What Were People Eating In 1776?:
When we think about signs of wealth today, “we think about cars and handbags or real estate,” said Dana Connett, the community programs coordinator at the nonprofit Historic Annapolis.But in 1776, it was food. Two hundred and fifty years ago, social class defined the food that colonists and the enslaved ate.
The Founding Fathers and members of the gentry class relied heavily on recipes from France and England and even imported some of their food from Europe, food historians said. They were desperate to emulate the wealth and prestige of affluent Europeans.
At a dinner table in the Paca House, a representation of a spring meal sits on the table with original monogrammed silver condiment shakers. On this day, the Pacas would have eaten turkey soup, fried shad, collards, ham and asparagus, oysters and roast chicken.
The type of meat the colonists ate was a status symbol, and beef was the most sought-after, said Joyce White, a local food historian who set up the food displays at the Paca House. Chicken would be eaten on special occasions — to sacrifice a good hen rather than use it for its eggs would be a delicacy.
“If it’s your pig or cow coming from your plantation, you don’t want to waste it,” White said.
In the basement of the Paca House, a kitchen reveals the grueling work it took to get the food on the Pacas’ table. The Pacas were not cooking their own food, and neither were the Founding Fathers — they relied on the enslaved.
“A few of our biggest cuisine definers are Washington and Jefferson — famous enslavers,” Lohman said. Both men had well-known enslaved chefs: James Hemings, a chef for Jefferson, and Hercules Posey, Washington’s chef. Jefferson even took Hemings with him to Paris to train in French cuisine. Macaroni and cheese recipes exist to this day that likely came from Hemings.
In the Pacas’ kitchen, a meal on a small wooden table resembles what an enslaved cook would have eaten: stewed kidneys, boiled hominy, pickled beets, collard greens, roasted sweet potatoes and black-eyed peas. As Connett pointed to the food on the plate, she said it would not be enough to satisfy hunger.
“When we’re remembering: What did the Founding Fathers eat? We have to remember all of the people in the kitchen,” Lohman said.
The kitchens would have been stiflingly hot, especially in the summer, Connett said. Food 250 years ago was cooked in hearths.
Miller said the rations for the enslaved could be cornmeal, sweet potatoes, rice, a jug of molasses and a couple of pounds of smoked, pickled, salted or dried meat, usually pork. A lot of the time, they had to supplement their diet by hunting, fishing and foraging.
The “they” is Lucky Strike Entertainment, formerly known as Bowlero Corporation, the private equity–backed behemoth that in the past 10+ years has bought more than 350 of the nation’s bowling alleys and transformed them into a (to quote the Bowlero website) “quirky, edgy, retro-inspired bowling phenomenon” that has deprioritized league bowling, escalated the cost of bowling with algorithm-driven dynamic pricing, and accelerated the demise of one of the 20th century’s most dependable third spaces. And now, thanks to a class-action lawsuit filed in May by disgruntled bowlers, the company stands accused of violating antitrust laws, as well as “the veritable destruction of the decades-old pastime of bowling in America.” (Bowlero, which rebranded as Lucky Strike Entertainment after acquiring all Lucky Strike bowling centers, has since added water parks to its portfolio.)
In a 2024 exposé on Bowlero’s rise, Amos Barshad introduced a now-familiar category of villain — the private-equity vulture — as more than the average mercenary buying up distressed properties and selling off their parts. Bowlero was engaged in an intentional decimation of bowling itself, asserted Barshad: It became the world’s largest operator of bowling centers, the suit alleges, “not by offering better lanes and a superior customer experience, but by gobbling up its competitors through unlawful acquisitions, and then cutting supply, raising prices, pushing alcohol, promoting gambling, and alienating virtually every customer except those who have no interest in bowling.”
I might add that the proliferation of TV sports essentially killed the Pro Bowlers’ Tour, plus improvements in lane conditions and ball technology made 300 games ‘too easy’ as opposed to being a rarity. Materials engineers will love this. Perhaps only materials engineers (and litigators) will love this. I predict that none of you will listen to the whole thing:
How do you feel about exclamation marks? Otherwise known as gaspers, screamers, dog’s cocks, or shrieks. In his Modern English Usage, Fowler said that using too many betrays an “uneducated or unpractised writer”. Martin Amis called them “joke badges”, and Theodor Adorno “soundless cymbal-crashing”. The novelist Elmore Leonard specified that you were allowed only two or three every 100,000 words. He was being generous.
What Hazrat really believes about exclamation marks, alas, may be inferred from her ultra-liberal use of them. “No such thing as binge-reading the Bible for an early-medieval monk!” runs one joke-badged parenthesis. “Let nobody claim punctuation wasn’t sexy!” “The mind and the hand of the pope – you couldn’t get much higher in the Renaissance!” To be fair, this is a nice observation: “All Shakespearean tragedies have at least one exclamation mark, while the six comedies and two history plays don’t have any at all. It’s not farfetched to conclude that, for Shakespeare and his contemporaries, exclamations were an expression of intense distress, rather than ‘screechy’ hysteria.” If the reader is supposed to experience intense distress on encountering Hazrat’s own exclamation marks, then they work as intended.
The happy corollary to the author’s exclamatory incontinence is that this book is no mere wacky usage guide of the Eats, Shoots & Leaves sort; it is an appealing, lavishly researched scholarly inquiry into punctuation over the centuries. After a brief prehistory about “interpuncts” (dots between words in ancient languages) and the like, we observe a great Renaissance flourishing of innovative marks designed to guide people through the rhythm and tone, and so the sense, of what they were reading. The semicolon, for example, was created by a Venetian master printer named Aldo Manuzio, who hung a sign on his door that read: “Whoever you are, Aldo asks you again and again what it is you want from him. State your business briefly, and then immediately go away.” Hashtag life goals.
When thinking about this, I realized that I rarely think about punctuation. The way I use it has simply become a part of my voice, and I employ it as such: Without thinking (insert joke here).
I know what you’re thinkin’–not too many songs about punctuation. How are you getting out of this one? Hey, I’m not ‘comma-tose’. I know what I’m doing:
I have disdained the exclamation point for most of my literate life, but my attitude has changed a little. I’ve found that very brief comments meant to be neutral, positive or ironic in space-limited emails or texts can sometimes sound curt or even downright unfriendly without an exclamation point. But my love for the semicolon continues. It’s always satisfying to find a place where it’s appropriate (they do exist), tap that little mark and glide right over to the next part.