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Title: Partakers of plenty
A study of the first Thanksgiving
Author: Jay Anderson
James Deetz
Release date: January 5, 2024 [eBook #72628]
Language: English
Original publication: Plymouth, Mass: Plimoth Plantation, 1972
Credits: Bob Taylor, Steve Mattern and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net
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Transcriber’s Note
Italic text displayed as: _italic_
Bold text displayed as: =bold=
PARTAKERS OF PLENTY
A Study of the First Thanksgiving
James Deetz and Jay Anderson
[Illustration: Turkey]
This article is printed with the permission of the
_Saturday Review of Science_ and was previously published
under the title of “The Ethnogastronomy of Thanksgiving”
in the November 25, 1972 issue of the
_Saturday Review of Science_
PARTAKERS OF PLENTY
A Study of the First Thanksgiving
[Illustration: Village of people]
“Our harvest being gotten in, our governor sent four men on fowling,
that we might after a special manner rejoice together after we had
gathered the fruit of our labors. The four in one day killed as
much fowl as, with a little help beside, served the company almost
a week. At which time, amongst other recreations, we exercised our
arms, many of the Indians coming amongst us, and among the rest their
greatest king Massasoit, 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 on our governor, and upon
the captain and others. And although it be not always so plentiful as
it was at this time with us, yet by the goodness of God, we are so far
from want that we often wish you partakers of our plenty.”
So wrote Pilgrim Edward Winslow to a friend in England shortly after
the colonists of New Plymouth celebrated their first successful
harvest. This brief passage is the only eyewitness description of the
events that were to become the basis of a uniquely American holiday:
Thanksgiving. As with so many of the facts of the Pilgrims’ first years
in America, this occasion has become so imbued with tradition that it
is difficult to place it in the perspective it occupied in Winslow’s
eyes. Indeed, any reference to giving thanks is notably missing
from Winslow’s description. What took place on that fall day some
three-and-a-half centuries ago is best understood as the first harvest
festival held on American soil, the acting out of an institution
of great antiquity in the England the Pilgrims had left behind. It
was a time of joy, celebration, and carousing, far removed from any
suggestion of solemn religious concern. To appreciate just what it
meant to those Englishmen, we must know who they were and what they had
endured in the year prior to that first harvest of 1621.
The one hundred and one emigrants who crowded aboard the =Mayflower=
in the fall of 1620 were a mixed lot. Thirty-five of them were
religious dissenters who had known years of persecution, flight, and
exile. Another sixty-six were added to the group by its financial
backers to bring their total number to a level deemed sufficient to
establish a colony in the New World. Whether a non-dissenting cooper
like John Alden or a religious leader like William Brewster, each
member of the tiny band carried the mark of English culture as it was
on the eve of the Renaissance. Save for the higher social classes,
which were not represented in the group, the English people of the
time were products of a medieval world whose legacy was still felt in
the first years of the seventeenth century. It is easy to forget that
1620 is further removed in time from the American Revolution than it
is from Columbus’ discovery of the New World in 1492. So it was that
the church members—“saints,” as they styled themselves—carried the
strong tradition of East Anglican yeoman culture to the New World,
its peasant customs deeply rooted in the soil and its bounty. The
others in the group—called “strangers” by William Bradford—were a more
heterogeneous lot, many coming from the urban world of London, others
from the countryside. As a group they were to create a culture in New
England that bore unmistakable traces of the Middle Ages, whether it be
in dress style, the arrangement of their community, their theology, or
their social institutions.
From the start events seemed to conspire against the Pilgrims as they
prepared to depart from England. They were originally scheduled to sail
in late summer on two ships, but difficulties with one of them resulted
in their being crowded aboard the =Mayflower=, which finally put to sea
in mid-September. The crossing itself was, for that time, successful;
only one of the company perished. (Just two years before, another group
of 180 dissenters had attempted to reach Virginia from Amsterdam; only
forty-nine survived.) After sixty-six days at sea land was sighted off
Cape Cod, and the weary band, much buffeted by ocean storms, must have
indeed been glad to have arrived. But by then the year was old, and
there was no hope of acquiring adequate sustenance from the land in the
coming months.
