Getting Back in Touch with New England’s Culinary History
From The Apples of New York, 1905
New England cuisine has never been static. The region is well known for clam chowder and Boston cream pie, but locals know there is much more to it than that. A fascinating array of factors, from intense seasonality to waves of immigration, have shaped New England food, and its culinary history is deeply intertwined with social forces that have impacted the region’s overall culture. When Colonial settlers first encountered Indigenous communities, when immigrants arrived from Europe and as other ethnic groups vied for cultural status in the face of intense prejudice, people in New England grappled with assimilation and maintaining cultural traditions, with food as a direct manifestation of this process.
In addition to serving as cultural brokers expanding New England’s culinary horizons, immigrant communities have developed a number of foods unique to this region, fusing their own culinary traditions with ingredients found in their new home. Italian-Americans in New England have brought us New Haven Clam Pie and scali bread, while Jewish Bostonians growing up in the eighties have fond memories of “Boston-style” beef knishes. The stuffed clams found throughout New England and especially in Rhode Island are filled with Portuguese flavors and known as “stuffies.”
But in the late 19th century, as waves of immigrants settled in the region, the Yankee establishment believed they were watching their traditions slip away. To preserve the “traditional” New England way, they rewrote New England’s culinary past, excluding many of the region’s rich, existing immigrant cultures, as described in Keith Stavely and Kathleen Fitzgerald’s foundational book America’s Founding Food (2004).
This mythical version of history continued to disregard Indigenous communities’ contributions to New England cuisine and its broader culture. Avery Yale Kamila, creator of the Maine Vegetarian History Project, describes foods we would now call “nut milks” and “nut cheeses,” including a plant-based infant formula, that were developed by Indigenous tribes and likely taught to early settlers.
And even though New Englanders were increasingly urban, this 19th-century Colonial Revival movement asserted rural roots. Molasses began adding its rustic charm to a number of dishes where it would not have traditionally been used, such as baked beans. “New England Kitchens” at expositions and fairs across the country exported this notion by serving up “Ye Olde” apple pies and boiled dinners to unsuspecting diners.
The movement proved stunningly successful. Even today, “Most people are fully believing myths about New England food that were consciously created in the Victorian era in response to the perceived threat of mass immigration,” says Amy Traverso, senior food editor of Yankee Magazine.
For example, the menu at Northern Spy, chef Marc Sheehan’s restaurant in Canton, features a potato dumpling inspired by historical New England cookbooks. On the menu, though, the dish is listed as a “seared potato gnocchi,” even though “it’s not gnocchi because gnocchi didn’t exist here.” Sheehan has found people simply won’t go for the dish when it’s called a “potato dumpling,” revealing diners’ pre-established notions of New England food.
Similarly, Sheehan thickens his chowders with potato rather than with roux, and occasionally faces diners who argue that his dish is historically inaccurate. “I can give you two dozen recipes that are 150 years old that will prove you wrong, but you’re entrenched in your position that, because you’ve gone to Maine a few times, chowder has to have been made with roux,” he says.
Ridding ourselves of the Colonial Revival—of a xenophobic, revisionist idea of New England culture—means getting back in touch with the history, diversity and unique qualities of the region.
For much of her life, Yankee’s Traverso experienced a cognitive dissonance between what she believed to be New England food—“baked beans and lobster rolls and scrod and clam chowder”—and what she had actually eaten growing up here. Born into an Italian-American family in Connecticut, Traverso grew up with Sunday dinners of pasta, meatballs and tomato gravy, but didn’t see this fitting into New England cuisine.
Yankee was established almost a century ago to “represent and preserve the rural New England life … because the founder felt that life was under threat from cities and cultural homogenization,” Traverso says.
Yet Traverso feels a strong responsibility not to “perpetuate the idea that New England is mostly rural and mostly white, which is a lot of the image that gets exported.” She hopes for the magazine to serve as “a place that represents New England as it is today and has a strong sense of place”—that celebrates New England, but is not tied to stereotypical views of the region’s culture.
Traverso recognizes the difficulty of establishing this balance. “Growing up Italian-American, but white—Italians have been considered white since World War II, so we’ve had a number of decades of whiteness—it’s a lifetime’s work to be interrogating your biases and … realizing where you’re centering yourself or thinking your culture is the norm against which all others are measured,” she said.
She highlights a recent Yankee article featuring traditional wintertime foods from a variety of cultures, all of which can be found in New England. These range from Bûche de Noël and rugelach to tamales and Kwanzaa feasts. Traverso also has ideas for a future issue that allows readers to “dine around the world without leaving New England” by looking at different cultural centers and cuisines, like Cambodian in Lowell; Thai in Portland; and Brazilian in Bridgeport.
