presence of storage vessels speaks to the role of food preservation as a desired food prepara-tion technique and/or a necessity due to less frequent access to fresh foods and the need to keep food available on-site between potential acquisition episodes. However, storage vessel fragments do not appear in excessively large numbers and, at only 14 percent, indicate either more regular access to fresh foods, the lack of dependence on ceramic storage vessels for food storage (i.e., casks or baskets may have been more heavily utilized for nonliquid foodstuffs), or the supplemen-tary contributions of preserved foods to the households cuisine.

While any number of food items could have been bought or prepared on-site and kept in these storage containers, the reliance by cooks at the Sarah Boston Farmstead site on glazed redwares and stonewares suggests that a considerable amount of liquid preserved foods were stored on-site. Documentary sources speak to the presence of an “exceptional” garden associated with the homestead in its later occupation (1790–1830) and a “handsome” cherry tree growing next to the house (Forbes 1889:179, Law 2008:57). Amelia Simmons’ s 1796 cookbook, American Cookery, illustrates the widespread practices of preserving fruits and vegetables at the time, which, coupled with the presence of fruit and vegetable

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resources near the house, suggests that cooks at the Sarah Boston Farmstead were potentially preserving and pickling fruits and vegetables to help ride out the win-ter months or to make up for a lack of regular access to fresh foods. Documentary sources also detail “several” rye and wheat fields on the house parcel (Earle Papers, box 1, folder 4); these crops (in addition to corn) would have been processed and stored on-site in ceramic containers or the archaeologically ephemeral splint baskets Sarah was known to possess (Law 2008) and would have provided cooks with a source of grain throughout the year.

Figure 9.2. Recovered ceramic vessels categorized by functional category.

Figure 9.3. Recovered redware vessels categorized by functional category.

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fOOds COOked And eAten

Documentation from the town of Grafton records the regular purchase and sale of cornmeal or “Indian meal” in town and the surrounding region and specifi-cally mentions the buying of cornmeal by Nipmuc households and individuals in Grafton, such as Nipmuc proprietor Patience Cook (Earle Papers, box 1, folder 3). With the widespread availability of corn, rye, and wheat meal and the regu-larity of purchases of both ground and unground corn and rye (ibid.), it seems reasonable to conclude that such grains served as a rather common component of meals. Indeed, the most visible mention in the documentary records of Sarah Boston’s cooking prowess are her “hoe cakes,” a form of corn-based “bread.” Ubiquitous in precolonial New England, these cakes were made by first mix-ing cornmeal with water and adding fruits, berries, and beans (Messner, Dickau, and Harbison 2008:113) and, according to Daniel Gookin (1970), cooked by “baking it in the ashes, covering the dough with leaves” (Stavely and Fitzgerald 2004:33). Hoe cakes, or “Johnny cakes,” as they came to be known, were later widely adopted by English colonial populations in New England, where they were made by mixing cornmeal with cream and “baked before the fire” of an open hearth (Emerson 1808:59) on the blade of a hoe or other flat implement or fried in a “greased griddle” (Stavely and Fitzgerald 2004:34–38), such as the iron pan recovered from the site. It seems probable that dried/parched corn or cornmeal could have been kept in storage vessels at the home and used by cooks for making hoe cakes and other dishes calling for corn, such as “brown bread” (rye and corn-meal bread) or soft corn “spoon breads” akin to porridges (ibid.).

However, at the SBFS the cooking of corn-based foods highlights a poten-tial departure from the cooking practices that predominated in colonial New England homes. The recovery of several fragments of a steatite bowl or mortar (figure 9.4) and a possible pestle with grinding use wear holds interesting poten-tial for informing on “continuities” of precolonial indigenous food preparation techniques.