[Illustration: Pilgrim ship]
After some preliminary explorations of the Cape, a site for a
settlement was finally selected in what had been an extensive Indian
cornfield some years in the past. Evidence of the Indians’ former
presence was everywhere. Exploring Cape Cod on foot, the Pilgrims
discovered and excavated an Indian grave and entered an abandoned
Indian encampment, where they found buried corn caches, some of which
they appropriated. Later they would repay the Indians for the corn they
had taken on that cold November day. But they had only one encounter
with living Indians at that time, which was hostile and involved an
exchange of shots for arrows; no one was injured in the incident. Had
the Pilgrims known the situation, there would have been less concern
about the Indians than they must have felt. Three years earlier the
Indian population of the New England coast had been ravaged by some
European disease, and as much as three-fourths of the population had
perished. The Pilgrims were to have no further confrontations with
the Indians until the following spring, and their next one was to be
dramatically different.
Their first year in the New World started badly. Upon arrival there
had been rumblings of dissension from the “strangers” in the company,
and anarchy seemed a real threat. This problem was met by framing the
famous =Mayflower= Compact, which established a participatory form
of government for the settlers. But even if all had been harmonious
among the people, the physical hardships of establishing a colony were
genuine and disturbing: using the =Mayflower= as a base of operations,
work parties went ashore daily, constructing a common house and a
platform for their guns, laying out house lots, and scavenging food
supplies. Slowly, as the winter wore on, a small town began to grow
on shore. The work was done under physical hardship, coupled with
the latent threat from Indians, who appeared from time to time in
the distance but never came close enough to engage in conversation.
At other times smoke from the fires of unseen people appeared in the
distance.
As the tiny town grew, its population declined. William Bradford’s
account of the winter’s sickness lends a sense of immediacy to what
must have been a terrible time:
“So as there died some times two or three of a day in the foresaid
time, that of 100 and odd persons, scarce fifty remained. And of
these, in the time of most distress, there was but six or seven sound
persons who to their great commendations, be it spoken, spared no
pains night nor day, but with abundance of toil and hazard of their
own health, fetched them wood, made them fires, dressed them meat,
made their beds, washed their loathsome clothes, clothed and unclothed
them. In a word, did all the homely and necessary offices for them
which dainty and queasy stomachs cannot endure to hear named....”
[Illustration: Barn in snow]
Just how hungry the Pilgrims were during these trying times is less
clear. Provisions had been moved ashore from the ship and stored in
the common house. That these were not ample for the group is suggested
by numerous references in their journal to the other foods they
acquired—on one occasion they killed an eagle, ate it, and said that
it was remarkably like mutton. The appearance of a single herring on
the shore in January raised hopes of more, but they “got but one cod;
[they] wanted small hooks,” and this was eaten by the master of the
ship “to his supper.” In at least one case they found themselves in
competition with both Indians and wild animals: “He found also a good
deer killed; the savages had cut off the horns, and a wolf was eating
of him; how he came there we could not conceive.” But it would seem
that, while food was never plentiful, actual starvation was held at
bay. Yet if death was a constant companion, hunger was almost certainly
a regular visitor to them.
The winter gave way to the warming sun, and on March 3, 1621, “the wind
was south, the morning misty, but towards noon warm and fair weather;
the birds sang in the woods most pleasantly.” With the coming of
spring, there was a welling up of hope. On March 16 a remarkable thing
occurred:
“... there presented himself a savage, which caused an alarm. He very
boldly came all alone and along the houses straight to the rendezvous,
where we intercepted him, not suffering him to go in, as undoubtedly
he would, out of boldness. He saluted us in English and bade us
welcome....”
