New England Regional Cookery

The English colonists who named the northeastern most corner of America after their home country brought with them the expectation of maintaining their familiar English yeoman foodways based on wheat bread, peas, dairy products, beef, mutton, pork, and orchard and bramble fruits. The climate, the soil, and the fiscal requirements of being a colony funded by a joint-stock company all affected the food that the settlers ultimately could produce and gradually came to choose.

The six New England states—Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, Maine, Vermont, and New Hampshire—cover a large enough area to be divided into smaller subregions, some of which have distinctive foodways, distinctions blurred in later times by mass consumption and popular culture and possibly retained only by self-conscious effort. New England contained some of the country’s earliest urban and industrial centers and so absorbed great numbers of immigrants who contributed to the region’s foods even as they gave up many of their own. Out of New England came many settlers who moved to western parts, taking with them their food preferences and laying down the basic diet over and through which subsequent influences from other regions and ethnic groups would be laid.