to keep such meats in good condition for any great length of time. Beef both dried and fresh were included in the inventories of estates.[1] In some cases it had been salted. The beef of the Colony, while pronounced to be of excellent quality, was not as fat as that produced in England, where the cattle perhaps were more carefully provided for in winter. A cow or an ox designed for the butcher was there most frequently stalled as a preparation for its conversion into food. In Virginia, it was allowed to run wild in the woods even in December and January, or was scantily fed on straw, and when the spring arrived, bringing the grass back to the fields and the leaves to the forest, the animal was almost exhausted. With the improved nourishment it soon recuperated, but never acquired the fatness which made English beef one of the most nourishing of all varieties of food.
As has already been stated, the bacon of the Colony, many years before the close of the seventeenth century, was considered by impartial foreign judges to be equal to that of Westphalia, the most celebrated in the world in that age.[2] Clayton expressed the opinion that it very much excelled the English. The very causes that
- ↑ One of the items in the inventory of Robert Drury of York County was “forty pounds of dried beef,” this being in addition to other meats. Records, vol. 1684-1687, p. 333, Va. State Library. The inventory of Margery Bullington included eighty-seven pounds of beef. Records of Henrico County, vol. 1688-1697, p. 306, Va. State Library. There were professional butchers in the Colony in the seventeenth century, some of whom, if an inference can be drawn from the case of William Johnson, were the owners of extensive tracts of land. See Records of Middlesex County, original vol. 1694-1703, p. 230.
- ↑ Clayton’s Virginia, p. 36, Force’s Historical Tracts, vol. III. Burnaby, writing nearly an hundred years later (1759), remarked: “The Virginia pork is said to be superior in flavor to any in the world.” See his travels printed in Va. Hist. Register, vol. V, No. 1, p. 38. Large quantities of pork are enumerated in the inventories of the seventeenth century.