The appearance of an English-speaking Indian was truly a source of
wonder to the Pilgrims; indeed, it was thought to be providential.
This first Indian to come among the Englishmen was Samoset, whose home
was in Maine. He told the Pilgrims of yet another English-speaking
Indian, Squanto by name, who had more fluency in the language than he.
Small wonder that he did, for Squanto had been kidnapped by one Thomas
Hunt in 1614, sold into slavery in Spain only to escape to England,
where he found a home with the treasurer of the Newfoundland Company.
He made at least one round trip to America and back before returning
again in 1618; jumping ship, he made his way back to his home at
Plymouth only to find that his people had been wiped out by the disease
of the year before. The role of these two Indians in the first years
of the Pilgrims’ life in America was immense. Before March had run its
course, they had arranged a meeting between the English and Massasoit,
the chief of the local Wampanoags, which resulted in the concluding of
a treaty of peace and mutual assistance. It was Squanto who instructed
the Pilgrims in the ways of planting corn with herring taken from the
local brooks where they ran thick in the spring. This first corn crop
was to assume a critical role in their life before the year was out.
The Pilgrims were genuinely surprised that the Indians wished to live
at peace with them. Their reasons for doing so were doubtless complex.
In the first place they were not the fearsome people the Pilgrims had
been led to believe inhabited the land. The history of European-Indian
relations before the coming of the Pilgrims is marked by trust and
friendliness on the Indians’ part, all too often betrayed. Yet,
although stories of the Europeans’ actions had circulated among the
Indians over all of northeastern North America, it seems that not all
Indians were ready to believe the worst. But there was more to it than
that. The epidemic of 1617 had upset the balance of power that had
prevailed among the native American population for years. The Indians
who had suffered most were those along the coast, where the disease
had had its most drastic effect. Not far inland were Narragansets and
further west Pequots, neither of whom had felt its effects. It would
be insulting to the intelligence of Massasoit and his Wampanoags to
believe that they did not perceive the advantage English allies would
give them in opposition to their western neighbors. In the words of one
of the Pilgrim chroniclers of the time:
“We cannot yet conceive but that he [Massasoit] is willing to have
peace with us, for they have seen our people sometimes alone two or
three in the woods at work and fowling, when as they offered them no
harm as they might easily have done, and especially because he hath a
potent adversary the Narragansets, that are at war with him, against
whom he thinks we may be some strength to him, for our pieces are
terrible unto them.”
[Illustration: Indian walking]
And so it was that by the late spring of 1621 the surviving fifty
Pilgrims had cause to hope. Their fears of conflict with the Indians
had been at least temporarily calmed. Eleven houses had been built
along a narrow street. Hardly well appointed, they were sturdy
structures built in the timber-framed tradition of their homeland
and afforded shelter and comfort to the small band. The sickness had
passed, and judging from what William Bradford was to write years
later, the food supply did not present a critical problem. By the
summer of 1621, nature was favoring the Pilgrims with wild foodstuffs:
“... others were exercised in fishing, about cod and bass and other
fish, of which they took good store, of which every family had their
portion. All the summer there was no want.... And besides waterfowl
there was a great store of wild turkey, of which they took many,
besides venison, etc. Besides they had about a peck of meal a week to
a person....”
The meal could only have been the remains of the stores brought on the
=Mayflower=, for Bradford added, “or now since harvest, Indian corn
to that proportion.” But with the memory of the past winter painfully
fresh, the Pilgrims could ill afford to rest and rely on providence
to supply them. It was critical that they produce a crop to insure an
adequate surplus for the coming winter. To this end they planted their
fields with a mixture of English and Indian crops. Twenty acres were
put into Indian corn, after the planting advice tendered by Squanto,
and also some six acres of peas and barley. As the summer progressed,
the troubles that had earlier dogged the company seemed to threaten a
return. The barley failed to measure up to expectations. Worse, the
peas were a total disaster. “They came up very well, and blossomed, but
the sun parched them in the blossom.”
