The Indians and the Pilgrims: What was on the menu?

Separating myth from reality

By: Carolyn Foote Edelmann
   On a bleak November morning, a wild turkey flew low, dark and determined across Meadow Road in West Windsor, just missing my car. Serenely, he joined his stately flock in shadowy woods.
   This early Thanksgiving omen carried me right back to "Plimoth" Colony — and to wondering what they really ate at that pivotal feast.
   Some years ago, when I visited Philipsburg Manor, the 300-year-old plantation in Sleepy Hollow, N.Y., a guide lectured us on the difficulties of hunting and fishing for the first settlers.
   "They brought all the wrong tools — the fishhooks were too small, the fishnet holes too large for freshwater species," he said. Worse, British muskets were cumbersome, slow to load and noisy: "Any deer worth his salt would be in the next county before those men could draw a bead." His point was, "Without the Abenaki and Wampanoag (American Indian tribes), the Pilgrims would have starved."
   We’ve heard this before. But the slowness of this week’s turkey flight made me wonder: Did turkeys really grace the first Thanksgiving table? What was deemed worthy for 1621’s three-day celebration?
   My Plimoth Colony Cookbook is introduced as "’A collection of ‘receipts’ or ‘received rules of cookery’ used in Plymouth from Pilgrim days to the end of the last century," i.e., the 19th century. At Plymouth’s Harlow Old Fort House, "framed of timber from the original Pilgrim Fort," re-enacted Pilgrim Breakfasts were served by "girls in Pilgrim costumes, bearing beans and fish cakes for this traditional meal."
   For those "ill-equipt" Europeans, however, there might not even have been beans and fish cakes without Samoset, the Abenaki; Massasoit, the Wampanoag chief; Hobomok, and Tisquantum, known as Squanto.
   The Mayflower first landed Nov. 11, 1620, in very northerly Provincetown. Although a landing party did not find appropriate conditions for settlement, the Mayflower Compact was crafted and signed offshore. On Dec. 8, a search group explored farther south, on "First Encounter Beach." Prophetic shots were exchanged without injury; an Indian corn cache raided. Some accounts report this theft was later remedied, but I have my doubts.
   Again unsatisfied as to conditions, the Mayflower lifted anchor, braving turbulent seas anew. It arrived on the mainland Dec. 20, near an abandoned Wampanoag village, Patuxent. One wonders if the settlers had brought Pilgrim equivalents of Zodiac landing craft or, at least, dories. Wading ashore would not have been pleasant, Plymouth rock or no Plymouth rock. What is known is that arriving in "New Plymouth" at the winter solstice, they faced the New World’s harshest months, with few wilderness skills and inappropriate equipment.
   A 1633 list for a "well-equipt kitchen" reveals that Governor Bradford’s brother-in-law possessed "kettles, yron potts, a dripping pan, pewter platters, a smale brasse mortar and pestle, pewter flagons, beakers, salt sellers, porringers, spoons and pot hooks." Without the Indians, those vessels would not have been filled.
   Old New England cookbooks recount that Indians taught "the lore of the forest, methods of fishing and hunting … first introducing (the settlers) to the growing of corn, which they planted along with their supplies of wheat and rye seed." Lacking mills, how did they grind harvests of wheat or rye? However, recipes for their bread called "Rye ‘n’ Injun" (corn) come to us from those days.
   Squanto would not arrive until late March 1621, speaking English and facilitating the treaty of cooperation with Chief Massasoit. The idea for the autumnal feast may have originated with the Indians, thankfulness being central to their daily life. When I attended Tom Brown Jr.’s Tracker School in Waretown, we were instructed to ask permission of tall grasses before reaping and binding and to thank the squirrels for giving over lives and spirits for our hearty stews.
   Indian ways — which Tom Brown learned from the Apache, Stalking Wolf — suggest that Massachusetts tribes may have also transmitted weir-building techniques. By placing rocks in strategic V’s to narrow streams, fish-spearing was virtually guaranteed.
   As a generally eager hostess, I quail (pun intended) at the number of First Thanksgiving guests reported by Edward Winslow:
   "Our harvest being gotten in, our governor sent four men on fowling, that we might, after a special manner, rejoice together …We exercised our arms, many of the Indians coming amongst us, and among the rest, their greatest king Massasoyt, with some ninety men, whom, for three days, we entertained and feasted; and they went out and killed five deer, which they brought to the plantation and bestowed … "
   I can still hear the Phillipsburg Manor guide chuckling, "Yes, even Pilgrims could shoot ducks and geese on the wing, accustomed to beaters who flushed prey back in England." Prairie chicken, pigeon, quail and pheasant may also have been among "the bag."
