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.”
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)