Bendremer and Thomas (2008:188–189) have cited work by anthropologist Frank Speck that mentions mortars and pestles explicitly as corn-grinding instru-ments in material assemblages of other native New England populations (such as Mohegan) as late as the early twentieth century. Although it is possible that the recovered steatite fragments were simply curated by the inhabitants of the Sarah Boston Farmstead, their presence does add an interesting wrinkle to the other-wise “standard” set of colonial-era “Euro-American” cooking practices observed at the site. The steatite sherds may well represent an active nostalgic engage-ment of “precolonial” Nipmuc past and cooking practices through the conscious actions of colonial-period cooks at the Sarah Boston Farmstead, actions that may have come about as part of the “practical politics” of identity construction and expression that radically recontextualized the meaning and experience of such

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practices within this Nipmuc household (as per Silliman 2001, 2009; Harrison 2002).

Beyond cooking vessel analysis, the faunal assemblage speaks further to cooking techniques and gives a cursory overview of the kinds of meats and meals being consumed at the site. To date, the 2006–2007 faunal assemblage has been analyzed, and results thus far show a variety of different cuts of meat that were eaten on-site. The 2006–2007 assemblage yielded a number of identified speci-mens (NISP) of 2,478 (table 9.2) and in general, the collection was highly frag-mented as a result of destructive taphonomic processes.

First, 32 percent of faunal remains from the site were burned (97 percent of which were burned white or calcined), hinting at secondary deposition of a significant portion of the faunal remains into hearths as part of refuse disposal practices (Crader 1990:710). Second, over a quarter of the assemblage displays evidence of weathering; combined with the highly fragmentary nature of the col-lection, this suggests that trampling and/or crushing of bone material has severely degraded the collection. These taphonomic factors have likely biased the collec-tion toward denser elements such as feet and teeth as well as toward larger ani-mals, while simultaneously reducing the likelihood of recovering small mammals,

Figure 9.4. Fragment of a steatite bowl recovered at the Sarah Boston Farmstead site.

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birds, fish, and reptile remains. It should be noted that ongoing laboratory analy-sis of more recently collected faunal material from well-preserved features at the SBFS indicate much higher numbers of small mammals, birds, reptiles, and fish, suggesting that taphonomic factors have definitely biased the current collection against recovery of these animals (Allard 2010).

Of the identifiable portions of the sample, domesticated mammals predomi-nated in terms of NISP, minimum number of individuals (MNI), weight, and biomass, a theoretical amount of meat determined from bone weight by use of an allometric equation based on the natural biological relationship of meat to bone weight in live animals (Reitz and Wing 1999). Pig and cattle elements rep-resented 48 percent of the MNI and 52 percent of the biomass, while caprines (sheep or goats) represent only 13 percent of the MNI and 2.3 percent of the biomass (table 9.2). Head and foot remains (including teeth) are overrepresented in the NISP compared with body and limb bones, although cattle skeletal part representation shows a greater variability in the skeletal parts identified than does that from pigs (see figure 9.5 and figures 9.6–9.8). It is likely that some of the seemingly higher numbers of cattle and pig remains and foot and teeth elements result from taphonomic factors; however, ongoing laboratory analysis indicates similar results within better-preserved contexts, suggesting that this pattern is in some ways “real” and that inhabitants of the Sarah Boston site had a greater reli-ance on “lower quality” parts.

It should also be noted, however, that long bones from pigs and cattle could be more numerously represented within the collection among the many indeter-minate mammal bone fragments recorded. While it is difficult to say with cer-

Figure 9.5. Total head and feet bones vs. body and limb bones (NISP) for the three major domestic mammal taxa recovered at the Sarah Boston Farmstead site.

