So coming back to New England was almost like a pilgrimage in the summer. Stavely: The idea that the only proper way to eat lobster is live boiled was quite a recent idea.įitzgerald: Yankee roots were a very big thing for people who had to resettle in the Midwest to farm. At the same time, tourism started to become the fad, so eating lobster in the summer in areas you traveled to was beginning. By the end of the 19th century there had been a lot of bad press about dirty conditions in canning factories, so people were put off of canned lobster. How did boiled lobster become a New England summer dish?įitzgerald: There was a big lobster canning industry in Maine and the Canadian Maritimes. So if you have communally prepared food that is ready, then you don't have to do work on the Sabbath. New England Puritans and then the Congregationalists really emphasized keeping the Sabbath from sundown on Saturday through Sunday evening. They were also evoking this vaunted New England way of life that is community-based and simpler. Community cookbooks and community suppers were often fund-raisers for Civil War veterans and veterans' widows. It was equal parts nostalgia and remembrance of foods that they saw as plainer than the fancy stuff of the Gilded Age diet. We strongly suspect that this custom of community suppers on Sunday nights was a response to feeling that there wasn't enough sense of community with all the changes that were taking place in society as a whole.įitzgerald: People wanted to evoke the past. Stavely: After the Civil War, in the era of industrialization and heavy immigration, it was felt that these traditions were slipping away.
The two split their time between Cambridge and Jamestown, R.I. Together the pair has researched and written two books, "Northern Hospitality: Cooking by the Book in New England" and "America's Founding Food: The Story of New England Cooking," that give armchair cooks a taste of New England heritage from the Puritan days through more recent times.
"There were cuisines of ethnic groups - Italian food, Chinese food - and then there was just food. "I became interested in why we all in New England were influenced by this. "We had baked beans on Saturday night and ate cod cakes, chowders, and lobsters," she says. Fitzgerald is a public librarian and college chaplain who was raised in a New England Irish-Catholic household and has had a long-standing curiosity about food traditions. Stavely is a scholar who descends from early New England settlers and has written about Puritan influences on American culture.
The husband-wife team Keith Stavely and Kathleen Fitzgerald has written the history of New England through the region's everyday food, an interest they come by honestly.
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