The result was a cuisine that depended on what was available in the New World but was enriched by what had been transported from the old. The colonists planted corn, beans, and pumpkins just as the natives did, and later they planted wheat, barley, and rye. Sugar and salt were brought with them. For both the Wampanoags in New England and the Powhatans in Virginia, the only sugar came from fruit, the only salt from shellfish and ashes. The settlers brought honeybees, which the natives called English flies. They brought cattle, pigs, chickens, herb gardens, frying pans, and alcohol. They brought precious stores of olive oil, beer, and spices. Butter and salt pork fortified the common bean pot. Eggs and milk lightened lowly corn pudding. Old ideas played out in new ways. A fine English meal of a leg of mutton with a chutney of currants and barberries might be translated in America as turkey with cranberry sauce. Yet the indigenous custom of keeping a pot simmering over a fire all day so family members could help themselves as they got hungry was not adopted by the newcomers. Attendance at mealtimes was strictly observed. They were living in what they considered a savage land, but that seemed only to make them try harder to maintain their traditions.
“An ideal dinner for people from these northern European cultures,” says Bentley, “is a piece of meat and complementary vegetables. These would have to be separate, not mixed together as they would be in other cultures.” Many of the early colonists would have appreciated the concept of the TV dinner, with its foods carefully contained in separate aluminum compartments.
That’s not to say that tastes among the English were identical. Radical differences existed between Jamestown and Plymouth, differences that would give rise to America’s current, rather complicated, relationship with food.
In coastal Virginia, tobacco growers’ estates, with deepwater frontage along the Chesapeake Bay, were self-sufficient fiefdoms. By the end of the 1700s, some of them would have their own icehouses, smokehouses, corncribs, and even parishes. One of these properties, Shirley Plantation, lies not far from Jamestown. On the roof of its manor house sits a wooden pineapple, the colonial symbol of hospitality. So hospitable was Shirley’s 18th-century owner that, to accommodate his many guests, most of them strangers traveling up the James River, he opened two dormitories on his grounds. Yet this hospitality was also based on inequality—the sweat of indentured servants and, later, slaves. The South gave us our association of food with sociability and material display, as well as the culinary variety that comes from a society of extremes.
Piety, in New England, ruled the day. There was no cooking on the Sabbath. There was no Christmas celebration. You couldn’t even sell land to outsiders without the town’s approval. So many people were whipped for breaking various laws, Marcoux says, that the punishment was nearly as common as getting a parking ticket today. Massachusetts was home to thrift, moderation, and suspicion of foreigners. Even the fork, an Italian innovation that was called a “diabolical luxury,” wasn’t accepted in New England for more than a century. In the 1650s, a Puritan minister sermonized that mincemeat pies were “idolatry in crust.”
Sound familiar? For many contemporary Americans, food is still a sinful pleasure. We might think of ice cream; for the Pilgrims, it was fruit, says Marcoux. “Eating sugar, even in the form of fruit, was considered unhealthy, and overindulging in it was a vice. This is one of those really crazed kind of Puritan things that comes across in people’s diaries. In one I read recently, the man spends a whole page working up to not eating a bunch of plums and eventually, of course, he writes, ‘I ate the plums!’ There’s a lot of torment surrounding fruit.”
“It’s the Adam and Eve thing,” adds Curtin. Marcoux agrees. “I resist temptation, then succumb to it; now I’m confessing.”
The culinary legacy of our colonial past lies in ingredients as well as in attitude. Take Thanksgiving, a far more complicated creature than our current simple celebration of nature’s bounty indicates. Here is a holiday that perfectly captures who we are as a nation. Institutionalized in the Civil War era, it reinvents and glorifies colonial history, and attempts to transcend race and religion. Most Americans partake of this combination of 17th-century England, pre-Columbian North America, Victorian fancy, and whatever ethnic and modern touches each household might embrace. Even our newest arrivals usually participate. And whether they serve canned gravy or the Peking duck my mother made, from the moment they eat their first Thanksgiving dinner, they cease, as our country’s founders did, to be wholly foreign.
Jamestown Settlement: Route 31 South, Williamsburg, Virginia (757-229-1607)
Plimoth Plantation: 137 Warren Avenue, Plymouth, Massachusetts (508-746-1622)
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