217


tainty, the high degree of fragmentation in the collection could be suggestive of the practice of crushing mammal long bones to access marrow or to ease the pro-cess of extracting grease from bones, either for economic reasons or for taste pref-erences. As discussed by Manne (this volume), numerous ethnographic examples exist of Native American groups using marrow and rendered bone grease in tradi-tional foods of various kinds. It is possible that the Nipmuc inhabitants of the site utilized marrow and rendered grease in cooking and food to nostalgically engage past Nipmuc cooking practices because of personal taste preferences developed through the influence of structural/cultural norms and practices specific to the Nipmuc and the spatial/temporal context(s) they inhabited, due to economic necessity, or, most likely, some combination of some or all of these factors. While pot polish on bones indicating extended boiling for grease extraction was not identified during analysis, it is possible that the heavy degree of weathering pres-ent at the site has obliterated this evidence and that it may be present in better-preserved faunal remains from the site.

The predominance of head and foot bones and crushed long bones (fig-ure 9.5) suggests that cooking methods with longer cooking times to render the meat more tender and palatable were used, if such qualities were in fact desired (Wandsnider 1997:10). Cooking techniques such as braising and stew-ing would achieve these results and would likely have been performed in the iron kettles recovered on-site as opposed to ceramic vessels, as only one sherd showed soot/exterior burning indicative of use over a fire and one glazed red-ware sherd displayed a possible interior boil line. Consideration must be given to the bias that external glazing would introduce to these interpretations, as little evidence of soot would remain on such vessels, obfuscating their use as open-fire cooking vessels. Soups, stews, and pottages with lower-quality cuts of meat as the base would be prepared by the household cook(s) either simply as a meat broth or with an assortment of vegetables, grains, and herbs from the garden planted next to the house, and even potentially using spices and ingredients purchased from likely well-stocked taverns and stores in the town of Grafton (as per Comer 2000:1307; Pierce 1879; Pezzarossi 2008). These stews and braises, prepared from “lower quality” cuts of meat (Schulz and Gust 1983), would have provided a flavorful and relatively frugal way for cooks to make the most out of local ingredients while also engaging with local, regional, and global economies.

The presence of body parts with a higher meat yield, such as long bones and lumbar vertebrae, suggests nuances in the kinds of meals being prepared at the site. Greater percentages of high-meat-yield cattle parts (24 percent) were recov-ered than for pigs (10 percent) and caprines (10 percent) (figures 9.6–9.8), and some of these bones exhibit saw marks suggestive of the purchase of cattle parts from butchers in Grafton.

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Additionally, the presence of a single cattle lumbar vertebra with cut marks is interesting: while being only a single bone (see Mrozowski 2000 for the impor-tance of single artifacts and observations in archaeological assemblages), it speaks to at least sporadic access to high-quality meat cuts such as the tenderloin. The cut marks on the wing of the vertebra imply either the butchering of the animal on-site or the breaking down of the tenderloin into steaks or other such cuts of meat that, as a result of the lack of collagen of this muscle, would likely be broiled, roasted, pan-fried, or otherwise quickly cooked (Wandsnider 1997:10). In short, despite the poor preservation of the assemblage, the faunal remains bear out the diversity of cooking practices on-site and specifically point to the preparation of meat cuts typically associated with both “one pot” meals as well as the increas-ingly popular segmented meals that would be served on flatwares and eaten with forks and knives.

Figure 9.6. Skeletal part representation (NISP) for cattle bones recovered from the Sarah Boston Farmstead site.

Figure 9.7. Skeletal part representation (NISP) for pig bones recovered from the Sarah Boston Farmstead site.

