Twelfth International Conference on Food Studies

Abstract

The island of Nantucket, thirty miles off the coast of Massachusetts, has always been an enigma. It has always been curiously connected to, yet cut off from, the mainland and the rest of the world. Its earliest white settlers were Quakers seeking asylum in its remoteness, yet the island quickly became an important part of the globalized trade networks of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Following the collapse of industrial scale whaling, the island fell into disrepair until it became a desirable resort community in the mid-twentieth century. Despite all of this change, one thing at least has remained constant: the island has always been incapable of producing enough food to sustain its population. Despite this, Nantucketers developed fierce loyalty to items they deemed as regional foodstuffs. This can be traced from manuscript cookery books dating back as early as the 1830s. In this paper, I utilize Nantucket cookery books to discuss what islanders believed to be uniquely Nantucket fare in the nineteenth century and how nostalgia and colonial revival sentiments in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries created local heritage cookbooks. Importantly, I then place that within the context of modern-day Nantucket which is facing an urgent environmental crisis that threatens not only their sustainability, but their island itself.