[Illustration: Planting crops]
After the total failure of July’s pea crop and the disappointment with
August’s “indifferent good barley,” the Pilgrims faced a real threat
of starvation. This may at first seem strange, considering their
assessment of wild foods:
“For fish and fowl, we have great abundance; fresh cod in the summer
is but coarse meat with us; our bay is full of lobsters all the
summer and affordeth variety of other fish; in September we can take
a hogshead of eels in a night, with small labor, and can dig them
out of their beds all the winter. We have mussels ... all the earth
sendeth forth naturally very good sallet herbs. Here are grapes, white
and red, and very sweet and strong also. Strawberries, gooseberries,
raspas, etc. Plums of three sorts, with black and red, being almost as
good as damson....”
However, none of these foods are high in energy, and the typical
English farmer was accustomed to a diet that gave him almost six
thousand calories a day. To get these calories, he ate a normal daily
diet of one pound of meal or peas cooked up in a porridge, pudding,
or bread, over a pound of butter and cheese, and a full gallon of
strong, dark ale. Some dried or corned meat and fish were also eaten
but usually only in small amounts—quarter pound a day. The Englishmen
in the 1620s certainly did not live on flesh alone. William Bradford,
for example, described a season of semistarvation, when “the best
they could present their friends with was a lobster or a piece of
fish without bread or anything else but a cup of fair spring water.”
Simply to meet his daily caloric needs, a Pilgrim would have to eat a
twenty-pound lobster at breakfast, lunch and supper. As they lacked
dairy cows in 1621 and their peas and barley were insufficient, their
survival hinged on the Indian corn. If this crop failed, so would the
pilgrimage.
It did not fail. In October twenty acres of corn, laboriously planted
and manured with shads in the Indian manner, ripened beautifully.
Describing this bounty, Winslow religiously acknowledged in Puritan
fashion that “our corn [grain] did prove well, and, God be praised,
we had a good increase of Indian corn....” Thus, the corn yield was
unexpectedly high. Each Pilgrim could look forward to two pounds of
corn meal every day.
It might have seemed appropriate for the Pilgrims to formalize their
thanks to God with a solemn day of thanksgiving. Instead, they opted
for an older mode of thanksgiving known as Harvest Home. Most of them
as boys had experienced the secular revelry of Harvest Home, when,
after the main grain crop was ingathered, it was cakes and ale and
hang the cost. Earlier in the sixteenth century it had been so rowdy
during harvest time that Henry VIII had attacked the numerous feasts
that prevented farmers from “taking the opportunity of good and serene
weather offered upon the same in time of harvest.” So by the late 1500s
the holiday was begun only after the harvest was safely home. Then came
day after day of revelry, sports and feasts. As Thomas Tusser, the
Elizabethan farmer-poet, described it:
In Harvest-time, harvest folk
servants and all,
Should make all together
good cheer in the hall,
And fill the black bowl
of blyth to their song,
And let them be merry,
all harvest-time long.
Why the Pilgrims selected Harvest Home over a solemn day of
thanksgiving is not clear. Perhaps, after their long urban exile in
Leyden, Holland, they needed to reassure themselves that they were
still capable farmers. Harvest Home, the most important of the rural
festivals, was a natural symbol of their success.