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Given the “chronic scarcity of fresh and tender flesh” (Stavely and Fitzgerald 2004:184) in colonial New England and the economic hardships facing the inhabitants of the Sarah Boston Farmstead that would have impinged on their ability to enjoy fresh meat frequently, we must consider what Crader (1990:713) has dubbed the “bacon factor.” In short, the potential dietary and culinary impor-tance of packed boneless or deboned smoked, pickled, and/or salted meats is underemphasized as a result of their lack of archaeologically recoverable traces (ibid.). A receipt for a transaction between Sarah Phillips and John Sherman in 1774 records the purchase of 21 pounds of beef for two shillings, nine pence, and two farthings for the household. With “average” estimates for yearly meat con-sumption in New England populations at this time thought to be around 150 pounds per person (Derven 1984; Comer 2000:1308), this purchase of beef would represent just shy of two month’s worth of meat for one person. Although more than one person inhabited the household at this time, some sort of preserva-tion would be needed to keep the meat from spoiling over the weeks it would take to be consumed if it was not eaten all at once. The receipt is unclear as to whether the beef was bought raw or as deboned packed, salted, or pickled beef (Crader 1990:704, 713), though the month of purchase, July, was not during slaughter-ing time (November–February), when fresh meat would have been most readily available (Stavely and Fitzgerald 2004:173; other receipts in Earle Papers 1:4 bear out this pattern). Regardless, it is likely that the beef was either purchased already preserved or preserved in some manner on-site and that storage vessels were used by cooks at the homestead to hold this meat until it was utilized in the kitchen.

Thus, the use of salted and otherwise preserved meats in addition to the abundance of head and feet portions in the assemblage illustrates the likely pre-dominant form of cooking meat by the inhabitants: boiling and stewing “one pot” meals, the method Stavely and Fitzgerald (2004:191) claim was the most

Figure 9.8. Skeletal part representation (NISP) for caprine bones recovered from the Sarah Boston Farmstead site.

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common form of cooking pork and other meat-based dishes in colonial New England until the nineteenth century. However, overemphasizing the use of pre-served and lower-quality meat cuts runs the risk of ignoring the ability of cooks at the site to utilize an array of cooking methods, as by 1750 New Englanders “were able to shift from monotony to routinized variety in their daily fare” (Stavely and Fitzgerald 2004:59), both in the ingredients and cooking techniques employed. The archaeological evidence discussed above traces out the uncommon but nonetheless economically and socially important investment in the cooking and eating of differentially prepared meals at the Sarah Boston Farmstead. Such evi-dence leads to an acknowledgment that the character and motivation for cuisine choices may lie at the intersection of constraining economic and social relations, wishes to engage in broader colonial foodways, and the microscale desires, tastes, and traditions of communities and households mediated through the agency, knowledge, and “bricolage” (de Certeau 1984) of cooks.

eAting And entertAining

The ceramics assemblage can be mined for further insights into the cooking prac-tices of the site inhabitants, especially through analysis of the tablewares associ-ated with serving and consuming the foods prepared by cooks using the previ-ously discussed cooking and storage vessels. There is little evidence in the assem-blage of the purchase and use of complete sets of ceramics wares, and analyses have shown a rather mixed assortment of decorated refined white earthenwares, predominantly shell-edged, hand-painted blue-on-white or polychrome pearl-wares dating to 1795–1810 (Miller et al. 2000; Pezzarossi 2008). The minimum vessel count (MVC) for the assemblage yielded a total of twelve flat tableware vessels to thirteen hollow tableware vessels, hinting at the equal importance of liquid and semiliquid food preparations and segmented meals involving what has traditionally been categorized as higher-quality cuts of meat (Crader 1990:698–699; Schulz and Gust 1983; Otto 1984).

Of particular interest is the variety of specific tableware ceramic forms, ranging from small and large plates, bowls, saucers (small dishes for sauce), and serving vessels, such as two large flat platters and eight oversized serving bowls (identified through sherd analysis). Mrozowski (2000:288) has argued that such diversity in tableware vessel forms implies participation in more formal dining practices that necessitate such a variety of specialized wares. Serving platters and bowls and other such serving pieces necessitated greater expenditure than simply serving directly to plates. However, the presence of a variety of vessels specific to serving and presentation “implies . . . a diet and style of dining that requires some expense to maintain” (Sussman 1977:108), a pattern paralleled in the vessel form variability of the assemblage. However, the serving vessels likewise dovetail

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with other evidence for the commensal nature of the foodways at the site that the archaeology has illuminated.

