In the film Sleeper, Woody Allen, awakened from a cryogenic sleep in the distant future, wanders with mouth agape through a field of Brobdingnagian vegetables. The founders of the first successful English settlements in the New World must have felt much the same way. Accounts by awestruck early colonists describe 25-pound lobsters, schools of cod so vast that a man could walk across water by stepping on their backs, skies darkened with so many migrating fowl that one shot could down a dozen. Nature was bountiful, but to the colonist sit was a strange bounty indeed—nowhere near the free-for-all Disneyland version of a farmers market we envision, particularly during Thanksgiving. The Pilgrims didn’t exactly trip over a beautifully butchered turkey on their way to the wild mushroom stall. They first had to kill the turkey and pick the mushrooms (which might possibly kill them).
Those 17th-century colonists, like Allen’s character, felt a disconnect with their new world, which was so unlike the world they’d left behind. Neither a sheaf of wheat nor a head of cattle was to be found. Instead of using butter, the Indians used bear fat. In England, even pious Puritans drank beer to quench their thirst, but in America there was only water, a drink they considered “without virtue.” In this bizarre land, corn, used as animal fodder back home, was the basis of nearly every meal.
When the Plymouth Pilgrims and their adventurer counterparts in Jamestown left England, changing their eating habits had not been a part of the plan. So they attempted to re-create their old home in their new one. But trading countries is not simple. Into the calculation must go variables of loss and gain, opportunity and heartache. And if food is the most visceral way we identify ourselves (as Amy Bentley, assistant professor of food history and culture at New York University, points out, “We put it in our bodies. It becomes our bodies”), then the early immigrants had no choice but to reinvent themselves. It was a matter of survival—a transformation enacted not through government, law, or social mores but through hunger. When the English changed what they ate, they created the outlines of a new culture upon which all subsequent immigrants would build.
“To the Pilgrims,” says Paula Marcoux, a food historian at Plimoth Plantation—which uses then governor William Bradford’s preferred spelling to differentiate itself from the nearby town of Plymouth—“it would seem weird to see at one table a piece of venison and Indian corn bread. Here’s something a king would eat, next to this coarse bread that you wouldn’t feed to a horse in England. Such a dichotomy is mind-numbing.”
Today, a visit to either Plimoth Plantation or Jamestown Settlement, both living-history museums, makes for an engaging if strange experience. Plimoth is set in 1627, which means that the interpreters portray actual colonists. Seventeenth-century English is spoken. The approach at Plimoth is in many respects so fanatical about accuracy that one story, probably apocryphal, has it that an interpreter once denounced a visiting nun as “a whore of Rome.” But a visit here still feels as if you’re consuming History Lite. Having a genuine colonial experience is impossible when your own trip begins and ends in a heated car and includes a midday stop at the cafeteria for pizza.
At Jamestown, cooking demonstrations might feature food not grown on the colonists’ land. One afternoon in the fort, the interpreters were making a version of a “pye of several things,” consisting of ham, vegetables, and spices in a wheat crust. This was fare for the more monied colonists, for spices were costly and came from ship’s supplies. And you wouldn’t see corn in this pie, says Sharon Walls, Jamestown’s historical interpreter: “That was food for swine.”
The truth is that early life in both settlements was much starker than the cozy fantasy currently on display. Of the 102 passengers who sailed into Plymouth Harbor in December 1620, more than half would be dead six months later, while nearly two thirds of the 104 men and boys who landed on the island of Jamestown in May of 1607 would die within the next year. From the fall of 1609 to the spring of 1610 the colony—confined to the fort because of skirmishes with Indians—experienced a “starving time,” when its population dropped from 350 to 90. “So great was our famine,” wrote Captain John Smith in an infamous account, “one amongst the rest did kill his wife, powdered [i.e., salted] her, and had eaten part of her before it was knowne; for which hee was executed, as hee well deserved: now whether shee was better roasted, boyled, or carbonado’d [i.e., grilled], I know not; but of such a dish as powdered wife I never heard of.” They were in no position then, or for years to come, to turn their noses up at corn.
Hungry as they often were, however, the English settlers abhorred many of the native eating habits, such as the practice of seasonal eating (which bears no resemblance to our postindustrial definition of the term). “It is strange,” wrote Smith about the Powhatans, “to see how their bodies alter with their dyet, even as the deere and wilde beasts they seem fat and leane, strong and weeke.” The colonists, in contrast, counted on having three meals a day, year-round.
“Food,” says Kathleen Curtin, another Plimoth food historian, “is part of social hierarchy. The Pilgrims were mostly middle-class; having spices was part of their expectation of eating. You would feel bereft if you didn’t have them in this strange land. They tried to surround themselves with England.”
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