COLONIAL WILLIAMSBURG, VA. -- It's not unusual for visitors to this reconstructed Colonial capital to cap off a day of sightseeing with a meal at one of its historic taverns, where Southern comfort foods inspired by centuries-old "Colonial receipts" tempt the palate. Chicken fricassee or pulled pork anyone?

Back in the 18th century, though, when Williamsburg was the cultural and political center of the most populous and influential of the American Colonies, dining was a very different experience. Especially if you were a slave living and working on a mid-size farm such as Great Hopes Plantation, a representative "middling" plantation on the edge of this living history museum.

Royal Gov. Botetourt (1768-1770) might have employed an English head cook trained in the French manner, who presided over a kitchen equipped with a brick stew stove, cookware crafted of copper and three or four cookmaids. And his frequent dinner guests enjoyed several courses with upward of a dozen different dishes, many prepared with citrus items and sugar. Meat courses often arrived at the table with the animal's head and feet still attached.

But enslaved blacks working from dawn to dusk in the tobacco and cornfields around the capital? Their meals were limited at best.

Adult slaves in the countryside typically were given a weekly ration of one pound of salt pork and a peck of corn, which had to be shelled and then pounded or ground into grits after the work of the day was performed. So says Frank Clark, supervisor of the Historic Foodways program at Colonial Williamsburg, which this year celebrates 30 years of African American programming. Anything else they managed to add to their diet was the result of their ingenuity or dogged determination.

Since Williamsburg was close to the water, for instance, fish and shellfish would have been free for the taking. So was anything else a quick-handed slave was able to trap, forage or wrestle into a net: possum, frogs, rats, turtles, rabbit, chickens.

"If it was on the floor and slithers, you're eating it," says Harold Caldwell, an African American history interpreter who does cooking demonstrations in the plantation's reconstructed rural slave kitchen.

Slaves also maintained small garden plots -- tended to after the workday was finished, often in the dark -- in which they grew high-yield and easy-to-grow plants such as lima and pole beans, cabbage, collards, hot peppers, okra, peanuts, black-eyed or other field peas, potatoes and pumpkin.

In addition, they took discarded animal parts such as hog maw and pig's feet and added African and Native American cooking techniques and spices to create flavorful dishes that have survived today as something called "soul food."

One favorite dish was fufu, dough balls made from cooked yams and served with soup. Seafood gumbo containing okra ("gumbo" is actually the Americanization of the African word for okra) was another staple, along with peanut stew or soup, bean cakes and collard greens cooked with salt pork. Any leftovers would have been served as supper after they came in from the fields, or dished up as a quick breakfast the next day.

The upper classes would have been supplementing their diets with some of the same wild game and fish and homegrown vegetables, of course. But they would have had much more of it, notes Mr. Clark. And its preparation would have been much more involved.

Meals served in upscale English households in the 18th century were influenced by the French, with multiple cooking techniques and sauces made with rich broth; cooks for the gentry class, though less formally trained, also would have been highly skilled. A palace chicken wasn't just deboned and stuffed but also roasted and then fried. Similarly, oysters served at the Peyton Randolph House, owned by one of Williamsburg's leading citizens in the quarter-century before the American Revolution, would have been soaked in imported wine and then battered and fried. At the poor man's house, they would have been thrown on hot coals and eaten plain.

With spices and many of the native West African ingredients in scant supply, slaves relied on salt pork and hot chillies to flavor what would have been very boring food, says Mr. Clark. They also relied heavily on deep frying, a cooking style that originated in western and central Africa, to keep dishes from spoiling during Virginia's hot summers.

For enslaved blacks on middling plantations such as Great Hopes, cooking, of course, was a secondary job to their work in the field. Most of their meals, then, were one-pot dishes cooked on a small open hearth, dishes that extended the limited amount of meat they had and made tough cuts more tender.

It wouldn't have been easy: You need good flames to boil, simmer or stew foods and hot coals to bake. Absent of modern-day conveniences such as thermometers, timers or a bevy of utensils, 18th-century cooks would have had to rely on smell, touch, sound and the power of observation to tell when a particular dish bubbling on the hearth or baking on a bed of coals was ready to serve. (During roasting, for instance, raw meat's initial flabbiness slowly gives way to firmness.)

As Mr. Caldwell puts it, "When is it done? When it's done."

Practice, though, makes perfect. Accomplished cooks would have been able to juggle eight different dishes cooking at one time in a larger fireplace -- four placed on the hearth near the fire inside three-legged, cast-iron "spiders" or long-handled skillets; three more bubbling in heavy pots hanging on a swinging crane; and a roast on a rotating spit.

"If you can cook a meal in this kitchen," Mr. Caldwell says, laughing, "you can make anything."

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