Before he became the chief photographer of the American Civil War, Matthew Brady earned his living by making photographic portraits of people who could afford to pay for his services. His passion, however, was to documenting the lives of Americans from every station in life. On December 12, 1853, while traveling through the State of South Carolina, he wrote in his diary that "to truly understand either the rich or the poor one must know what and how they eat. My photographs do not lie and it is incontestable that the rich eat far too much and the poor far too little". Brady was especially moved by "the tragic condition of the Negro slaves" and between 1852 and 1860 he took more than five thousand photographs of slaves preparing or eating their food.

During the Civil War, Brady took more than 45,000 photographs, nearly one-third of them portraying the dining habits of the soldiers of the Northern and Southern Armies. Nearly all of Brady's photographs have survived and many of these went into the making of the justifiably prize-winning television documentary, "The Civil War".Brady's photographic observations about the culinary habits of Americans in the 1860's are documented in other sources as well. In 1858, Elbert Hubbard, a Mississipi banker visiting Boston wrote that "my Yankee colleagues start their day with a breakfast of black tea, toast, scrambled eggs, fried fish, wild pigeon and oysters". In the same year, George Adams, the son of the 6th president of the United States, was visiting Atlanta, Georgia and noted that "my Southern hosts are fond of breakfasts that consist of fried chicken, bread croutons coated thickly with caviar, and mutton with onion sauce.

Although they liked different things for breakfast, wealthy Northerners and Southerners agreed on one thing - dinner must be substantial and rich. Two years before the onset of the Civil War, the officers of the Boston Light Infantry Brigade served a dinner that included turtle soup, salmon in shrimp sauce, turkey stuffed with, beef tongue with raisins, breaded mutton cutlets, chicken fricasee, chicken in cream sauce and leg of lamb with mint sauce. The desserts included five different soufflés, fresh pineapples and six flavors of ice cream. Southerners enjoyed similar dinners but, because they had a special love for pork products, their meals also included pork chops, smoked ham and pickled pigs' feet.

To look at Brady's photographs is to quickly realize that not all Americans dined well. The diet of most plantation slaves was limited to 3 kilograms of lettuce, 2 kilograms of corn and a small sack of potatoes every week and twenty salt herrings every month. Some plantation owners allowed their slaves to have small vegetable gardens and a few let their slaves raise chickens. In no case, however, were slaves allowed to raise ducks, geese or pigs. In the State of Georgia, a slave who stole peanuts from the fields was subject to being punished by twenty lashes of the whip. A great many people lived on such a diet - and a great many died because of it.

With the onset of war, the dining habits of most Americans were affected. The abundance of meat and vegetables that had made the land so famous was quickly depleted and one Connecticut housewife complained in a letter to her sister that "I have been reduced to serving meat only four times each week". The people who suffered most, however, were the soldiers in the armies of both the North and the South. Because their governments could barely find enough money to supply them with uniforms and weapons, there was often not enough food for commanders to feed their armies. The soldiers of both sides quickly ravaged the countryside and, as Ulysses S. Grant, commander of the Northern Armies observed "sometimes you could advance for a full day without seeing a single cow, horse, pig or chicken". Donkeys, cats and dogs became scarce within the first year of what was to prove a five year long war and a reporter for the Atlanta Journal wrote that "by the third year of the war, even rats had become hard to find in the State of Georgia".

Differences in taste between Northern and Southern soldiers soon vanished, and most were reduced to a breakfast of bread and tea. Percival Lyons, a doctor with the once well-fed Boston Light Infantry. wrote to his wife that "for more than a week our lunches and dinners have consisted of a thin soup made with whatever wild vegetables we could find." The soldiers in the Southern Army fared no better. "On more than one occasion" wrote Colonel Arthur Markham of the Atlanta Cavalry Brigade, "our soup had nothing more in it than oats we had stolen from the horses and grass that we had picked in the fields".

As in any war, there were moments of respite, and when they were given their choice of what they most wanted to eat, the vast majority of the soldiers in both the Northern and Southern armies preferred the same dish - baked beans with meat. Southerners made the dish with pork chops and Northerners with lamb chops, but apart from that single difference, the recipes were identical. So popular was the dish that three songs were written about it, and General Lee, the commander of the Southern Armies declared that his soldiers loved it so much that "all I would have to do to keep them happy is to give them beans three times every day".

The dish has maintained its popularity in both the North and the South. That the War is not completely over is demonstrated by the fact that Northerners refer to the dish as "Boston Baked Beans" and Southerns insist that its correct name is "Atlanta Baked Bean.



Boston/Atlanta Baked Beans

3 cups dried beans (may use white beans, lima beans or red beans
6 thick pork chopsor lamb chops
1 large onion, peeled

1 cup beer
1/2 cup onion, coarsely chopped
1/4 cup molasses
1/4 cup ketchup (ideally home made)
2 Tbsp. each curry powder and dry mustard
1 Tbsp. Worcestershire sauce
1 tsp. salt
1/2 kilo bacon, cut in thick slices

Place the beans in a large pot and pour over 12 cups of cold water. Let stand 15 - 20 minutes and then discard any beans that have floated to the top. Cover the pot and let stand overnight.

Bring the beans slowly to a boil and then simmer gently until the beans are tender (about 1/2 hour). Drain the beans, reserving 2 - 3 cups of the liquid.

Place the whole onion on the bottom of an ovenproof casserole dish and then add the pork or lamb chops. Add the remaining ingredients except the bacon, stirring well, and then place the bacon on the top of the casserole. Cover and bake in an oven at 130 degrees Celsius for 8 - 9 hours, adding a little of the reserved liquid if the casserole dish become dry. Uncover for the last hour of cooking. Serve hot. (Serves 6).

© Daniel Rogov