   But no turkey. Written accounts describe only "waterfoul" and deer at the First Thanksgiving.
   The New England Yankee Cookbook discloses a likely candidate for the menu — succotash. "The Indians planted beans in the same hill with corn, so that the vines of one might run up the stalks of the other. And after the harvest, they boiled the two together so as to blend the juices and called the dish succotash."
   But no potatoes were served, white or sweet. Although native to South America, potatoes had not yet made their way north to the Wampanoag by 1621.
   Both Wampanoags and English stuffed birds and fish, using wild herbs and wild onions, with the English incorporating oats. Cranberries and dried blueberries were key ingredients in pemmican, a dried meat paste that Indian women prepared for hunting and other journeys. Either or both berries could have been added to Thanksgiving dishes, providing welcome color and tang, as well as vitamin C. (Early whalers prevented scurvy at sea by eating New England and New Jersey cranberries.)
   Recipe names in my New England collection provide clues to other possible inclusions. But we will never know if their groaning board included finny creatures: Smothered Fowl and Oysters, Fish Chowder, Clam Muddle, Lobster Soup, Codfish Tongues, Corn Chowder, Plymouth Clam Pie, Escalloped Oysters.
   Dishes with names as disparate as "Smother" and "Bedspread" involved covering almost anything with oysters. Accounts reveal that the bivalves were not gathered at Plymouth Colony; rather, they were brought to the settlers from Cape Cod by helpful Indians. Among these gifts were "soft- and hard-shelled clams, sea clams, quahogs, mussels, scallops, razor clams and sea snails."
   One book’s lengthy fish and shellfish section redundantly declares, "Fish, supplemented by corn, kept the Pilgrims alive through the first hard years." An early writer bragged or complained, "My bones are made of Indian corn."
   If pumpkin and other squashes played their part in the feast, it was not as pie — there was neither flour nor shortening for piecrusts. Earliest techniques for dealing with pumpkin had it sliced and sautéed in animal fat, or stewed in a kettle over "ye fyre." Edward Johnson, in 1651, would write, "Let no man make a jest of pumpkin, for with this fruit the Lord was pleased to feed his people until corn and cattle were increased." Pumpkins, which Pilgrims called "pompions." were also sliced and dried above fireplaces.
   Desserts do not appear in most First Thanksgiving recountings. However, in 1609, historian Mark Lescarbot, in the Lake Champlain area, reported, "The Indians get juice from trees and from it distil a sweet and agreeable liquid."
   "Indian Pudding," that slow-cooked sweet of corn meal and milk (it’s still served at key Boston restaurants), would not have graced the Thanksgiving table: Cattle did not arrive until a few voyages after that of 1620. Molasses did not emerge from the West Indies until later in the century. No nutmeg or cinnamon was handy, although sassafras roots contributed a spiciness somewhat like root beer. Later, as a cure-all, sassafras would become a key trade item to the Mother Country.
   This sort of research kills too many traditional images and phrases, like "as American as apple pie." Not for the Pilgrims — apples are not native to North America.
   Let Edward Winslow have the last word, if there was a last course to Plimoth Thanksgiving:
   "Here are grapes, white and red, and very sweet and strong also. Strawberries, gooseberries, raspas, etc. Plums of tree sorts, with black and red, being almost as good as a damson; abundance of roses, white, red, and damask; single, but very sweet indeed … hese things I thought good to let you understand, being the truth of things as near as I could experimentally take knowledge of, and that you might on our behalf give God thanks who hath dealt so favorably with us."
Culinary sources: The Plimoth Colony Cookbook, Plymouth Antiquarian Society, 1957; The New England Yankee Cookbook, Coward McCann, Inc., 1939; Favorite New England Recipes, Yankee Magazine, Dublin, New Hampshire, 1972; Peter Hunt’s Cape Cod Cookbook, Gramercy Publishing Company, Crown Publishers, 1962.
Other sources: www.plimoth.org.
A resident of West Windsor, Carolyn Foote Edelmann is a freelance writer, a member of the Cool Women poets, and an avid amateur naturalist. She has spent numerous summers on Cape Cod. Having worked in Manhattan as a food stylist, creating and arranging food for commercial display, and also as director of a test kitchen, she describes food as "a major passion of mine."