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Until late in the seventeenth century, the majority of Maryland settlers were immigrants, mostly from the British Isles, who faced resources to supply food and drink very different from what they had previously known. For most Englishmen, the diet was based on grains: beer or ale to drink and bread and cereals in various forms to eat, supplemented when possible with fruits, vegetables, and small quantities of meat or fish. However growing English grains-wheat, rye, oats, and barley-required plowing, and in seventeenth-century Maryland, plowing required clearing the land of huge trees and roots not much found in the English landscape. The process took too long to produce enough English grains for feeding a family until the next crops were ready and still grow the cash crop, tobacco, needed to purchase manufactured goods from Europe. Maryland settlers turned to Indian methods for producing food, based on Indian corn.

A Different Agriculture
To newcomers, the contrast must have been a shock. Instead of chopping down a large tree, planters and their servants learned to cut away the bark in a circular strip near the base-a process called girdling-to keep the sap from rising. When the leaves had fallen, they hoed the land beneath and planted Indian corn kernels in small hills, eliminating the need for the plow. The amount of corn a man then could grow would feed his family for a year or more. However, Indian corn had one drawback, compared to English grains. It did not provide the niacin needed to prevent pellagra, a terrible skin disease that produces severe gastritis and skin sores. The cure was to eat beans and peas, easily planted with the corn, and\or meat and fish. All were available. There was little long-term hunger or thirst and no famine among settlers in Maryland, even in the earliest days.

Indian Corn
Indian corn provided the main year-round food, but in the absence of water mills, Marylanders had to grind it by hand. They soaked dried kernels for several hours and then pounded them with an iron pestle in a mortar, often simply a hollowed-out log set upright in the ground. Each cup took about ten minutes to pound. About four and a half cups per day was the standard food ration for a grown man; smaller quantities were needed for women and children. Once beaten, the corn was sifted to eliminate the shell. The coarser grains were boiled with water in a very large iron pot hooked to a wooden pole set into the chimney walls. After cooking for many hours, they became a mush called hominy. Families often ate one-pot meals by adding dried peas and beans, milk in season, and on occasion, preserved meats, usually salt pork or beef. The addition of peas and beans alone provided an adequate nutrition. Once edible, the stew could simmer indefinitely until needed.

The finer corn grains, mixed with water or milk, could be made into bread, often referred to as pone. This was baked in an iron or brass kettle. Unlike pots, kettles had tops. They became make-shift ovens when set upon a gridiron over coals with more coals on the top. People could dip the pone into the "pot-likker" or eat it with a little butter.

Meat and Milk
Most households had at the minimum a few pigs and/or cattle for pork, beef, and milk, and some had poultry for eggs as well as eating. Estimates of the amount of meat available per person range from 60 to 200 pounds a year, depending on the wealth and the size of the household and the ages of its members. Sheep were little raised until late in the century, since wolves found them easy prey. Besides stewing meats or fowl with the corn, settlers roasted these products, when fresh, on a spit attached to a rack or an andiron at the front of the fireplace or from a hook on the mantle piece, with a dripping pan beneath. The cook might also fry smaller pieces with fat in a frying pan placed over the coals on a gridiron. When the cow or cows were in milk, she could skim the cream and churn it to make butter, which, when salted, would keep well. She might also add what we call cottage cheese to the family diet, but there was little time in this farm-building period to produce cured cheese.

Vegetables and Fruit
As for vegetables, besides beans and peas, the records mostly speak of cabbages, squashes, pumpkins, herbs, and root crops such as sweet potatoes, parsnips, carrots, and turnips. All these could be stored, but apparently usually were not, since they are rarely mentioned in the probate records taken at the death of the householder. More perishable products such as lettuce, cucumbers, and melons, received less widespread comment, but most planters had at least a small orchard of apples or peaches, and sometimes pears.

Wild Foods
Over the first twenty-five or thirty years of Maryland settlement, wild foods were an important addition to the diet. Here archaeology has provided information not to be found in the written record. Bones found in trash pits on domestic sites in Maryland and Virginia show that before the 1660s, wild creatures?animals, fish, and birds-provided as much as 40 percent of the "meat" consumed. Deer meat was the most prominent, but small mammals such as raccoons, squirrels, and opossums also were in supply, and fish, water fowl, turkeys, and other game were present in great variety. However, by the 1660s, the bones begin to change in favor of domestic livestock. By 1700, bones of wildlife represented only about 10 percent of all the bones so far found in these early settled areas.

Wild vegetables and fruits in abundance also contributed to the colonists' diet, although usually mentioned only incidentally. Violets, sorrell, and "Purslanes"-probably referring to several kinds of weeds-provided greens for salads; persimmons, maracocks-a fruit that tasted like a lemon-grapes, raspberries, strawberries, and mulberries are wild fruits and berries reported. Walnuts and hickory nuts also got notice. All these wild products must have made a difference especially to the poor, who, without servants to assist their labors, had to give priority to raising tobacco to sell and corn and legumes to eat before establishing orchards or more than the simplest kitchen gardens.

Sweeteners and Spices
Apart from local fruits, berries, and herbs, sweeteners and spices were mostly missing from the diet. Marylanders had to import expensive sugar and molasses, and planters did not begin to care for bee hives to harvest honey until late in the century. Nevertheless, there are occasional references to meat or fruit pies and sweet cakes, especially for baptismal and funeral feasts, and not just among the very rich. Planters sometimes raised a little wheat among the corn stalks, which could provide the flour for the piecrusts and cakes, and milk and eggs were seasonally on hand. Affluent planters imported small quantities of spices such as pepper, nutmeg, and cinnamon for baking and stewing. However, the poor relied primarily on local herbs for seasoning, or went without.

Drink
Drink to wash down the food was at first only water, to the dismay of many, but numerous springs supplied ample quantities. The early colonists brought with them seeds for planting fruit trees, making production of peaches, pears, and especially apples possible within a few years of settlement. Once a planter had established an orchard, a mildly alcoholic cider from these fruits was available for about eight months of the year. These ciders could also be distilled into brandy for a more permanent supply, although the absence of stills in most lists of household equipment suggest that brandy was not often locally produced. Milk was a more seasonal drink, hence less available than cider. Cows usually calved only once a year, in the early fall or late spring, and seventeenth-century housewives, always in charge of the dairy, did not attempt to extend milk production after calves stopped sucking. Housewives could, and did, brew a mildly -alcoholic beer from corn stalks, pumpkins, persimmons, sweet potatoes, or a mixture of these, but it did not much appeal to English tastes. Few planters attempted to make English beer or ale. These were based on English grains and were the basic drink in the British Isles. Water and cider played that role in early Maryland.

Over the first twenty-five years of settlement, strong liquors distilled from grains and often referred to as drams, were imported from England, but thereafter, rum from the West Indies, based on molasses, gradually became the norm. It crowded out drams in the diet of households with small and middling wealth. Some innkeepers offered fortified wines, imported from Portugal, Spain, and the Azores, but at high prices that not many settlers could afford. Such drinks rarely appeared in the household goods of even the well-to-do. Planters did not try to make their own wines.

Changes to Come
Toward the end of the seventeenth century, change in the Maryland landscape began to affect the Maryland diet. In the early settled areas, virgin forest had mostly disappeared, and planters could chop down the second-growth trees and remove their roots. They then could plow their land, rather than hoe it by hand. By 1700, in early settled areas, planters were beginning to plow. Food and drink in the eighteenth century would in some basic ways remain the same, but the changes that plowing brought to agriculture would bring new crops and foods to support new ways of living.

— Lois Green Carr