Dining out and Dining In during colonial era

 

1. Dining out and Dining In during colonial eraⁱ

Let’s also recognize that the retailing of prepared food is now and has always been largely an urban phenomenon. People living in sparsely-populated rural areas in the past enjoyed far fewer opportunities to purchase or barter for ready-to-eat meals than their urban counterparts. For this reason, rural fairs, like the ones once held at Ashley Ferry, Radnor, Wiltown, and Childsbury or Strawberry in colonial times, were popular occasions during which vendors sold prepared food to the assembled crowds. . . .

In the deep history of urban Charleston, just as today, there were lots of dining options available to residents and visitors, but our ability to study those past options is constrained by the paucity of written documents. All of our forebearers here in Charleston ate meals every day, of course, but eating is generally such a mundane activity that most people don’t write descriptions of their dining habits. Descriptions of cooking and ingredients and recipes are interesting branches of this topic, but I’m narrowing my focus to documentary evidence of the commerce of serving food and drink to paying customers. Some of the best information we have about the food and beverage industry in early Charleston appears in the local newspapers that commenced in Charleston in 1732. Here we find advertisements for services, descriptions of feasts given on special occasions, and small anecdotes about eating and drinking within essays about a wide variety of local news topics. But the newspapers were created for and read by a relatively narrow sphere of affluent, literate people. Those parts of the food and beverage industry intended for less-affluent people were not necessarily described in the newspapers. Consequently, we have very little evidence about the early food commerce related to folks at the lower end of the socio-economic scale. Like today, we might assume that poor people did not “dine out” very frequently, but sometimes there was no choice. People laboring outside their respective residences did not necessarily have the luxury of time to return home in the middle of the workday to prepare or eat a meal.

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Ambulatory food is generally the least complicated sort of fare. It might be something raw or minimally unprocessed, like peanuts, oranges, honey, or fresh shrimp, or it might be something ready to eat like a pastry, ice cream, or a plate of boiled shrimp or steamed oysters. From Charleston’s earliest days to the middle of the twentieth century, ambulatory food sellers known as “hucksters” (or “huxters”) plied the city streets, some with baskets of food balanced on their heads while others pushed small wooden carts of comestibles. The hucksters frequently cried out to the public as they walked, chirping melodious advertising slogans to entice customers on the go. The city’s food markets (in different locations at different periods in our history) always formed their home base, and the ambulatory hucksters—including both men and women—generally ranged through the city’s most populous streets in search of business. You’ll recognize this phenomenon, of course, if you remember that George Gershwin included the honey-man, the crab-man, and the strawberry-woman in the score of Porgy and Bess as a way to infuse his opera with a bit of real Charleston flavor.

The concept of take-out or take-away food and drink has existed as long as there were hungry people who didn’t feel like cooking. In Charleston, this sort of activity is one of the hardest to document because it didn’t rely on advertising or expensive infrastructure. By combining a handful of surviving local clues with facts about this sort of activity in other historic communities, and in the present, however, we can reconstruct a bit of the take-out culture of early Charleston. Entrepreneurs with cooking equipment in their own homes sold food to passing pedestrians without requiring customers to enter the premises. Part of the evidence for this historic practice involves a once-common but now forgotten architectural feature called a “stall board,” which transformed an open window into a platform for contact-free business. Laborers with limited time for a mid-day meal could bring their own tin cup or lunch pail to such an establishment and take away a serving of ale and a bowl of soup. Some vendors used illegal outdoor fires to cook market goods on the fly. More sophisticated vendors with larger kitchens and staff were able to offer complete meals for entire families, ready for pick up on short notice.

Food delivery was part of the Charleston dining scene long before the arrival of pizza and Uber, but the clientele for such services was much smaller in the past. Before the proliferation of the automobile in the twentieth century made food delivery a relatively quick and cheap option, only the most affluent customers could snap their fingers and summon ready-made food to their table. Where there’s a market, however, there’s always means to commerce. The restauranteurs of early Charleston could dispatch meals to a client’s house for a handsome fee, or send a cook and staff to prepare and serve a feast within the customer’s own kitchen. Adam Pryor, for example, came from London to Charleston in 1786 and offered to “perform the art of cookery in all its variety” for the ladies and gentlemen of Charleston. In the distant past as today, hungry homeowners could also hire chefs of known abilities to cater domestic feasts for a private audience. Prior to 1865, the owners of skilled enslaved cooks rented their culinary services to paying customers in Charleston’s rarified world of high cuisine.

The business of inviting customers into a facility to consume a meal or a drink on the premises is an ancient practice that has evolved far beyond its humble beginnings. The basic concepts behind the modern restaurant and bar existed in early Charleston, but it wasn’t called a restaurant or a bar and we might not recognize it as place of culinary business. Here our modern vocabulary fails, and we have to resort to an eighteenth-century dictionary to identify the clues.

The landscape of eighteenth-century Charleston, for example, was littered with taverns, inns, public houses, victualing houses, houses of entertainment, and ordinaries. On King Street alone during the late colonial-era, customers lodged and ate at the sign of the Crown, the Bear, the Peacock, the Seven Stars, The Cross Keys, the Buck, the Sloop, the White Horse, the Bay Horse, the Black Horse, the Golden Horse, the Horse and Chair, the Horse and Jockey, and the Horse Centienel. These ancient English terms denoted facilities that offered meals of varying degrees of sophistication to paying customers who sat at tables and consumed their fare on site.

As global commerce and communication increased in the early nineteenth century, new dining practices and vocabulary came across the ocean to transform Charleston’s culinary scene. Saloons, hotels, and restaurants—products of post-Revolutionary France—gradually supplanted the old English taverns, inns, and ordinaries. This transition involved more than just a new vocabulary. The new manner of seating, the variety of the menu, and the introduction of a la carte dining transformed the expectations of customers. The roots of Charleston’s restaurant business were far simpler and streamlined than the French-infused model offered to twenty-first-century customers.