What question did this study set out to answer?

The aim is to analyze how hasty pudding recipes reflect the settler history of colonial extraction.

July 16, 2026

“The Surest Plan”: Recipes, Joel Barlow’s “The Hasty-Pudding” (1796), and Settler Memory in the British Atlantic World

Key Points

The aim is to analyze how hasty pudding recipes reflect the settler history of colonial extraction.
Examined hasty pudding recipes circulating in the eighteenth-century British Atlantic.
Analyzed the influence of Joel Barlow's poem 'The Hasty-Pudding' on recipe culture.
Reviewed the Almon Scrapbook and its ties to Indigenous food practices.
Hasty pudding recipes were critical for shaping the domestic space as a site of colonial power.
The recipes made Indigenous corn accessible for settler use, emphasizing culinary appropriation.
Influences from Loyalist cooking highlighted a complex interaction of cultural memory and republican ideals.

Abstract

Abstract: This essay explores how recipes for hasty pudding circulating in the eighteenth-century British Atlantic world are part of the settler history of colonial extraction. Hasty pudding recipes informed not just Joel Barlow’s republican mock heroic poem “The Hasty-Pudding” (New York, 1796) but also the recipe culture of those who remained loyal to Britain. Recipes in the Almon Scrapbook (Almon Family Fonds, MG1 vol. 14, Nova Scotia Archives) belonging to the family of Nova Scotia physician Dr. William James Almon were copied from Essays, Political, Economical, and Philosophical (London and Dublin, 1796) by Sir Benjamin Thompson, Count Rumford (1753–1814), a Massachusetts-born Loyalist. These recipes make corn, an Indigenous food, available for settler and colonial use and establish the domestic as a space of colonial power.

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