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Thomas Jefferson loved the
Fourth of July. He reportedly described the holiday to a friend as "the only birthday I ever commemorate," and devoted the very last letter he ever wrote to the topic, exhorting his correspondent to "let the annual return of this day forever refresh our recollections of [our] rights, and an undiminished devotion to them."
A few of Jefferson's countrymen may very well have spent the nation's first Independence Days contemplating the meaning of democracy. But the vast majority of them celebrated by getting falling-down, seeing-double, looking-for-a-fight drunk.
Early Americans drank frequently, and the arrival of the Fourth provided them with a conveniently patriotic excuse to drink even more. In 18th century Charleston, bowls of stiff eggnog were fixtures of Independence Day parties -- many of which were well underway before noon. One especially raucous Philadelphia celebration, recounted in historian Len Travers'
"Celebrating the Fourth," threatened to spill over into July 5 as attendees, eager to keep filling their punch cups, offered endless toasts to the young country's military heroes.
Food and drink signifying freedom -- whether from sobriety or a hot summer kitchen -- have always played an integral role in July Fourth celebrations. While
hamburgers and
hot dogs are relatively recent additions to the holiday's culinary canon, a free-spirited, summer-loving streak runs through the history of Independence Day cuisine.
Perhaps the first dish to earn its Fourth of July stripes was a soup that most modern Americans no longer eat on any day of the year. But in the early 1800s, as surely as Christmas meant a goose on the table, Independence Day was celebrated with turtle soup.
Turtle
soup was so coveted by Philadelphians that tavern keepers could confidently offer the delicacy for just one hour on the holiday, knowing local eaters would dutifully troop in at the advertised time.
Although turtle soup appears to have been primarily an urban preoccupation, rural Americans shared their city cousins' taste for
ice cream, which was served in conjunction with July Fourth festivities as early as 1798.
Ice cream was, of course, a luxury in the pre-electric age, when dessert connoisseurs lacked not just functional coolers to prevent their treats from melting, but the means to make their own ice. Until John Gorrie, a Florida physician who believed he could successfully fight yellow fever if he had an adequate supply of ice, invented an ice maker in 1848, ice-cream lovers were stuck harvesting ice from frozen northern lakes and keeping it packed in sawdust until the summer.
Even after ice cream became a more pedestrian indulgence, it remained the go-to July Fourth snack. In 1938, when New York State Commissioner of Agriculture Charles Baldwin lectured housewives on summer food safety, he briefly drifted into a reverie that had nothing to do with botulism. Sweet, cool milk and homemade sherbert were his "happiest memories of the Fourth of July of childhood," he told the crowd, urging New Yorkers to send away for his office's pamphlet of "snappy milk drink" recipes.
Independence Day weather, reliably hot and and sticky from Mississippi to Maine, helped make ice cream a holiday favorite. Triple-digit temperatures, exacerbated by tightly packed parade- and beach-going crowds, made cool foods a must (which begs the question of why folks were sipping on turtle soup; Perhaps they were just too plastered to care.)
Watermelon, which annually made its first appearance in northern markets right before the holiday, was another popular July Fourth treat.
Back when locavorism wasn't optional, Independence Day menus were largely dictated by availability. Not surprisingly, regionalism reigned, with Southerners feasting on barbecue and brunswick stew, Midwesterners enjoying fried chicken and potato salad and New Englanders devouring
salmon.
"Custom decrees that salmon and peas must be served at Fourth of July dinners," a New York Times writer chronicling the Northeastern tradition wrote in 1941. "In earlier times, clans reunited on the Fourth, and meals were of gargantuan proportions. A fish weighing upward of 15 pounds was stuffed, skewered, garnished with bacon and put in a hot oven, there to bake long hours until it turned a golden brown."
Such elaborate preparations had largely disappeared by the 1950s, when convenience items such as the canned salmon endorsed by the Washington Post -- "independence of the kitchen's tyranny should come on Independence Day," columnist Mildred Bundy proclaimed -- and outdoor grilling had become acceptable culinary expressions of good old-fashioned American freedom.
While some holiday recipe writers, apparently desperate to distract young eaters from dangerous Roman candles, continued to spew suggestions for red-white-and-blue Jell-O salads, firecrackeroon cookies and Fourth of July cupcake flags, the no-fuss lineup of hot dogs, hamburgers, ice cream and (in an implicit salute to America's founding fathers) cold beverages was cemented as the national Independence Day meal.
Unlike the anointed foods of Thanksgiving, the now traditional foods of July Fourth are incredibly simple -- leaving eaters free to focus on refreshing their recollections of their rights. Thomas Jefferson would be proud.
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