Plymouth’s Harvest Home conformed in most essentials to its English
prototype. It was, for example, deliberately long. William Bradford,
the governor, began the holiday when he sent out four of the best
hunters for fresh meat. They returned that evening with enough
fowl—geese, ducks, and possibly turkeys—to last a week. During this
period there were various traditional “recreations,” one of which was
parading of sorts. In England villagers customarily marched through
the fields of stubble, singing the old harvest songs, waving handfuls
of grain often plaited into kern or corn dolls. The men would then
demonstrate their prowess with firearms or longbows. When Winslow
writes, “... amongst other recreations; we exercised our arms,” he is
referring to customs like these. It is doubtful that any kern dolls
were fashioned at Plymouth; Puritans did not take kindly to graven
images of the Mother Earth or Mary sort. But they had muskets and
fowling pieces, and under the command of Miles Standish, a professional
soldier, they acquired some of the noisier martial skills. Harvest
Home gave them a chance to demonstrate these to each other and to
Massasoit’s Indians. The turkey shoot held in many rural communities
before Thanksgiving is a modern survival of this harvest custom.
Another traditional recreation was athletics. Englishmen were serious
sportsmen. King James had even issued a Book of Sports in 1618, which
enumerated those “lawfulsports” like “archery for men, leaping,
vaulting, or any other such harmless recreation ...” suitable for
playing after church. Puritans were not against sports as such, but
they were against them on religious holidays; the Sabbath was not made
for sporting. For example, on Christmas Day, 1621, William Bradford
chided some of the newer settlers in Plymouth for playing “stool ball”
(an ancestor of cricket) and “pitching the bar” (weight throwing):
“... he went to them and took away their implements and told them that
was against his conscience, that they should play and others work. If
they made the keeping of it [Christmas] a matter of devotion, let them
keep their houses; but there should be no gaming or reveling in the
streets.”
Since Harvest Home was not a religious day, it provided an ideal
context for sports.
[Illustration: Woman turning over dirt]
But by far the most important recreation was feasting. In fact, to
Elizabethans the word recreation itself primarily meant enjoying a
leisurely, well-prepared meal and so re-creating or renewing mind and
body. Farmers were instructed that at “the feastes that belong to the
plough, the meaning is onely to joy and be glad for comfort with labour
would sometimes be had.” And there is every reason to believe they were
joyful and relaxed. One of the best observers of Elizabethan England
wrote:
“Both artificer [craftsman] and husbandman [farmer] are sufficiently
liberal and very friendly at their tables; and when they meet they are
so merry without malice and plain without inward Italian or French
craft and sublety, that it would do a man good to be in company among
them ... the inferior sort are somewhat to be blamed that being thus
assembled talk is now and then such as savoreth of scurrility and
ribaldry, a thing naturally incident to carters and clowns.”
[Illustration: Harvesting]
Preparing the feast, however, was seldom so leisurely for the housewife
and her daughters. After a month of cooking and carting meals for
half a dozen men famished from working nearly twenty hours a day (and
frequently being called on to join them in the fields when rains
threatened), the housewife was required to set forth
“a humble feast, of an ordinary proportion which any good man may keep
in his family, for the entertainment of his true and worthy friends
... that is, dishes of meat that are of substance, and not empty, or
for show; and of these sixteen is a good proportion both [for your]
first and second and third course....”
This “humble” smorgasbord, totaling forty-eight dishes, from the first
popular English cookbook, Gervase Markham’s =The English Huswife=
(1623), was for the housewife more ideal than real. The typical harvest
feast was more modest. A Yorkshire farmer, Henry Best, wrote that
“it is usual, in most places, after they get all the pease pulled or
the last grain down, to invite all the workfolks and their wives (that
helped them that harvest) to supper, and then they have puddings,
bacon, or boiled beef, flesh or apple pies, and then cream brought in
platters, and every one a spoon; then after all they have hot cakes
and ale; for they bake cakes and send for ale against that time.”
In communities where labor was pooled at harvest and families helped
each other, there would be a round of these meals—in form and function
similar to small parish tureen suppers today except that one hostess at
a time would assume overall responsibility, excepting neighborly help
from other wives.
The atmosphere at Plymouth’s Harvest Home feast was similarly warm
and close. A year of privation, culminating in the death of half of
the community, had pulled the rest together. Communal farming was
adopted—cooperation legalized. By breaking bread together in the
open, they sanctified in a robust, secular way their communion. The
familiar scene to which we have been accustomed, of Pilgrims and
Indians feasting together while seated at tables in the open, is mostly
a creation of later artists. It is doubtful that there were enough
tables to accommodate even a tenth of the number who were celebrating.
