The last course of the cooking class was prepared and served around 8 p.m., after five hours of a journey from the 21st century to the 18th.
The cooks had to work without the bare necessities: a stove, fridge and even counter space.
As everyone began to eat their dessert, they toasted all their hard work and Ellen L. Madison for welcoming them into her home. They joked about the hardships of Colonial-era cooking and the many steps it took them to get to this moment.
“When you taste the gingerbread, you can taste the history,” said Arlene Piacquadio of Westerly, one of the participants, filling the room with laughter.
The Colonial fires continue to burn inside the house of Madison, where she hosted a class on cooking 1700s-style: on a hearth over an open flame. The hands-on lesson on March 14 followed a lecture on the Colonial kitchen by Maureen J. Bjorkland at Westerly’s Babcock-Smith House Museum earlier in the month.
Madison has a room in her Westerly home built to replicate the Colonial era, with her own hearth, beehive oven and authentic Colonial kettles and cast-iron pots. Her home was the Woody Hill Bed and Breakfast until 2024 and has been in her family for four generations.
Teaching a group of adults with limited prior knowledge to cook like Joshua Babcock, the Colonial-era physician and military officer from Westerly, is no easy feat. Madison, in only six hours, achieved just that. Laying out a packet of instructions for each participant and a table full of every ingredient they’d need, Madison was just there to teach.
“You guys will be doing all the cooking, not me,” said Madison to participants when they first arrived.
The meal consisted of three courses; the first included Abigail Adams’ rum-tea punch,
squash soup and skillet cornbread; the second, including roast pork, cranberry relish, herbed rice, pear chutney and cornmeal biscuits and the third Thomas Jefferson’s bread pudding and Mary Washington’s spiced gingerbread, all made from scratch and in a hearth or beehive oven.
One of the first dishes, the skillet cornbread, had to be adjusted due to the heavier, moister white cornmeal in the Colonial era. Instead, modern JIFFY mix made up the batter that was then poured into a spider skillet, greased “heavily heavily,” as Madison emphasized in all capital letters in the instructions.
It was then cooked uncovered over hot coals in the hearth until the edges pulled away from the side of the spider, an iron frying pan with three legs. Once that happened, it was covered with a lid and hot coals placed on top of the lid. It was turned a quarter way every 15 or so minutes until completely baked.
With Madison’s instructions, participants divided and conquered the dishes mostly in pairs. Though many of the participants didn’t know each other beforehand, most of them had attended Bjorkland’s presentation, and now they all worked together fluidly to create the three-course meal laid out for them.
As if it were a classroom and Madison the professor, she instructed participants to look in their packets for the answers as she quizzed them on specific tasks, such as how to bake the desserts.
Though all the recipes were from the Colonial era, Madison made sure to include every detail of the instructions in the packet, down to which antique pan a participant should use for each dish.
Other events on Revolutionary history are planned at the museum in celebration of the nation’s semiquincentennial. For more information, visit www.babcocksmithhouse.org.
Mel Eusebio is a student reporter from the Community News Lab, a project of the University of Rhode Island’s Harrington School of Communication and Media (email newslabeditor@uri.edu).
