July 4 in New York City, 1837

Frederick Marryat was an Englishman who traveled through America in the early 1800s. Like many nineteenth-century European travelers, he published a book about what he found here. He was in New York City for the Fourth of July celebrations in 1837, and this is what he reported seeing along Broadway.

On each side of the whole length of Broadway, were ranged booths and stands, similar to those at an English fair, and on which were displayed small plates of oysters, with a fork stuck in the board opposite to each plate; clams sweltering in the hot sun; pineapples, boiled hams, pies, puddings, barley-sugar, and many other indescribables.  But what was most remarkable, Broadway being three miles long, and the booths lining each side of it, in every booth there was a roast pig, large or small, as the centre attraction.  Six miles of roast pig! and that in New York city alone; and roast pig in every other city, town, hamlet, and village, in the Union.  What association can there be between roast pig and independence?  Let it not be supposed that there was any deficiency in the very necessary articles of potation on this auspicious day: no! the booths were loaded with porter, ale, cider, mead, brandy, wine, ginger-beer, pop, soda-water, whiskey, rum, punch, gin slings, cocktails, mint juleps, besides many other compounds, to name which nothing but the luxuriance of American-English could invent a word. Certainly the preparations in the refreshment way were most imposing, and gave you some idea of what had to be gone through on this auspicious day.

This really is an amazing list of foods. New York City was a major trading port, as evidenced by pineapple showing up in the booths. And look at that list of drinks! I’m not sure what he meant by “pop” (it may have been fizzy like soda pop, but it could mean something else too), but the list certainly points to the fact that Americans were a hard-drinking bunch of people in the years long before Prohibition.

From Frederick Marryat, A Diary in America With Remarks on Its Institutions (New York: Knopf, 1962), 58-59.

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