Colonial Williamsburg serves traditional recipes for modern palates: Salt: NPR

Just a few blocks from a college bookstore, modern restaurants with beer flights and big-screen TVs, and souvenir shops selling the same trinkets you'll find in any tourist town. America, you could walk down a cobblestone street.

A cock sings. The smell and sound of the horses drift in the breeze. Women go to their business dressed in hats and petticoats; men wear panties, maybe a tie.

Colonial Williamsburg, Virginia, the 300-acre living history museum, is a place where visitors discover the past, whether it's talking to sewing binding pages by hand or to grow long-forgotten fruits and vegetables.

Since the beginning of the restoration in 1926, the dream of preserving this part of Williamsburg has become an opportunity to experience history.

There is a food program that allows people from the colonial era to cook all year round on an open fire using cooking technology available only in the 18^th century.

And then there are farmers like Ed Schultz, who sows the fields with turnips, tobacco, corn and cotton using the power of the horse literally; or Eve Otmar, a peasant gardener who takes care of the "garden of gentlemen", which includes flowers in summer and expensive glass frames that allow lettuce to grow all year round.

"We have prickly pears in our garden," says Otmar. "People are horrified, surprised and stunned." She tells how a woman who had lived in Virginia for 52 years told her once that she had never seen prickly pear. "They are native here," says Otmar.

Although customers can often buy seeds to take home or taste the edible products they are lucky, the relationship between foods of the past and those of the present becomes a little more turbid in the many restaurants of Colonial Williamsburg.

Guests may think that they want to taste the past, but their modern palates are often in disagreement.

"When you're thinking of recreating historical recipes, sometimes that's not good taste," says Travis Brust, chief of the Colonial Williamsburg Inn. "Many things seem to be overcooked – it does not have the seasoning profile that one would expect." Bringing the past – from a food perspective – is often a matter of trial and error. A ginger cake that the colonial restaurants serve during the holidays took at least 10 attempts before the sugar and spices reached a level that seemed acceptable to them.

Brust explains that spices were expensive in colonial America. "You could have paid your cardamom rent, and now you can get a bottle for $ 4." If a 18^th– American Century has dined in one of our restaurants, he said, "they would think our food is too salty and too seasoned and that it contains a ridiculous amount of herbs" .

The other challenge concerns aesthetics, says Brust. The turnip stew is difficult to sell as is in the restaurant. "It has been cooked for hours and hours and it is very tender and tasty, but all the green is gone – it has turned brown," he says. "When you're thinking of recreating it, you can maybe leave the greens out and jump quickly, then bend them at the end." That's what George Washington would have eaten had he had Instagram.

Brust bases its menus partly on what Williamsburg's gardens and farms will reap. "They know when the radish harvest is going to be done and they will inform us of the different stages of the carrot." He uses carrots, baby carrots, teenage girls and adults in different ways.

Schultz grows a lot of vine plants, ranging from pumpkins to squash cushaw, a common variety in 18^th-century Virginia which is sold as an heirloom today. This is not a seasonal cooking item, but rather by wagon. "We have everything at the same time," says Brust. "We sweeten it, dehydrate it, turn it into ice cream, turn it into a vacuum bag and make ravioli – it's almost to the point that we can not use it all because there are some." so much."

About 18^thCentury plants have been easier to rediscover than others. Schultz is still trying to find a plant known as the "Hanover Turnip", mentioned in the sales records of a local merchant's shop, John Carter, with limited success. Carter's shop sold everything from swans, chickens and hedgehogs to imported garden seeds and molasses.

Although he grew up in Virginia in the 1700s, Cypriot Melon did not return to Colonial Williamsburg until a seed company went to Cyprus and discovered an interesting fruit for sale in a local food market, says Otmar. "He answered the description we had from the 18th^th century, she explains. The team relies on written descriptions of taste and smell, as well as old drawings and paintings to rediscover or recreate crops through careful reproduction – with less terrifying results than Jurassic Park.

The various culinary crafts of Colonial Williamsburg did not always work as smoothly as today, says Schultz. People constantly ask him what he's doing with the corn that he's growing. "They want to know that it's a complete circle, that it's really going to cattle or really to someone's belly."

Today, locally grown foods are rarely wasted. When kohlrabi (German turnip) started to swell due to heavy rains that Virginia experienced last summer, the culinary staff proceeded to an emergency harvest of baby kohlrabi. "We ended up entrusting, peeling, slicing and [cooking them] in a scented olive oil to use as a special night, "says Brust. We saved the harvest. "

Tove K. Danovich is a Portland-based reporter, Ore.