While Saltwater Foodways was written for Mystic Seaport Museum and reflected its exhibits and collections, I wanted very much for the work to represent a whole region - New England - and era - the 19th century. Because Mystic Seaport is a maritime museum, I had the opportunity to compare and contrast the foodways of the same people at sea and ashore. Plus, it seemed necessary to address such issues as gender, identity, commerce and industrialization, celebration, and conflict. I found that evidence for all these topics abounded in the narratives, journals, account books, newspapers, magazines, provisioning and outfitting lists, inventories, photos, drawings, and kitchens and galleys which were my sources.
While the book is primarily a food history, in order to illustrate the text, I included recipes, most of which I found in manuscript or printed sources. That meant I used cookbooks for some of the research, and discovered, as many have before me, their limits as a useful historic source. They were, usually, the last link in a long chain of evidence. That may leave you wondering what the other links were.
A Vernacular Foodways System
About 25 years ago, long before I wrote my book, I developed what I named a "vernacular foodways
system." This system helped me categorize, identify, and predict the common foodways of under-
described people, and even the less-described foodways of the well-documented. Vernacular
foodways in this instance means anything - a dish, a manner of serving, or consuming - that
proceeds more or less unconsciously out of everyday food habits. In mundane terms, vernacular
foodways is what happens when you open the refrigerator or kitchen cupboard door and make
dinner out of what you find.
A vernacular system of foodways rests on the food supply; the available culinary technology including everything from fuel supply to cooking tools; on the physical possibilities and properties of the food; and a society's conventions with its foods. I will give some examples of these features and then show how I used them to inform myself about duff.
Food Supply
A food supply can be as large as the whole collection of edibles available to a group of people
or as specific as their grocery list. Usually society defines edibility or at least what foods
can be included in the group's diet. For example, in most of North America insects are not
included among edibles except in extreme instances of survival. Pork is widely considered
edible, but is excluded by certain religious groups. Just because a food is edible does not
mean it will be included.
Cooking Technology
This feature takes into account the available range of cooking methods - boiling, roasting,
grilling, baking, poaching, etc. Are people cooking on fire or on stoves? Do they have
the reflected heat necessary for roasting? Is there sufficient heat for baking? Do they
have containers for boiling? The weekly brick oven baking in the Northeast depended in part
on ample wood supplies. The rapid food preparation time of a stir fry resulted in part
from small fuel supplies in Asia. There is not always a neat correlation between tools and
a cooking method. For example, one might assume that without a spit, roasting is impossible.
But we know that hearth cooks in early times could suspend a piece of meat by a string, or
even merely place the food item before a fire to roast it. Boiling, on the other hand, is
very hard to do without a container. Usually a subtle connection between the technology
and the preferred tools shows a group asserting its preferences: if there is a high value
placed on roasts, than a group will do its best to equip itself to continue the practice
while the practice itself may have evolved from a set of conditions that made it possible
in the first place.
Structural Possibilities
This feature merely describes the range of possible physical characteristics of the food:
from large whole items (roast turkey at Thanksgiving) to finely minced (leftover turkey in
pie); thin mixtures to thick; simple presentations to embellished; plain combinations to
enriched. For example, most people worldwide have a way of preparing their major grain
and/or pulse in a simple porridge or mush form: the simplest combination is the grain or
pulse mixed with water, sometimes with salt added. The thickness or thinness of the
porridge depended on how plentiful the grain or pulse was at any given time, perhaps even
speak to its plenty in any particular household. Is it not a rule of thumb that when you
need to stretch a dish, you add whatever you have most of, possibly even water? Sometimes
other ingredients are added to the dish: vegetables or meat, spices, or fats or oils.
Sometimes when sugar or fruit is added the dish becomes a sweet one.
Cultural Food Conventions
Each group has certain conventions - usual ways - of handling particular foods or groups
of foods, once they have determined which foods are edible or appropriate to eat. It is
in this category that issues of identity, avoidance, status, and signficance appear.
While food supplies, technologies, and structural possibilities may all have been identical,
it will be a culture's conventions - expressed as preferences - that form a cuisine.
For example, the English and Eastern Europeans both agreed that beets were edible and acceptable. Both groups had a supply of beets and the technology and habit of making soup, but one group made borscht and the other didn't. As a usual thing, when presented with beets, English people boiled them and ate them, sometimes pickled them, but did not generally have the convention of making soup with them.
Conventions help a group determine how to use unfamiliar products. For example, because corn, that is, maize, meal behaved in cookery like oatmeal, many English and Scots Irish settlers tended to use cornmeal in the ways they had previously used oatmeal. Hence, bannocks, porridges, and puddings. If they tried to use it as they had wheat flour, it probably would not have succeeded in, for example, pastry cookery and though the possibility exists, it did not become common practice.
Understanding Duff
Let's examine duff using questions based on the variables in the vernacular foodways system.
Here first is what a couple of seafarers said about duff:
The whaleman John Perkins aboard the Tiger in 1845: "At noon we had duff for the
first time which I believe all sailors think to be the greatest feast possible. In
appearance it was like bakers bread with the crust taken off & then wetter, four tablespoons
of molasses were given to each man as sauce." And this at mid-century from the teenaged
midshipman Charlie Abbey: "It is simply flour & water with dried apples mixed in & the
whole boiled down hard & heavy as lead in a canvas bag. When first taken out of the bag
it looks like a loaf of white sugar as much as can be."