It is more likely that food was taken, not at an appointed time and
place, but at frequent intervals throughout the time of the festival.
Seating was almost certainly on the ground for the most part. Lacking
forks, which did not appear in Plymouth until a century later, food was
taken with fingers, from the tips of knives, and with spoons. Wooden
trenchers (small shallow dishes) were probably much in evidence, while
other foodstuffs could have been consumed directly from large kettles,
or, in the case of meat, eaten with the hands, hot from the roasting
fire. Far from the formality of a single meal taken together, the
consumption of food at Plymouth’s first Harvest Home was but one event
that mixed with the gaming and “exercising of arms” in one happy blend.
[Illustration: Cooking meat over fire]
What did they eat? Essentially the yeoman fare noted by Henry Best but
with some intriguing American additions. Fresh meat was rare in the
farmer’s everyday diet, but feasts featured it. The traditional meat
was a young, lean goose. Tusser warned that despite
... all this good feasting
yet are thou not loose
till thou geve the Ploughman
in harvest his goose.
In England it would have been a domesticated bird, fattened on the
grain stubble. In Plymouth it was a wild one, part of the large haul
of fowl that Winslow mentions. William Bradford remembered many
years later not only these waterfowl but also a “great store of wild
turkeys.” These would certainly have been eaten, and with relish, but
roast goose constituted the feast’s foundation. Englishmen preferred
its flavor and housewives the ease with which it could be roasted.
[Illustration: Women preparing food]
The “flesh” pies Best referred to would have in England been filled
with old chicken, hare, or pigeon meat, tenderized by hours of
simmering and then baking. Plymouth, however, had a spectacular
substitute: venison. This was the Elizabethan’s chief culinary status
symbol, seldom eaten by ordinary farmers but continually craved. Kept
in deer parks by the gentry, “... venison in England [was] neither
bought nor sold, as in other countries, but maintained only for
the pleasure of the owner and his friends.” The five deer donated
by Massasoit were a great luxury. Served up in corn-meal venison
“pasties,” they gave the feast an aristocratic aura the Plymouth
farmers could never have foreseen, not having the guns or skills
necessary to bring down a deer regularly. Ironically, venison soon
became a symbol to Englishmen of New England’s natural bounty. A more
realistic choice would have been the ducks and geese, which they could
and did bring down in droves with their fowling pieces.
[Illustration: Men shooting]
[Illustration: Men wrestling]
[Illustration: Indian eating]
Pudding was the Harvest Home’s most typical dish, composed as it was of
the cereals and fruits that had just been ingathered. A special harvest
version called frumenty (or furmenty) became synonymous with the
harvest feast itself and elicited the lines, “The furmenty pot welcomes
home the harvestcart.” John Josselyn, a later visitor to New England,
described a New England furmenty made with a variety of oats brought
over from East Anglia by the Puritans (although whole-grain wheat,
barley, or corn were just as suitable):
“They dry it in an oven, or in a pan upon the fire, then beat it small
in a mortar ... they put into a bottle [two quarts] of milk about ten
or twelve spoonsfuls of this meal, so boil it leisurely stirring of it
every foot, lest it burn too; when it is almost boiled enough, they
hand the kettle up higher and let it stew only, in short time it will
thicken like a custard; they season it with a little sugar and spice,
and so serve it to the table in deep basons.”
It was an expensive dish. To make up for their lack of sugar, the
Pilgrims would have added many of the wild fruits mentioned by Winslow:
grapes, berries, and plums. Though water can be used in place of milk
for frumenty, milk was the preferred ingredient. An available milk
supply might have existed, if goats were among the livestock brought
on the =Mayflower=. While there is no specific mention of any animals
being brought on that first ship, Winslow’s statement that “if we have
once but kine, horses and sheep ... men might live as contented here as
in any part of the world” suggests that goats and pigs may well have
crossed the Atlantic with the Pilgrims.
