Editor’s Note: This article is part of “The Unfinished Revolution,” a project exploring 250 years of the American experiment.
When John Adams arrived in Philadelphia for the First Continental Congress, he immediately went out to eat. “Dirty, dusty, and fatigued as we were,” he wrote in his diary that night—August 29, 1774—“we could not resist the Importunity, to go to the Tavern, the most genteel one in America.” A few days later, when George Washington rode into Philadelphia, he made straight for the same establishment.
City Tavern had opened the previous year, backed by a group of wealthy Philadelphians who’d decided there was no place in town that met their standards for decent food and drink. Although the tavern’s sophisticated culinary style was influenced by Europe, it was also uniquely American, and a reflection of the colonies’ global ties. There was likely shad from the Delaware River, fresh corn and lettuces from nearby farms, sugar and pineapples from the Caribbean, spices from Asia.
But the multistory building at the corner of Walnut and Second Streets was more than just a place to eat. In addition to dining rooms, it had a bar, lodgings for travelers, and a room for coffee. It also had a subscription room, where newspapers and magazines from across the colonies and Europe were delivered regularly.
The tavern quickly became a favorite meeting spot for the Founding Fathers. Thomas Jefferson took almost all of his meals there as he wrote the Declaration of Independence. Many of his compatriots routinely ate and drank in its rooms as they worked to construct a new nation. And on July 4, 1777, with the war unfolding not far away, the Congress gathered there for a meal to celebrate the United States’ first birthday.
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As naval vessels filled the Delaware River that day, crowds amassed along the shorelines to cheer. When the sun began to set, fireworks, bonfires, and candles were lit throughout the city. Philadelphia glowed with fresh patriotic spirit.
That afternoon at City Tavern, the delegates “were very agreeably entertained with excellent company, good cheer,” and music from a band of Hessians, Adams wrote to his daughter Abigail. Throughout the meal, they listened to toasts “in honour of our country, and the heroes who have fallen in their pious efforts to defend her.” They sat in the Long Room, a private dining room on the second floor with generous windows that allowed light to pour in. Though we don’t know for sure what they ate on July 4, 1777, we can make an educated guess based on bills of fare and descriptions of other dishes served in the period, as well as the diary entries and letters of the Founding Fathers documenting their day-to-day lives. The meal would have been served family style, with many dishes laid out on the table all at once, next to their accompanying sauces and jellies.
The delegates would have started with tureens of soup set at both ends of the table. Turtle soup, a delicacy of Colonial American cuisine, used green sea turtles, typically immersing the sweet meat in a delicate veal broth with a final splash of acidity from imported sherry or Madeira wine. West Indies pepper-pot soup was a favorite of Philadelphians (it also figures in a myth about how George Washington’s troops survived at Valley Forge). The dish came to the city by way of the Caribbean, where enslaved people working on the brutal sugar plantations had re-created a leafy-green West African stew called callaloo. One of the variations that became popular in Philadelphia utilized ingredients native to the Americas, such as chili peppers. It also used Asian spices such as cloves and mace, alongside meat like beef and pork, which had not been available on the American continent until Europeans introduced them.
Large platters of fish would have dotted the table too. Sturgeon from the Delaware River were likely fastened to a spit and basted with butter, then sprinkled with flour, nutmeg, mace, salt, sweet herbs, and breadcrumbs before being dressed in a tangy sauce that usually included anchovy, lobster, lemon, horseradish, and white wine. Other fresh fish were lightly dredged in flour, fried, baked, and then garnished with parsley and black walnuts.
The dense woods of 18th-century North America were teeming with wildlife, and deer, turkey, rabbit, pigeon, and game birds all likely made regular appearances on City Tavern’s tables; they would typically have been roasted over the fire in a style reminiscent of medieval cooking (it’s worth remembering that the Founding Fathers were closer in time to the Tudors than they were to us, their culture and cuisine on the cusp of a yet-to-be-defined modernity). The French gastronome Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin once referred to turkey as a culinary gift from the New World. At City Tavern, it was probably prepared using Old World techniques—slowly braised with onions, garlic, and bacon and then garnished with fresh herbs and gravy.
Smaller plates of vegetables would have surrounded the platters of roasted meats. Potatoes, native to Peru, were a staple in the colonies—and were quickly becoming one in other parts of the world as they made their way along colonial trade routes. Cucumbers, peas, and summer squash likely gave seasonal color to the July 4 table.
The quantity of alcohol served at such a meal would be astounding by today’s standards (in part because people at the time rarely drank water). One bill from a dinner at City Tavern in 1778 for 270 people included 522 bottles of Madeira, 24 bottles of port wine, 116 big bowls of punch, nine of toddy, six of sangaree, two tubs of grog for artillery soldiers, one gallon of spirits for bell ringers—and an extra fee for the dozens of glasses and plates that, perhaps unsurprisingly, broke during the course of the evening.
[Read: Colonial Americans drank roughly three times as much as Americans do now]
The celebratory July 4 meal would certainly have kept the innkeeper, Daniel Smith, busy replenishing the finest bottles of Madeira from behind the locked bar—perhaps overhearing snippets of chatter among the delegates. But Smith, a Loyalist, may not have been in as jubilant a mood as his guests. When the British withdrew from Philadelphia in 1778, he, too, got on a ship and sailed to England.
As platters emptied, they would have been removed from the table to make way for nuts, fruits, and sweet biscuits that were variously spiced with nutmeg from the Maluku Islands, in Indonesia; cinnamon from Sri Lanka; or ginger grown in the Caribbean. Perhaps there was also an apple pie. With the exception of the bitter crab apple, which is native to North America, the apple’s origins lay far away; initially from Central Asia, the sweet fruit wasn’t introduced to the continent until at least the 1500s. But by the 1800s, some sources estimate that thousands of varieties were growing in the colonies, making the apple a frequently used ingredient in America’s emerging cuisine. In time, the apple’s proliferation on American soil and the ubiquity of apple pie on American menus would help turn the dessert into a patriotic symbol.
In ways large and small, the meal that took place at City Tavern on July 4, 1777, was the result of a thousand unlikely events put into motion by untold numbers of people across time and space. The foods on the table in Philadelphia that day, like the men who ate them and the country they were building, had traveled by way of the mercantile seas and through the American colonies to create the basis of a new culture, a new cuisine, and a new, revolutionary identity.
This article appears in the November 2025 print edition with the headline “We Hold These Turkeys to Be Delicious.”