The magazine still has space for the occasional lobster roll roundup, and increasingly bridges the expected with the new by publishing recipes for innovative spins on traditional recipes. “What our audience wants is classics with a twist,” Traverso says. “But we try to be broader in what we call classics.”
While studying history as a college student, Marc Sheehan came to realize how deeply food represents broader social and cultural trends. Embedded in a seemingly dull report on expanding maple syrup production in the early United States, Sheehan was surprised to discover founding father Benjamin Rush argued that increasing the country’s self-sufficiency would allow it to eventually eradicate slavery. Since recognizing the culinary legacy of New England, the Milton native has kept his culinary career rooted in his home region’s history.
At Loyal Nine, Sheehan’s Cambridge restaurant from 2015 to 2021, each dish was the product of meticulous historical research and freehanded experimentation. At first, Sheehan and his diners struggled to define the restaurant’s cuisine. Restaurant reviews labeled Loyal Nine’s food as “Colonial,” but what Sheehan sought to celebrate was in some ways the opposite: the “very rich and interesting and, almost at times, seemingly foreign food culture that existed here” before the 19th Century Colonial Revival movement separated New Englanders from their culinary traditions.
This nuance was difficult to convey, and a tough sell to diners who weren’t seeking an education from their dinner. “We would have the same diners who would go into a Thai restaurant, not be able to pronounce a word on the menu, maybe not fully know what it is, and feel comfortable ordering it, but not do the same thing for New England food,” says Sheehan.
Northern Spy, Sheehan’s latest restaurant, is located in Canton on the grounds of the first rolling copper mill in the country. The building Northern Spy occupies was once a mill run by Paul Revere’s grandson, and rolled the original copper for the dome of the Massachusetts State House as well as the hull of the U.S.S. Constitution. (Sheehan notes that the ship’s nickname “Old Ironsides” is a misnomer; the ship should really be called “Old Coppersides.”) The name Northern Spy comes from a regional apple variety of the same name, while also paying homage to the founding father whose land the restaurant lies on. Revere only learned how to roll copper, after all, by sending his grandson to work undercover in an English mill after the Revolutionary War.
To allow interested diners to explore this history in their own time, Sheehan is working with Canton’s Paul Revere Heritage Trust to create a museum in a barn also located on the property. He plans to host upcoming events with local historians Keith Stavely and Kathleen Fitzgerald, authors of the legendary book America’s Founding Food.
Cookbook author and historian Marilynn Brass describes the food she grew up eating in two distinct categories: that inspired by her Ashkenazi-Jewish heritage, and that of her upbringing in Winthrop.
Every Friday throughout Brass’ 1940s childhood, her mother prepared a Shabbat meal typical of the Jewish diaspora: chicken soup, challah, herring and chopped liver. But the family enjoyed exploring other immigrant cuisines as well. Brass and her sister Sheila ate Chinese food on Christmas and New Year’s, and frequented Harvard Square’s Casa Mexico.
These places were distinct from those visited by Boston’s cultural elite, the so-called Brahmins. “When we wanted New England food, we didn’t think of the food we grew up with,” she said. “[At] any restaurant in Boston, other than an ‘ethnic’ restaurant, you got meat and potatoes, or you got roast chicken.” For special occasions, Brass enjoyed eating at stalwart Boston institutions like Union Oyster House, Durgin Park, and, on special occasions, Locke-Ober, which didn’t allow women into its dining room until the 1950s.
Brass’s exploration of all the food Massachusetts has to offer has fueled a lifelong interest in cookbooks and the stories hidden within them. Through decades collecting them at yard sales and estate sales, she has unearthed centuries of local culinary history. Brass is especially fond of manuscript cookbooks, handwritten collections passed down through generations in a family, collecting marginalia and clippings along the way. Several recipes from the cookbook she wrote with her sister Sheila, Baking with the Brass Sisters, were adapted from loose pages tucked away in manuscript cookbooks, including their recipe for Irish tea bread.
While the blockbuster cookbooks of the day—especially those published by the Boston Cooking School—canonized the diets of New England’s elite, manuscript cookbooks reveal a much more diverse food landscape. Brass has combed through recipes put together by Irish servants, pioneering women in the arts and in politics and men who took to the kitchen. Brass’s cookbooks celebrate these stories as well as those of her own childhood, demonstrating that everyone here deserves a place in the canon of New England’s culinary history.
It remains an open question, how to describe a region’s cuisine. There is no single way to account for the myriad factors that contribute to the way people eat. Attempting to define a cohesive cuisine for a community will always mean struggling to balance culinary idiolects with a unifying culture.
But New England is a special place, and there are certainly strands that can be picked out to represent those who inhabit the region now, whether they’ve been here for centuries or months.
“New Englanders are tough,” says Brass. “In New England, you put down roots, and you stayed. … The food was nourishing, and it was grown by you or by somebody who had a farm near you, and you lived off what you could find.”
