What Did the Founding Fathers Eat? Corn, Vinegar, and a Catastrophic Amount of Booze

It's the country's 250th birthday, which means we are neck-deep in colonial cosplay. Tricorn hats. Candlelit tavern tours. Reenactors in buckled shoes marching schoolchildren past the butter churn. And humming underneath all of it, the same soft-focus daydream that resurfaces every few years in a fresh costume: that somewhere back there was a simpler, realer time, before life got complicated and processed and bad for us.

So, what did the Founding Fathers eat? And more to the point, what did everyone else eat? Nobody is actually trying to eat like it's 1776. Smart. I can't imagine waking up and eating a sh*tton of fried corn and grain alcohol to start the day. (Or maybe I can, but that's a different blog post.) The founders' dinner table is still the best place to watch the "simpler times" fantasy come apart, because the food stays honest even when the mythology doesn't. So let's set the table and see what's on it.

Short version: corn, vinegar, and a genuinely catastrophic amount of booze.

What did the Founding Fathers actually eat? Magic shows.

The Founding Fathers and the gentry they ran with were Francophiles with a king-sized inferiority complex, and you could tell. They had just finished rejecting a monarchy, then sat down to dinner and did their level best to eat like it was Christmas at Versailles.

Dinner for these people was a magic show. Food historians describe gelatin molded to look like playing cards, cheese dressed up with slivered almonds to resemble a hedgehog (slay), sugar sculpted into elaborate centerpieces meant to make guests gasp. They ate terrapin pulled straight from the Chesapeake and, yes, Parmesan ice cream, which is a real flavor they made on purpose. Ben and Jerry, please make "No Taxation Without Refrigeration" or "Give Me Liberty or Give Me Brie" special editions!!

Jefferson loved macaroni with the focus most people reserve for their own children. He sketched out the schematics for a pasta machine and had French wine hauled across an ocean to drink with it. A dinner like this was built to be talked about for a week afterward: plating for the camera two centuries before the camera, the kind of meal you'd want preserved in an engraving. It was not, under any circumstances, eating like the man out back with his bowl of unshaped cornmush.

So if your colonial fantasy involves rugged simplicity, leave the gentry out of it. They were doing the eighteenth-century version of molecular gastronomy and plating foam.

The colonial American diet: corn, then more corn, then corn again

Climb down from the big house, where most actual people lived, and the menu narrows fast. The early American diet, for anyone who wasn't rich, was 50 shades of maize.

Disguise one: hasty pudding. Despite the name, nothing about it was hasty. It's cornmeal stirred into boiling water or milk until it gives up and turns into a thick porridge, somewhere between grits and wet drywall, eaten with molasses or butter if you were lucky enough to have them. The English (of course we can blame the Brits for this one) brought the dish over made with wheat, promptly ran out of wheat, swapped in cornmeal, and renamed the result Indian pudding. Bake that same mush low and slow for a few hours with molasses and spice and you get the dessert version, which is the one people actually looked forward to. Hasty pudding turns up in Yankee Doodle, which tells you exactly how central a bowl of corn mush was to the early national self-image.

Corn for your hole number two: the johnnycake. Also called the hoecake. Also the journey cake. Also the ash cake. Also roughly nine other names depending on which colony was arguing about it that week. At its most basic, it's cornmeal, salt, and hot water, mooshed into a flat cake and cooked on a hot surface. Indigenous people of the Northeast, the Narragansett and their neighbors, were making cornmeal flatbreads on hot stones long before any colonist showed up to take credit, and the colonists adopted it immediately because wheat was scarce and corn was everywhere. There's a popular story that hoecakes got their name from being cooked on the flat blade of a garden hoe. Historians now think the "hoe" was probably a cooking implement, a kind of flat iron peel. Less cinematic, more likely true.

The johnnycake was food for the poor, the rural, and the enslaved. Which makes one detail both funny and telling: George Washington's famous breakfast hoecakes were the deluxe edition, yeast-risen and served, in his words, swimming in butter and honey. Same humble cornmeal, entirely different life. Hold onto the question of who was in the kitchen making them, because that part matters.

What is switchel? Colonial Gatorade.

Hold on to your tricorn hats, because of course our forefathers were in on the electrolyte game. Long before anyone trademarked a neon sports drink, colonial farmers were drinking switchel.

Switchel, also known as haymaker's punch, is water, apple cider vinegar, ground ginger, and a sweetener, usually molasses.

Farmers drank it in the fields during haying season, when the labor was brutal and the heat was worse, because gulping cold water when you're badly overheated can actually make you sick, and the molasses delivered a little sugar and a few minerals while the ginger settled the stomach. Functionally, it is an electrolyte drink. The colonists more or less reinvented the sports drink with a stone jug and a vinegar bottle. (If you want the actual science on what electrolytes do and don't do for you, Kylee and I went deep on it in our electrolytes episode of the podcast. Spoiler: the colonists were closer to right than most of your gym's supplement shelf.)

