Dominek Marsh had to make jugged hare five times. Working from a recipe written in the 18th century, he put butchered pieces of rabbit in a jug along with clove-stuffed onions, shallots, herbs, spices, and red wine; sealed the top with a board and a brick; and placed the jug in a pot of water boiling over the flame in the hearth to slowly cook over several hours. He didn’t mind me watching him work when I visited the kitchen of the Governor’s Palace in May. As they had on many other days of Marsh’s apprenticeship, which requires he repeatedly execute a set of colonial-era recipes, visitors milled in and out, asking him questions about the array of other dishes on the kitchen table: chicken the French way, veal sweetbreads, beef pie, bath buns, pate a choux, candied fruits, and more. Somewhere in the distance, a cannon fired.
“This is the best cooking job in the world,” says Frank Clark, Marsh’s boss and master of historic foodways at Colonial Williamsburg, the world’s largest living history museum. At the museum, hundreds of historical interpreters work every day to recreate 18th-century life for visitors — wearing period-appropriate clothing, telling tourists about their fictionalized 18th-century lives, playing famed historical figures like Patrick Henry or the Marquis de Lafayette, and dodging shit on the street left by the carriage horses. Clark’s team spends their days pouring over colonial cookbooks, growing ingredients in a period-appropriate garden, and cooking recipes utilizing tools made by tradespeople who operate the other shops around town: iron implements from the blacksmiths, wooden tubs from the coopers. “We’re lucky. We are, as far as I know, the only full-time, historic food program operating in any museum in this country or the world.”
Over his 35 years working at Colonial Williamsburg, Clark has never seen so much interest from visitors in the team’s cooking, which is good news given it’s a big year for Colonial Williamsburg. As the U.S. barrels into its 250th birthday in 2026, there’s a lot of hope that the nation’s semiquincentennial could bring renewed attention to the museum, as the bicentennial did in 1976.
Colonial Williamsburg benefits from nostalgia, which brings families and school trips back to Colonial Williamsburg generation after generation. But it also engages a deeper type of nostalgia, the kind that tends to crop up in periods of economic, political, and cultural stress, which inspires people to look to the past for comfort. At a moment of acute tension in the U.S. right now, America’s foundational culinary cultures are a vivid way to engage with our past.
“It’s a blessing to be able to apprehend a small piece of your ancestors’ world,” says Michael Twitty, James Beard Award-winning author of the upcoming Recipes from the American South and a collaborator with CW over the years. “You feel rooted, you feel grounded, and you understand what a lot of people don’t get in school. That’s an incredible way to tell history. It’s an amazing entry point into who we are, how we are, and what we need to be.”
Williamsburg, Virginia — inhabited for thousands of years by the Powhatan Nation before the arrival of English colonizers — became the capital of the Virginia Colony in 1699 and would remain the center of colonial Virginia through the American Revolution. Alongside the country’s semiquincentennial, Colonial Williamsburg, the town-sized museum that sprouted off the actual Williamsburg, is celebrating a major anniversary next year.
In the 1920s, W.A.R. Goodwin, a local minister concerned about the state of the town’s 18th-century structures, roped in John D. Rockefeller Jr. to fund a restoration project, which kicked off in 1926. Over the ensuing decades, the project grew from straightforward upkeep to a more creative endeavor: recreating a past era in Virginia’s one-time capital city, through a mixture of restoring existing buildings, constructing replicas from local records, and trucking in 18th-century structures from elsewhere. In the 1930s, staff donned 18th-century garb and began taking up trades from the 1700s like blacksmithing and wigmaking, and in the 1970s, costumed interpreters began sharing first-person stories of colonial life with visitors.
Today, CW consists of two interwoven parts, a nonprofit side in which interpreters (who act as historians, tradespeople, and entertainers all at once) research colonial life through reenacting it, and a for-profit side that’s designed to fund the town’s operation through hotels, shops, and restaurants — though both sides have struggled in recent years to stay afloat financially. Those two halves are reflected in the food too.
On one side, there’s the kitchen at the Governor’s Palace, where Clark’s team accurately reproduces 18th-century dishes. I didn’t get a chance to taste the jugged hare or any of their other dishes because they can’t legally serve this food to guests (the kitchen fails modern health requirements many times over). Instead, the team cooks for research, learning about 18th-century life by doing it (“You can’t taste a book,” Clark points out), and educates guests by showing their work. Occasionally customers can taste the fruits of their labor; CW has collaborated with Williamsburg Alewerks to produce beers based on Clark’s recipes, with Mars on chocolate based on 18th-century spices, and Anson Mills to produce bread from 18th-century-style wheat. There’s also an official cookbook for anyone who wants to try their hand at home.