At the SBFS it appears not only that such engagement of segmented, for-mal, and social dining practices was carried out, but also that the diversity of food preparations necessitated specialized cooking vessels as well as specialized tablewares necessary for participation in the more formal Euro-American dining practices. The mismatch of decorative styles and a consideration of the economic hardship facing the inhabitants of this homestead must also be considered, as it implies a form of improvised or piecemeal participation in colonial domesticity (Weiss, in press) in contrast to the accepted norms requiring full sets of matching tablewares (see Wall 2000).

It bears considering why—despite the documented economic hardships of the inhabitants detailed previously—such a tactical investment in these income-intensive (Sussman 1977:108) dining and cooking practices was pursued. One possibility is that investing in formal cooking and dining practices and their asso-ciated material culture may have yielded potentially subversive effects. Pezzarossi (2008, 2011) has argued that such an engagement and appropriation of colonial material culture by the Nipmuc may have precipitated a “deflection” (de Cearteu 1984) of inequality through a confusing of the material and performative demarcators of difference that marginalized native people in the colonial world. However, it is similarly plausible that such cooking and dining practices were not considered extraneous luxuries by the Nipmuc inhabitants (and thus quickly discontinued in times of economic scarcity) but rather necessities due to their central role in their daily lives and traditions. The archaeological data speak to the latter possibility through (1) the profusion of more expensive ceramic wares related to an income-intensive set of foodways and (2) numerous individual frag-ments of such wares datable to various times between 1780 and 1830 (Pezzarossi 2008:81–83), suggesting a longer history of these more formal cooking and eat-ing practices at the site and hinting at the potentially affect-laden role that such foodways played in the traditions of this Nipmuc family.

The cutlery recovered archaeologically further buttresses the contention that segmented formal dining practices were common at the SBFS. Ten forks and ten knives were recovered in the 2006–2007 seasons alone, and more have been recovered in later seasons (Law 2008). Analysis and conservation of these artifacts is ongoing; however, their common presence on the site speaks to the perceived need for such implements in the eating of segmented meals that likely included whole boiled or roasted vegetables and cuts of meat, such as chops and steaks, that would be served on flatware plates and eaten by spearing or cutting into smaller pieces with table knives (e.g., Harrison 1972:65).

The glass assemblage from the site contains evidence of an interesting aspect of the food-related material culture that other facets of the assemblage hint at:

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the apparently social and communal nature of meals. Law (2008) has analyzed the glass assemblage from the site and has concluded, based on the higher than normal instance of glass tumblers, that the inhabitants of the Sarah Boston Farmstead entertained regularly and that the house likely served as an important meeting place for the Nipmuc community in Grafton. In comparing the occur-rence of seventeen tumblers on-site with the assemblages of rural New England boardinghouses, she concludes that the homestead may have been serving as an informal rural tavern or other form of social gathering place organized around the sharing of food and drink (ibid.). Moreover, the number of forks recovered thus far (n=10) coupled with the apparently excessive number of refined white earthenware and porcelain tableware vessels identified in the 2006 assemblage alone (n=147) serve to further buttress the contention that the household was an important social center, possibly for the whole of the Nipmuc community. In addition, the historical recollection of Taft (1958:6–7) relating Sarah Boston hosting her non-Nipmuc neighbors at her home for tea, hoe cakes, and pickerel illuminates the role that cooking, food, and socializing played in the construc-tion of relations with the settler populations of Grafton. The apparent “fame” (Munn 1992) of Sarah Boston’s cooking, combined with a ceramic and glassware assemblage consistent with entertaining, suggests that the homestead could have played an integral role in maintaining community cohesion among Nipmucs as well as enhancing interaction with their English neighbors. Rather than provid-ing evidence of marginalization, the documentary and archaeological data from the Sarah Boston farmstead argue for a different interpretation: indigenous communities and individuals who were substantially integrated, visible, and “rel-evant” in the communities and social and material practices of the colonial world (as per Bruchac 2009).