It was everywhere. The early U.S. Congress kept it on the floor of the House and Senate, sometimes spiked with rum, and worked through staggering quantities of it while (allegedly) governing. Picture the founding of American democracy. Now picture 20-plus adult men slightly sticky and buzzed from swigging off-brand molasses-based electrolyte mix. There you go.

How much alcohol did colonial Americans drink? A lot.

In 1770, the average American put away roughly three and a half gallons of pure alcohol a year, about double what we drink now. That average includes children, because it had to. People drank at every meal. They opened the day with an "eye-opener" (also called an antifogmatic, which they believed would clear early a.m. fog) and closed it with a nightcap, and toddlers got the sweet dregs at the bottom of a parent's rum toddy, which is one way to get a kid (or this particular adult) to nap. Historian W.J. Rorabaugh called the early United States the "Alcoholic Republic," and traces how that affinity for booze shaped the early states. By the 1820s, whiskey was cheaper than beer, wine, coffee, tea, or milk.

In September 1787, at the close of the Constitutional Convention, the men who had just finished writing the Constitution threw George Washington a farewell dinner at City Tavern in Philadelphia, and the bill survived. Fifty-five guests went through 54 bottles of Madeira, 60 bottles of claret, 22 of porter, 12 of beer, 8 of hard cider, 8 of whiskey, and 7 enormous bowls of punch. They broke enough glassware to itemize it separately. Adjusted for inflation, the tab runs north of fifteen thousand dollars. Two days later, presumably nursing the worst collective hangover in the history of the republic, they signed the Constitution.

The booze most people were hitting on the daily was pretty weak. Small beer was brewed mild, the low-proof house drink that children sipped all day, closer to flavored water than to anything that would flatten you. Cider got cut down. A colonist with a tankard at noon was hydrating as much as drinking. The Madeira and the punch at Washington's send-off were another matter, and built to do real damage.

Some of the water avoidance was practical: wells went bad, disease moved through the supply (we didn't yet have a handle on germ theory), and a weak beer was the safer pour. Plenty of it was snobbery. Early Americans had inherited a European conviction that water was a low drink for the desperate and that liquor was the more respectable, more healthful choice. They weren't only dodging dysentery. They thought water was beneath them. TBH, I kind of feel the same about Spindrift. Tap water? What am I? A cave person?

Who actually cooked what the Founding Fathers ate?

Here's where the romp stops being only a romp, because you can't talk about what early Americans ate without talking about who grew it, who cooked it, and who didn't get to eat it.

The cheap rum flowed because of molasses, and the molasses came from Caribbean sugar plantations worked by enslaved people. The cornmeal trinity we just toured, the hasty pudding and the johnnycakes, was tied directly to the diets of the poor and the enslaved, eaten in volume because it was cheap and filling, not because anyone had decided it was clean living. And the founders whose tables we mythologize did not cook a single bite of any of it.

Jefferson's celebrated macaroni and cheese almost certainly came from James Hemings, an enslaved man Jefferson took to Paris, had trained in French cuisine, and then kept enslaved anyway. Washington's buttery breakfast hoecakes, the deluxe ones, were made by Hercules Posey, his enslaved chef, who eventually walked away from all of it. Posey freed himself on February 22, 1797, while Washington was across town celebrating his own birthday at a ball. Sit with that timing for a second.

Meanwhile, the people doing the cooking ate rations: cornmeal, a jug of molasses, sweet potatoes, a couple of pounds of salted pork, supplemented by whatever they could hunt, fish, or forage on no sleep and no time. Museum historians who recreate those plates today will tell you plainly that it was not enough food to fill a stomach.

The foods we now romanticize as simple, ancestral, the way people used to eat, were in many cases the foods people ate because they had no other choice. Cornmeal mush was not a foodie's dream. Switchel was not a lifestyle choice. They were what was cheap and within reach for people working themselves into the ground, many of them in bondage. That context is important whenever folks reach for easy-to-digest versions of history that omit facts.

Bottom line: whose diet are we actually nostalgic for?

The past was not simpler or healthier or purer. It was unequal, it was boozy, it ran on stolen labor, and the nicest plate in the house was carried up from a hearth-hot basement by someone who never got to sit down at the table. None of that is a knock on cornbread, which still rules (I am a Southerner, after all). It's a reminder that "they ate better back then" only holds up if you never ask which "they."

Happy Fourth. Make the switchel if you want. Just hold the nostalgia, and maybe pour a little out for Hercules Posey, who got himself free and presumably never wanted to look at another hoecake as long as he lived.

This started life as a post for the Patreon crowd, which is where the discussion threads get weird and good and where the "Wait, can we do a whole episode on this?" requests come from. Come hang out.

Sources

Rorabaugh, W. J. (1979). The alcoholic republic: An American tradition. Oxford University Press.