A Meal by Martha

In the center of a wooden table on a pewter platter sat a baked leg of lamb. One earthenware bowl held a heap of steaming, fresh string beans, while another contained sliced cucumbers, likely drizzled with vinegar. The table was plain, but the savory smell of the roast meat made mouths water and elevated this meal, like many simple meals, to a humbly exceptional status.

At the time, it was ordinary, but in retrospect, it seems utterly distinctive: everyone sitting at the table knew exactly where the foods came from. The lamb came from a nearby farm, while the string beans and cucumbers came from a garden just down a path out the kitchen door.

This particular meal was prepared and served on August 15, 1790, by Martha Ballard, who recorded it in her diary with an understated satisfaction: "had bakt lamb with string beens and cucumbers."

Martha Ballard is one of few eighteenth-century American women who left a diary. Over the course of twenty-seven years, she made notes about her daily life in a series of small hand-sewn booklets. Best known for her work as a midwife (her career is brilliantly chronicled in Laurel Thatcher Ulrich's book A Midwife's Tale), she delivered over eight hundred babies, hastening at all hours—under the serene dome of starry nights or through blinding snowstorms—to aid laboring women in the area now known as Augusta, Maine.

During that same period, Martha also conceived of and prepared thousands of meals for herself and her family. Her diary is filled with details of weeding and cooking, seeds and eggs, turkeys and cows, and through its pages we can begin to grasp what a woman two hundred years ago knew about the foods she cooked.

Martha's baked lamb dinner is a good place to begin. In the intimate circle of a meal, our attentions are directed to the physical and the sensuous, to aromas and flavors, to smaller scales and specific places. Through the details of dinner, we can begin to unearth a consciousness about cookery very different from our own.

In 1790, the year this lamb was served, Martha was fifty-five years old and living in a home beside the mill that her husband, Ephraim, leased. The couple had made their lives there along Bowman's Brook for five years. At this place, her oldest daughters had grown through adolescence, while her youngest son had just reached his tenth birthday. The Ballards' waterwheel powered not only a gristmill but a sawmill, one of several that formed a backbone to the budding industrial economy of the Kennebec River valley, based on felling and milling trees from northern forests and then shipping timber south to the growing city of Boston. While Ephraim's mill was integral to the greater regional economy, Martha's garden was central to the family's household economy.

At the time, it was customary for women to have purview over the garden. In her diary, Martha most often referred to it as "my garden," claiming authority for what happened on the small patches of land she presided over. In 1790, Martha spent parts of sixty-one days working in her garden. I imagine her moving amid rows of plants in her long, home-woven flax skirt, the billows of indigo-dyed fabric catching on cabbage leaves and her hem unavoidably sullied by garden dirt. She starts by picking bugs in her "east garden," which was nestled up against the house and situated to catch morning sunlight. Then she walks around to inspect peas tendrilling in another plot, located by the door to take advantage of an already-fenced-in space used for storing firewood in winter and thereby well mulched with "chips." After a shift of kitchen work, she might head down to pull weeds in another garden sited alongside the barn. Finally, in the late afternoon, she might find time to do some hoeing in a plot set by the brook, convenient if summer proved droughty and wilting plants required extra watering by pail. It was in this plot that Martha had planted, tended, and picked the string beans and cucumbers she served to her family on August 15.

In the case of the "bakt lamb" dinner, as with most meals, the distance that most ingredients traveled from field and barn to table was within a walk of the housewife. Because 95 percent of colonial women lived outside towns, this farm-to-table distance was typical. During the summer, a housewife could walk twenty steps into her yard to gather eggs or herbs. Vegetable gardens stretched farther from the kitchen door—often covering one or two acres with squash, cabbage, turnips, peas, and potatoes. In the early spring before the garden came ready, she might venture somewhat farther to gather wild greens for "sallets."

In the course of their work, housewives like Martha walked these short distances back and forth countless times. These walks wore a woman's body, but they also drew her attention to the land and animals she tended. She knew exactly where to look for eggs laid by a furtive red hen, where wild grapevines hung from oaks, and where the muskmelons sweetened best in a warm spot against the barn. The details of the place were part of her everyday life, her work, and the meals she prepared.

The lamb served for dinner in August 1790 came not from the Ballards' pastures, but from the farm of a Mr. Porter, who lived ten miles to the west. The lamb came as payment for the work of Martha's eldest son. Such barter tied families together in a close web of relationships; neighbors traded help and food all the time. The web of exchange served as a safety net. If hard times hit one neighbor, others had the wherewithal to help. While most families had the capability of raising nearly all of their own foods, they usually chose to grow some and to buy and trade for the rest. For example, meat other than lamb could have come just as readily from the Ballards' own pens and pastures—from animals cared for by Martha, her husband, and their children. They had a milk cow, pigs, and chickens but had not yet started a flock of sheep, probably for want of space at the mill site.

When Martha noted the baked lamb dinner in her diary, she did not specify bread, but a coarse and crusty loaf likely rounded out the meal. Most often, Martha made her bread from rye and wheat—she called it "brown and flower bread"—and sometimes from corn as well. Martha baked with flour milled from grain that came from fields cultivated by her husband and sons but also with wheat, corn, and rye that came from other farms as payment for milling or midwifery. In her diary, she noted with particular satisfaction baking bread from wheat grown by her husband: "I have Sifted our flower & Bakt, it makes a fine bread indead." As her hands plunged into the sticky sponge of dough, as she kneaded in the wooden trough hewn by her son, as she formed loaves and set them to rise, and as she pulled the hot...