Duff and the Food Supply
We know what the food supply aboard a sailing vesset was because of provisioning lists
and legal requirements for the amount of food a vessel must carry for its sailors. We
see essentially two food supplies aboard a ship: the one reserved for higher status
individuals - the captain, first officers, and passengers, if any - and another for the
forecastle crew (the common sailors who live in the bow of the ship). Salt beef, salt
pork, hardtack, beans or peas, flour, and certain other foods were carried in sufficient
supply for everyone aboard the ship. (An extra supply of better quality foods, canned
and fresh, including poultry, swine, and fresh vegetables were taken, most of which
would be reserved for the cabin, as the portion of the vessel occupied by the officers
was called.) We can see from the descriptions above that duff was made of flour and, on
the government's required rations list, we find flour served to the men twice a week.
Duff and Shipboard Cooking Technology
We also know what the food preparation facilities aboard a ship were because of outfitting
lists which show how the vessel was equipped. Most vessels from the time of early
voyaging forward were able to perform boiling more easily than any other cookery,
though, again, because of the higher class of individuals aboard - the officers - some
roasting and baking muse be provided for also. Most of the sailors' food was therefore
boiled, including anything made of flour.
Duff and Structural Possibilities of Flour
Given the presence of flour aboard ship, and an available technology which emphasized
boiling, but permitted baking and limited frying, we could begin to rough out a list
of possible ways that a sea cook might use flour to make something for sailors. We
have descriptions of duff, which confirm a combination of flour and boiling but that
combination also permits dumplings, pastry in a roly-poly pudding form, or as a thickener
in stew. In fact, a dish called sea pie which called for a pastry rolled out and
layered in a pot with meat and perhaps vegetables, and simmered, was made for sailors,
as were steamed dumpling-like items and, under certain circumstances, roly-poly puddings,
but infrequently. Sea cooks also baked fresh bread and, with the help of the steward,
occasional pies, cakes, and other flour-based desserts but the conventions of shipboard
life meant that these dishes never found their way into the forecastle.
Duff and Cultural Conventions of Shipboard Life
Most of us would guess at bread-making as the ideal way to prepare flour at sea. However,
only the ship's officers were entitled to freshly baked bread; hardtack - ship's biscuit -
however, took the place of the staff of life for the foc's'le crew, freeing their flour
for other purposes. If we look to the foodways to these sailors ashore, we would see
that boiled puddings of various sorts were common fare, a starch to accompany meat and
vegetables, sometimes sweet, sometimes savory. But this shipboard item has a distinctive
name - duff. And while we find boiled pudding recipes in the cookbooks used ashore in
the same era that John Perkins and Charlie Abbey went to sea, they don't have recipes
for anything called duff. What we need is evidence proving it is a pudding, and explaining
the odd name.
Our first help comes from the food historian's friend, the Oxford English Dictionary, which tells us that duff comes from the word "dough"; used in Northern England to describe a flour pudding or dumpling. In England in earlier days, "dough" was pronounced to rhyme with "rough": and so we see that American sailors spelled it phonetically: duff. Much of America's maritime heritage came from English seafaring practice, so we should not be surprised that dough/duff should have found its way onto American ships along with the hierarchy, sail plans, and chanteys. You can imagine the glee with which I found one day the following quote from an American whaler's wife, accompanying her husband to sea; on the Fourth of July in 1857, Mary Lawrence recorded in her diary that they had had a very nice dinner followed by "a boiled pudding, or duff as we call it"; Mary Lawrence in the 1850s must have made such a pudding dozens of times at home, and recognized it immediately for what it was.
As nice as it is to identify duff, and figure out where in the culinary scheme of things it fits, we will still want to understand what duff meant of both sailors in the foc's'le and the officers in the cabin for whom duff also was made. Frederick Harlow aboard the Akbar in 1875 described the differences between cabin and foc's'le duffs: "The cabin duff was seasoned with spice and plums or raisins and served with lemon or wine sauce. The crew's duff was steamed in a cloth sack and was seasoned with salt and dried apples and served with molasses. Too much spice and wine is not good for sailors. It is liable to ruin one's appetite."
Charlie Abbey had this to say about duff: "Two months ago I would have turned from it in disgust but now I am glad enough to get it." But he would not grow sentimental over duff. "Ever after," he wrote, "shall I remember it in connexion [sic] with the hard spots in my life."
Using the Vernacular Foodways System
Doing food history is sometime like trying to put together a picture puzzle you found at
a yard sale which is missing a lot of its pieces and its original box so you can't even
be sure what the picture is supposed to be. Still, by matching up colors and shapes, you
can get some of the pieces to fit together. Perhaps a whole section can be reconstructed
with only a couple of pieces missing. In any event, we might be able to describe very
well what the missing piece ought to look like, and get a hint about where to look. Or
maybe we have dumb luck and find the piece somewhere by accident and recognize it for
what it is.
When we seek to explain the foodways of largely unrecorded people, for example, enslaved
populations, the underclass, immigrants and newcomers, or the unrecorded food habits of
anyone else, it is like putting together the yard sale puzzle. We need a flexible matrix
into which we can place what bits and pieces of information we do obtain. The vernacular
foodways system provides such a matrix.