In 2025, as part of The Atlantic’s special issue on the American Revolution, the food historian Victoria Flexner re-created a Revolutionary-era soup.
Flexner met the award-winning documentarian Ken Burns at one of Burns’s favorite haunts, The Restaurant at Burdick’s, in Walpole, New Hampshire.
Under the guidance of Wesley Babb, the restaurant’s executive chef, Flexner cooked West Indian pepper-pot soup, a savory, spicy dish composed of global and Indigenous ingredients that may have been enjoyed at America’s first birthday party—a raucous gathering in 1777 attended by the nation’s Founding Fathers. Flexner then sat down with Burns to discuss the role that food and dining played during the era of America’s founding.
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