The Pilgrims also had an American pudding—which later, encased in a
pastry crust, became the Thanksgiving dish pumpkin pie. In October
1621, lacking the wheat or rye flour to make a pie crust, they probably
cooked pumpkins as a side dish. Josselyn described this
“ancient New-England standing dish ... the housewives manner is to
slice them when ripe, and cut them into dice, and so fill a pot with
them of two or three gallons, and stew them upon a gentle fire a
whole day, and as they sink, they fill again with fresh pompions, not
putting any liquor to them; and when it is stew’d enough, it will look
like bak’d apples; this they dish, putting butter to it, and a little
vinegar (with some spice, and ginger, etc.) which makes it tart liken
an apple, and so serve it up to be eaten with fish or flesh.”
Cakes and ale ended the feast. The cakes were made of corn—roasted,
pounded in homemade mortar and pestle, mixed into a paste with water,
and fried on a griddle into thin, crisp “pan” cakes. Crumbly and dry,
they complemented the strong, sweet ale that was drunk with them.
Ale and hop-flavored beer were fermented from malted (germinated and
roasted) barley at home. The alcohol content ranged from 4 to 8 per
cent—the stronger was brought out for holidays like Harvest Home. The
Pilgrims’ first ale and beer were brought over on the =Mayflower= and
soon ran short. So precious were they that, when Bradford was sick and
asked the sailors for a small can (quart) of beer, they replied that
even if he “were their own father he should have none.” So water was
drunk throughout the summer of 1621 but was considered an “enemy of
health, cause of disease, consumer of natural vigour, and the bodies of
men.” The “indifferent good barley” of August probably became October’s
strong harvest beer. It would not last long, but they were fortunate to
have it.
The food at this first American Harvest Home was notable then, “not
for variety of messes [dishes], but for solid sufficiency.” Like the
Pilgrims themselves, it was rooted in the good earth and culture of
yeoman England. And after the initial shock of transplantation both the
people and their food grew strong in their new home. They recognized
the significance of what had been done, and, venison pie in one hand
and leather mug of ale in the other, each celebrated with gusto the
achievement. It was the best of times.
So it is that, when twentieth-century Americans celebrate their
Thanksgiving, they are continuing a tradition that is older than the
nation itself. Many of the features of the modern version—feasting,
the menu in part, and athletic contests—are in the spirit of America’s
first Harvest Home. The religious component of Thanksgiving, and even
the act of giving thanks, are later additions. In Plymouth the fall
observance of harvest and the expressing of thanks to God for his
blessing varied from year to year between secular feastings and sacred
days of fast. In 1623, only two years after the first Harvest Home
festival, the colony formally gave thanks to God for ending a severe
drought that threatened their crops. No rain fell from mid-May through
late July, and the corn “languished sore.” Bradford tells us that
“they set apart a solemn day of humiliation, to seek the Lord by
humble and fervent prayer, in this great distress.... And afterwards
the Lord sent them such seasonable showers, with interchange of fair
warm weather as, through His blessings, caused a fruitful and liberal
harvest, to their no small comfort and rejoicing. For which mercy, in
time convenient, they also set apart a day of thanksgiving.”
The day so designated was one of solemn thanks to God, and bore no
resemblance to the happy event of two years before. Indeed, such days
were set aside with frequent regularity in both the Massachusetts Bay
and Plymouth colonies; the records abound with them. They were not
exclusively related to bountiful harvests but were set aside for any
act of God deemed worthy and in need of acknowledgement.