COnClusiOns

As a whole, the assemblage of the SBFS is characterized by an intensive and sus-tained engagement of colonial-period Euro-American cooking practices and foodways. It has been argued elsewhere that such engagements by indigenous populations may be part of a subversive strategy of “mimicry” aimed at deflecting inequality (Bhabha 2004; Pezzarossi 2008, 2011). However, we argue that consid-eration must be given to the potential of such eating and dining habits to become important Nipmuc community and family-specific traditions. Cooking and the foods produced through the varied cooking practices archaeologically visible at the SBFS appear to have become central to the daily lives of the Nipmuc inhabitants of the household. Particularly interesting is the manner in which the tastes, flavors, textures, and social dining experiences enabled through the skill and knowledge of the household’s cook(s) came to inhabit a position of such importance that they

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necessitated a substantial investment of financial resources in procuring a diver-sity of cooking implements, foods, and ceramic wares, despite the documented economic hardship of the household (e.g., Pezzarossi 2008; see also Wurst and McGuire 1999 for considerations of the constraining aspects of consumption).

We argue that Nipmuc attachments to the products of cooking practices came to be “poetically” constructed at the nexus of experience and habitus (as per Barthes 1979:31; Bachelard 1994). As such, the origins of the materials are rendered irrelevant (as per Silliman 2009), as the mix of “European” and “Native” technologies, ingredients, and cooked foods are experienced as “re-authored” (Harrison 2002) productions of the household cook (as per Abarca 2003). Through daily routinization, the foods would have been deeply and inextricably entangled with and central to Nipmuc traditions, albeit potentially micro-scale traditions unique to the Nipmuc inhabitants of SBFS household. The histori-cal trajectory that led to the development of these traditions is of interest as an example of the potential of cooks in influencing what is eaten and the variabil-ity within a community that such agency entails. The combined evidence points to micro-scale variations in practices, traditions, and food-related strategies for “negotiating social relations” (Rodríguez-Alegría 2005) in operation across vari-ous scales.

In the case of the SBFS, perhaps the apprenticeship of Sarah Muckamaug as a servant in the Brown household allowed her to gain knowledge and skills associated with popular late eighteenth-century cooking and eating practices, which may in turn have informed her daughter Sarah Burnee’s cooking practices and been passed down through the female heads of household inhabiting the family parcel on Keith Hill. Considering that Sarah Burnee was only seven at the time of her mother’s death, she may have been too young to absorb much of her mother’s cooking knowledge. However, scholars have argued that young chil-dren in colonial New England were seen as capable of “intellectual development” (i.e., training in reading, writing, and other skills) very early on, especially when compared with modern notions of children’s capabilities (Moran and Vinovskis 1985:30–32). Moreover, children in colonial New England began their “techno-logical” training—which for girls consisted of, among other things, learning to cook, spin, and make candles—between the ages of six and eight years old, if not younger (Beales 1975:382).

As such, young Sarah Burnee may have already begun learning how to cook and had substantial guidance from her mother before her death in 1751. It is equally plausible that Sarah Burnee may have learned how to cook (or been fur-ther instructed after her mother’s death) by the broader Nipmuc community she was part of and that indeed helped raise her after her mother’s death (Mandell 1998:81). This possibility highlights the Nipmuc community’s more wide-spread engagement of colonial or “Euro-American” foodways and underscores the

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centrality of these foodways in the daily lives and traditions of the colonial Nipmuc community in Grafton due to the fact that younger generations were taught to be proficient in them. While such speculation is productive, this study situates itself as only a point of departure for exploring the meaning and historical trajectories of various Nipmuc cooking practices in the colonial period and the current food-related traditions that emerged from that time period.