On the other side of the operation, just down Duke of Gloucester Street, are three taverns that serve visitors food inspired by historic dishes. Servers, dressed in period costume, are trained like all Colonial Williamsburg interpreters to answer any question posed by guests, both through first-person narrative and by breaking character to contextualize stories with historical sources. But everything served in the taverns is cooked in modern kitchens, buried beneath the historic structures.
“It’s authentic, but familiar,” says Stephen Perkins, the executive chef overseeing the taverns, of the food menus. “At King’s Arms Tavern, for instance, we stew a beef in the French manner, a recipe out of Martha Washington’s book. Well, that’s pot roast, but with a lot of red wine in it.” When Perkins took over operations in 2021, the restaurants were serving inaccurate items like bangers and mash. He’s been making the dishes more true to history, pulling recipes from 1700s cookbooks and noting his sources.
At Christiana Campbell’s Tavern, once frequented by George Washington, you might order the farced oysters from François Massialot’s 1702 The Court and Country Cook (described on the menu with the quote, “Having open’d your oisters, add to them greens minc’d small and boiled in cream and smoked streak, place some on each and strew with buttered crumb”). Or you could try the To Fry Fish found in Recipes from the Personal cookbook of Thomas Jefferson in 1788 (“The great art of frying fish is to have it free from grease”). Or perhaps A Seafood Pye, inspired by The Universal Cook; Or Lady’s Complete Assistant by John Townshend, published 1773 (“Send to the table with gravy made of the lobster bones”).
The team adapts recipes for modern equipment, the needs of a working restaurant trying to turn a buck, and modern tastes. Every time Perkins looks at a recipe he has to decide whether “this looks safe” or “this is too crazy; no one will order it.” Some menu items — crab cakes, potato dumplings in the Italian manner — are “tavern originals,” recipes Perkins’s team developed as homage to cooking of the era that might appeal to the more cautious diners.
Clark’s researchers have long used ingredients from their kitchen garden or the farming sites dotted throughout the museum, where teams work to reverse-engineer period-appropriate crops. There’s a lot of chatter these days about finding ways for the taverns to use those ingredients too, though scale is an issue. (It took 40 years for the farmers to get their corn just right on a small plot.)
But the kitchens aren’t entirely limited to what grows in Virginia. Though most 18th-century residents relied on local ingredients, wealthy diners like the governor would import ingredients from around the world — pasta and cheese from Italy, curry from India, rum from the Caribbean — paying hefty tariffs to England for anything coming from outside the British empire.
The dishes at the Governor’s Palace kitchen tend toward the rich and impressive, but most residents of 18th-century Williamsburg wouldn’t have eaten that way. “One of the things about the diet before us: It may not be very enjoyable, but it’s generally very healthy,” Clark says. “They do not eat much meat. They eat lots of vegetables. They have no processed sugar unless it’s molasses, and they don’t get a lot of that. And they spend their days doing heavy manual labor. It’s a much healthier lifestyle than the average Virginian has today, scarfing down pizza and burgers and sitting behind a computer all day.”
Though Clark says most 18th-century cookbooks were written by chefs working for rich patrons, both he and Perkins express interest in cooking the foods of Williamsburg’s everyday residents, including those of Black and Indigenous communities. “[More than half] the town was free Black or enslaved Black. The Native American population — where are the stories?” Perkins says. “We’re not there yet. So we’re pushing that into the agenda for next year’s menu.” That project isn’t just a logistical challenge; in the modern U.S., it’s a political one.
Part of a broader backlash against “woke rhetoric,” organizations like the Heritage Foundation and conservative donors have criticized the museum’s depictions of free and enslaved Black residents. While there have always been critics of CW’s work (including around an infamous mock slave auction in the ’90s), the museum has been thrust into America’s broader debate around race and history in the last five years.
For much of the museum’s history, Black interpreters primarily worked in silent, subservient roles, playing coachmen or cooks, and generally stories of Black life were little seen by visitors. In 1984, the museum began to rectify that, launching a dedicated unit to highlight Black lives in the 18th century. Over time, that programming has grown into what Twitty describes as a flourishing of Black interpretation at the museum, which has included educational staff trips to Africa, targeted visitor programming, and reconstruction projects focused on the Bray School and African Baptist Meeting House. Twitty worked with the museum on a colonial-era barbecue and the Sankofa Heritage Garden, a recreated garden plot like those kept by enslaved people.
