Learning to Love Pilgrim Succotash: Food Reform and the Colonial Revival in America, 1875–1925

In late nineteenth and early twentieth-century America, charity workers, urban reformers, and domestic-science experts descended upon working-class homes, attempting to solve the twin problems of poverty and urban disorder. Their interest in home food production, and their discomfort with the urbanized, heavily immigrant modern city, ultimately led some reformers to look to the past for examples of good home management. The Colonial Revival movement in home decoration and architecture presented an idealized, patriotic vision of American society. Its proponents envisioned colonial Americans as honest, hard-working, agrarian, and (not quite coincidentally) white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant citizens, who thriftily produced and preserved all of their food at home. The Colonial Revival movement influenced domestic scientists and urban reformers as well. Seizing on the colonial period – or a fantasy of it – as a good example for immigrant, urban housewives to follow, reformers like Ellen Richards urged women to reject the labor-saving but immoral conveniences of industrialized foodways and return to the more virtuous “old fashioned” ways. The reformers saw urban poor women as deskilled by industrialization: robbed of their kitchen skills and thereby their identities as wives and mothers, by competition from the deli and bakery. It would be better, the reformers thought, for working-class women to live virtuously and plainly: living mostly on whole grains, seasonal produce, and slow-cooked dishes, and performing most of the labor of food preparation in the home. The reformers’ interest in an imagined New England past dovetailed with their anxieties about immigrants and cultural assimilation, women’s paid labor, consumerism, and public health and sanitation. By the 1920s, “old-fashioned” home food production and frugality were less emphasized; instead, the growing field of home economics thrived on a close partnership with food corporations and encouraged careful consumerism as the means to a happy home and stable society.