We have discussed the potential for the deflection of inequality and the cre-ation of affective relationships to foods, but we must also consider the central place that meals occupied in the households relations with the outside colonial community. It is additionally important to consider the role of these types of meals and the traditions they fomented in promoting Nipmuc community cohe-sion in the colonial period. The local history of Sarah Boston’s cooking and enter-taining practices (Taft 1958:6) finger the social “bridging” quality of meals at the household, wherein sitting down to “hoe cakes and pickerel” was marshaled as evidence of the “friendly” relationship the Nipmuc inhabitants on Keith Hill may have had with non-Nipmuc neighbors. It appears that the SBFS inhabitants’ participation in fashionable trends in cooking, dining, and associated discourses of domesticity that the archaeology illuminates facilitated the households’ par-ticipation in extracommunity entertaining with non-Nipmuc populations. In short, social meals appear to have been important points of commonality with settler and extracommunity populations as well as critical aspects of Nipmuc community interaction in the colonial period. Both sets of practices cannot be discounted as a catalyst for the continued political cohesion crucial to the com-munity persistence of the Nipmuc into the present and beyond. If not for this exploration of cooking practices, we would not be privy to how the cooks (be it Sarah Boston or another inhabitant of the household) actively maintained these traditions, nor would we understand much about the relationships Sarah had with her non-Native neighbors.

While the ceramic and glass analyses previously undertaken (Pezzarossi 2008; Law 2008) have come to similar conclusions regarding the use of fashion-able tablewares at the site, the preceding discussion has more fully developed the scale of the Nipmuc inhabitants’ engagement of the food and dining practices of colonial New England in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The cook-as-agent framework employed has helped showcase the colonial-era practices and traditions of one Nipmuc household to be not simply the result of unthinking “behavior,” acculturative pressure, or the alleged homogenizing force of the con-sumption of mass-produced commodities (as per Mullins 2004, Miller 1987). As Voss (2008:245) argues, “The person preparing food from raw materials faces an array of choices, and the patterned regularity in these choices points to con-ventions, traditions, and practices that are negotiated throughout the rhythms of daily life.” It is misguided to underplay the importance of cooks in producing the

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“patterned regularity” of cuisine choices observed through the archaeology of the SBFS, and it is doubly so to ignore the negotiation of Nipmuc traditions and practices that was carried out through and with colonial “European” material and that came to punctuate and conduct the “rhythms of daily life” for the Nipmuc.

Our goal has been to explore the cooking practices/traditions of a colonial Nipmuc household as the active appropriations and productions of agents who, despite material similarities to settler populations, potentially experienced these materials and practices in radically different ways. While it is tempting to try to trace the cultural or ethnic origins of the disparate archaeological residues of food-related practices identified at the SBFS, the cooking practices of the inhab-itants of the site serve as a specific instance of the active process of “reauthorship” of colonial material culture that seamlessly imbricated elements of both Native and non-Native techniques and ingredients in the production of new heteroge-neous colonial Nipmuc practices, traditions, and their associated materialities. Faced with this observation, one might ask of what importance is the “origin” of cattle, iron kettles, or corn when discussing the perpetuation of the Nipmuc com-munity and the creation of memories and cultural practices made viable explicitly through those materials and ingredients? The focus is more productively placed on the way in which such materialities came to be “thoughtful constructions” (Loren 2008) that opened up new avenues and possibilities for being Nipmuc in a harsh colonial world.

Acknowledgments. Thanks very much to Stephen Mrozowski and the Fiske Center for making the SBFS project a possibility and for kindly letting us work on it over the last few years, including the use of the data discussed above. A spe-cial thanks to Rae Gould and the Nipmuc Nation for enabling this collaboration in Nipmuc historical archaeology. In addition, thanks to Dave Landon for his help with the faunal analysis and for the use of the University of Massachusetts-Boston faunal lab and Barb Voss for reading and commenting on an early draft of this chapter. Finally, many thanks to Dave Crass and the Georgia Department of Natural Resources for their continued support and encouragement throughout this project.

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“Hoe Cake and Pickerel” Cooking Traditions, Community, and Agency at a Nineteenth Century Nipmuc Farmstead

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