tly made into flour and meal by the
family, the fruit dried or preserved by the housewife. Molasses, sugar,
spices, and rum might be imported from the West Indies, but the everyday
foods must come from the local neighborhood, and through the hard manual
efforts of the consumer. An old farmer declared in the _American
Museum_ in 1787: "At this time my farm gave me and my whole family a
good living on the produce of it, and left me one year with another one
hundred and fifty silver dollars, for I never spent more than ten
dollars a year, which was for salt, nails, and the like. Nothing to eat,
drink or wear was bought, as my farm provided all."

The very building of a fire to cook the food was a laborious task with
flint and steel, one generally avoided by never allowing the embers on
the family hearth to die. Fire was indeed a precious gift in that day,
and that the methods sometimes used in obtaining it were truly
primitive, may be conjectured from the following extract from Prince's
_Annals of New England_: "April 21, 1631. The house of John Page of
Waterton burnt by carrying a few coals from one house to another. A coal
fell by the way and kindled the leaves."[85]

Over those great fire-places of colonial times many a wife presented
herself as a burnt offering to her lord and master, the goodman of the
house. The pots and kettles that ornamented the kitchen walls were
implements for pre-historic giants rather than for frail women. The
brass or copper kettles often holding fifteen gallons, and the huge iron
pots weighing forty pounds, were lugged hither and thither by women
whose every ounce of strength was needed for the too frequent pangs of
child-birth. The colonists boasted of the number of generations a kettle
would outlast; but perhaps the generations were too short--thanks to the
size of the kettle.

And yet with such cumbersome utensils, the good wives of all the
colonies prepared meals that would drive the modern cook to distraction.
Hear these eighteenth century comments on Philadelphia menus:

"This plain Friend [Miers Fisher, a young Quaker lawyer], with
his plain but pretty wife with her Thees and Thous, had provided
us a costly entertainment: ducks, hams, chickens, beef, pig,
tarts, creams, custards, jellies, fools, trifles, floating
islands, beer, porter, punch, wine and along, etc."

"At the home of Chief Justice Chew. About four o'clock we were
called to dinner.