Scrapple consisted of scraps of pork cooked with cornmeal to form a loaf. Parts of meat that were usually thrown away, like the heart and liver, were used for the dish. Some Amish and Mennonite communities still eat scrapple. It’s usually found in the Pennsylvania Dutch country and in some of the mid-Atlantic Colonies.

Posset is made from cream, eggs, and flour, making it a rich and creamy dessert popular in the 18th century. They added ale which turns it into a drinkable custard since the ale curdled the cream.

Posset was a drink served at weddings. They would even be served in specialty pots.

The wealthier Colonial Americans in the 17th and 18th centuries had pigeons for dinner. Pigeons were a delicacy for the upper class and they expected the birds to be prepared with the utmost care and flare.

Simple pigeon pies were also prepared and consumed by those who weren’t as wealthy.

The Colonial Americans had katchup, but it’s different from what we know today. Theirs wasn’t even tomato-based. What it is was an Asian-inspired sauce made from mushrooms, walnuts, oysters, and anchovies.

There was one recipe from Colonial Williamsburg that called for a combination of vinegar, white wine, cloves, ginger, anchovies, horseradish, and nutmeg. Colonial Americans would use the sauce for meat or fish.

We often see lobster as an expensive meal often enjoyed by the wealthy. But it was different back then for early Americans.

Seafood was common for British North American Colonies who held on to the Atlantic seaboard, making seafood common. Lobster was pretty common. It was even associated with the lower classes. Lobsters were really cheap back then that they were fed to slaves and prisoners.

Clabber was a form of yogurt made from soured, curdled milk done in an era before refrigeration. It did taste strong and sour so men and women of the era added toppings like cinnamon, nutmeg, or pepper just to add flavor.

Clabber, like many American foods, arrived with the Scotch-Irish in the 18th century.

Wealthy households of the 18th-century enjoyed trendy turtle soup and often had a recipe ready. The imperial trade gave wealthy families access to turtles from the Colonies, especially in Virginia and Maryland where there were a lot of turtles.

Colonial men and women enjoyed swan as specialty meat. And while that would be an outrage nowadays, having the bird stewed was no big deal. Colonists copied the dish from England.

Settlers from England brought apples to America making the fruit a food staple for Colonists. They came up with applejack by freezing hard cider using freeze-distillation to jack up the alcohol content. Applejack was roughly 30% alcohol which made a pretty potent drink for the Colonists!

Martha Washington’s Pepper Cake is a recipe from her cookbook, A Booke of Cookery. India’s spice had hostesses showing off their social status, using pepper with sweet ingredients like molasses for cakes.

It’s also been said that they last for “a Quarter or Halfe a Year.” Martha Washington, like others in the 18th century, used pepper for recipes that were for sweet, dessert-like concoctions.

Colonial Americans used lobster as bait in eel traps. They were crazy about eel, which could be eaten in different ways.

Eel pie was a popular recipe, with one recipe even going back to the 17th century.

Ice cream had become a go-to dessert in the second half of the 18th century. They didn’t have our modern freezers so they used a massive ice house with enough people keeping large chunks of frozen water around to maintain the temperature. Thomas Jefferson and the Washingtons all loved ice cream.

Many others prepared ice cream flavored with oysters. Dolley Madison herself used oysters for her own recipe.

Ambergris is expensive whale spit-up. It was something 18th-century men and women loved to have on their food for a decadent treat. The recipe was first developed in Europe in the 17th century and soon, cooks in Colonial North America were flavoring their chocolate with ambergris. The whaling industry was growing and demand for the spit was high.

Nowadays, ambergris is an ingredient used in expensive perfumes. You may have it in fancy hot chocolates too if you know the right places.

North America’s huge beaver population had them hosting a booming fur trade in the 17th and 18th centuries. All that beaver meat didn’t go to waste as they were also consumed. Beavertail was fatty and often roasted, making it a delicacy in Colonial America. One contemporary cookbook writer described the dish as “essentially gamey-tasting fat.”

Calf’s foot jelly was exactly what its name suggests. Gelatin and jellies were popular back then and this dish was gelatin that emerges while boiling the hoof of a calf. The Americans of the 18th century even believed the dish was good for the sick.