What a great history of Thanksgiving food the NYT has today!
EXCERPTS:
The native American food that the Pilgrims supposedly enjoyed would
have offended the palate of any self-respecting English colonist – the
colonial minister Charles Woodmason called it "exceedingly filthy and
most execrable." Our comfort food, in short, was the bane of the
settlers’ culinary existence.The reason is fairly simple. Hale and her fellow writers seem to
have forgotten that their Puritan forebears migrated to New England
with strict notions about food production and preparation. Proper
notions of English husbandry generally demanded that flesh be
domesticated, grain neatly planted and fruit and vegetables cultivated
in gardens and orchards.Given these expectations, English migrants recoiled upon discovering
that the native inhabitants hunted their game, grew their grain
haphazardly and foraged for fruit and vegetables. Squash, corn, turkey
and ripe cranberries might have tasted perfectly fine to the English
settlers. But that was beside the point. What really mattered was that
the English deemed the native manner of acquiring these goods nothing
short of barbaric. Indeed, the colonists saw it as the essence of
savagery.No matter how hard [the colonists] tried, no matter how carefully they tended
their crops and repaired their fences and fattened their cattle and
furrowed their fields, colonial Americans failed to replicate European
husbandry practices. Geography alone wouldn’t allow it.The adaptation of Indian agricultural techniques not only sent
colonists deep into the woods galloping after game and grubbing corn
from unbound, ashen fields, it also provoked severe cultural
insecurity. This insecurity turned to conspicuous dread when the
colonists were mocked by their metropolitan cousins as living, in the
words of one haughty Englishman, "in a state of ignorance and
barbarism, not much superior to those of the native Indians."This hurt. And under the circumstances no status-minded English
colonist would have possibly highlighted his adherence to native
American victuals – even if the early Thanksgiving holiday had been a
genuine culinary event. Indeed, it wasn’t until after the Revolution,
when the new nation was seeking ways to differentiate itself from the
Old World, that these foods became celebrated as a reflection of
emerging ideals like simplicity, manifest destiny and rugged
individualism.
Happy Thanksgiving Jimmy! Thank you for your blog!