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The cuisine of the Antebellum United States was a change in American eating and cooking habits from that of Colonial America over the period of 1776 to the American Civil War in 1861. During this period different regions of the United States adapted to their surroundings and cultural backgrounds to create specific regional cuisines, modernization of technology led to changes in food consumption, and an evolution of taverns into hotels led to the beginnings of an American temperance movement. By the beginning of the Civil War the United States cuisine and food culture could define itself separately from that of the rest of the world. ==Antebellum Eating Mannerisms== Under colonization, gastronomical traditions in the Americas were derived mostly from the colonialists' home countries; specifically the British Isles. However due to an abundance in vegetation and land for meat, American diet was healthier than that of their British counterparts. By eve of the Revolution the average American soldier stood 5 feet, 8 inches, several inches taller than the average British soldier.〔Whitman, Sylvia. What's Cooking?: the History of American Food. Minneapolis, MN: Lerner Publications, 2001. Print.,14〕 The United States quickly established themselves as differing in their eating habits from Europe.. American mannerisms were viewed by foreign travelers as crude and barbaric. Writer James Fenimore Cooper noted that “Americans are the grossest feeders of any civilized nation...Their food is heavy, coarse, ill prepared, and indigestible...There is not, perhaps on the face of the globe, the same number of people among whom the good things of the earth are so much abused, or ignorantly wasted, as among the people of the United States.” 〔Barr, Andrew. Drink: a Social History of America. New York: Carroll & Graf, 1999. Print.,93〕 One French tourist wrote in 1804 that Americans “swallow almost without chewing” and another, Constantin Volney, argued that Americans habits “ruined the Yankee stomach, destroyed the teeth, and extinguished health”.〔Kaufman, Frederick. A Short History of the American Stomach. Orlando, FL: Harcourt, 2008. Print., 100〕 An Englishman complained that even members of Congress “plunged into their mouths enormous wedges of meat and pounds of vegetables, perched on the ends of their knives.” 〔Whitman, Sylvia. What's Cooking?: the History of American Food. Minneapolis, MN: Lerner Publications, 2001. Print.,18〕 Andrew Barr argues that Americans' haste while eating was based on the abundance of food available. Abundance of food led to Americans disregarding the effort involved in appreciating their meals.〔Barr, Andrew. Drink: a Social History of America. New York: Carroll & Graf, 1999. Print.,94〕 Americans' rapid consumption of food was a habit also formed in defiance towards European eating habits. The French custom of a la carte meal service was viewed as undemocratic in comparison to sharing meals between guests. When the New York Hotel opened in New York in 1844, the hotel's decision to serve meals a la carte was answered by criticism by New York newspapers. Offering different people different food at different prices, the papers argued, was an attack on the foundations of the Republic. Nat P. Willis of the Weekly Mirror wrote “The public table is the tangible republic – the only thing palpable and agreeable that we have to show, in common life, as republican.”.〔Barr, Andrew. Drink: a Social History of America. New York: Carroll & Graf, 1999. Print.,90〕 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Cuisine of Antebellum America」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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