“When I first engaged with [CW], the foodways staff was focused on Britain,” Twitty says. “They might have talked about a few African Virginian dishes, but I was told flatly, ‘Well we don’t have much to go on.’” He acknowledges that working-class or enslaved Black 18th-century residents weren’t recording what they ate, but adds, “The people you’re talking about lived under, for the most part, compulsory illiteracy. Saying that you don’t have much evidence when people weren’t allowed to write down their culture, their history, was a really bad place to start.”
Twitty says the work on Black foodways has evolved over the years, often driven by particularly passionate researchers. Today, he has a lot of respect for the program and gives them credit for doing their best under the circumstances, pointing out that much of what Colonial Williamsburg can present depends not on staff members but on the mood of leaders, board members, and donors. He’s looking forward to seeing next steps.
When I visited in May, Clark was preparing for a Juneteenth event. Perkins was looking forward to the Dinner with a Nation Builder program around the holidays, which seats guests beside famous figures like Jefferson and Washington, as well as Gowan Pamphlet, an enslaved tavern worker who became the nation’s first ordained Black preacher. These special events — alongside programs focused on recreating foodways and culinary interactions between Indigenous peoples and Williamsburg’s residents — offer opportunities for particularly engaged diners.
Mileage may vary for guests at other times of year. During my visit to the Governor’s Palace kitchen, one visitor asked about where the kitchen would have sourced its rabbits. “In the countryside, enslaved folks had space often given to them by the masters to raise their own food,” Clark told them. “It saves him money, and it allows [enslaved people] to make a little bit of money by selling off excess food. So you see a lot of this, a lot of the fowl and things in our market, being sold by enslaved folks.” There was a pregnant pause, but the visitor didn’t ask any follow-ups. Clark let it drop.
“At most museums and sites that deal with enslavement, including Monticello, there’s this constant push-pull about ‘how much do we emphasize this?’” says Twitty. “Do we integrate it into everything and pump it up as a major aspect of our interpretation and public history? Or do we have it subtly in the background, [so] if you want to know, you get to know?”
Most days at CW are less like Disney World, where imagineers carefully plot out experiences, and more like a choose-your-own-adventure novel, allowing visitors to follow their curiosities. They can choose to visit the American Indian Encampment or the Bray School, or they can skip them. They can choose to ask questions. It’s up to guests to push into difficult historical territory — and they should. Every day, around the country, we eat ingredients rooted in the Transatlantic slave trade, dishes birthed by people in bondage, crops grown in land stolen from Indigenous peoples. These are not abstract pieces of historical trivia locked away in another time, or issues solved by previous generations we no longer need consider. They’re part of our diets and our tables. Colonial Williamsburg prompts visitors to ask these kinds of questions and gives them the opportunity to fully consume the answers. The question is how much appetite visitors have.
“The interpretation does not rely on the institution. It relies on us,” Twitty says. “Are we intellectually prepared? Are we academically prepared? I want the school system and the home to do a good enough job so that a kid and their family is prepared for the information, and can bring something to the table other than a gaping open mouth and closed eyes.”
In 1976, the bicentennial sparked an opportunity for that kind of education. Americans engaged eagerly with institutions like the Smithsonian and tuned in to Roots, which premiered the following year. “There was a fervor for Americana,” Twitty says, pointing out that the bicentennial offered a chance for healing to a nation rocked by Watergate and the end of the Vietnam War. CW saw massive crowds too.
But tourism to Williamsburg has trended downward since the ’80s. Even the food research program, which is more popular than ever among visitors, has shrunk. Clark’s team is just three now, down from nine researchers at its peak. “It’s just a reflection of the economic reality of running a museum,” Clark says. “The visitation goes down. The income comes down. You can’t maintain the same programming you have before. The museum world is all about tightening belts these days.”
It doesn’t help that President Trump has launched a war on the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History and other institutions presenting American history, even as the administration gears up for its own semiquincentennial celebrations. If this year’s military parade in D.C. marking the anniversary of the U.S. Army is any evidence, the administration’s events next year will continue blindly celebrating the nation’s past rather than engaging with its challenges and evolution. “Our current administration isn’t really interested in the truth or real history,” Twitty says. “The way that things are going now, this 250th is going to be rotten fruit.”
But he doesn’t think that will stop people from engaging with our colonial past or its food. “The country will keep wrestling with its own identity and the sources of its culture and its history. And the country will always be hungry,” Twitty says. “The country will always want to know where the plates on the table came from.”
Eater’s coverage of Colonial Williamsburg was produced with assistance from Visit Williamsburg. All editorial content is produced independently of those organizations. Read more about Eater’s ethics policies here.