[Illustration: Woman cooking]
In sharp contrast to our traditional concept of Thanksgiving, the
celebration of 1621 was a part of the harvest itself, and had the corn
also been “indifferent good,” chances are that some festival, perhaps
not as spectacular, would still have occurred. Such is the strength of
folk culture and tradition the world over, and so it was at Plymouth in
the fall of 1621.
[Illustration: Man eating]
[Illustration: Men playing]
[Illustration: Hartley and Elliot]
MENU
Roast Goose
Mock Venison
Stewed Pumpkin Sweet Stuffing
Frumenty
Ale
Thanksgiving is just too traditional to tamper with—in my home and,
I’m sure, in yours. No matter that our roast turkey, cranberry sauce,
sweet potatoes, and creamed onions are more Victorian than Pilgrim.
We’ve grown accustomed to them, and they rest as comfortably among
our memories as that Norman Rockwell painting of Grandma’s table. But
Harvest Home has no traditions whatsoever, and although a week-long
bacchanalia is beyond our means, a harvest supper isn’t. In an age when
we crave a deeper relationship with both our past and our earth, its
virtues are obvious. Harvest Home is as ecological as it is historical.
It celebrates both land and man and the fruits of their labor together.
This menu and its recipes are, therefore, very organic and very old,
and if we violate the letter of the Pilgrims’ first feast—few of us
seed our corn with fish—its spirit will still be there.
Roast Goose
To roast a goose (or any cut of meat) properly, you have to sear the
outside, quickly, changing the meat’s surface sugars into crunchy brown
caramel thereby creating a natural bag that seals in the fowl’s juices.
Inside, the goose literally cooks itself. Outside, all you need to
do is baste the skin with fat to prevent it from burning, and if you
are using an open fire, regularly turn the bird so that it is heated
evenly. An oven solves the latter problem, and although Englishmen had
bake ovens in 1621, the Pilgrims didn’t. But a decade or so later they
built them into their Plymouth fireplaces and used them regularly for
roasts as well as breads. So if you don’t have an outdoor grill with
a spit or a fireplace that could be converted into an open hearth, an
oven will do fine. In either case cooking time will be between one and
two hours, or twenty minutes to the pound. Just rub the goose all over
with animal fat (bacon drippings, chicken or goose fat, or butter) and
sear close to an open fire or at 450 degrees in an oven. When the skin
is brown (after about twenty minutes), lower the heat by roasting
your goose farther from the open fire or turning down the oven to 325
degrees. Baste regularly with the goose fat that escapes. When the
legs move easily in their sockets, it is done. The result: juicy rare
meat and crispy skin. Carve it roughly and let everyone eat with his
hands, making sure each has a good-sized cloth napkin or dish towel. No
forks—they were instruments of “Italian or French craft and subtlety”
and quite unEnglish.
[Illustration: BOOKE OF DIVERS DEVICES (1597)]
Mock Venison
Venison and mutton are so similar in texture and taste that even
an experienced gourmet has trouble in telling them apart after
marinating—a necessary step for large cuts of wild meats like venison
and boar, which will spoil if not put in an acid (vinegar) solution.
So if you don’t have a friend who hunts, buy a large leg of mutton or
lamb; marinate it in an enamel, glass, pottery, or stainless-steel
container in a solution of four bottles of dark beer or porter, one cup
of malt vinegar, garlic, and spices; cinnamon, mace, nutmeg, sea salt,
peppercorns, juniper berry, bay leaf, fennel, rosemary; thyme, sage,
and just about any dried herb you’ve got. Marinate for about three
days. The morning of your feast remove it, dry it, and stick it full
of cloves. Roast it just like the goose—again about twenty minutes to
the pound—basting it with its own juices and with a reduction of the
marinade.
The cut can be roasted bone in or out; both methods were popular in
1620. If you do take the bone out, make sure to stuff the roast with
bacon, as the loss of its bone tends to dry it out. And the smoky bacon
taste is a positive addition, especially if you are oven-roasting your
lamb. It can also be imparted to a bone-in roast if you make a dozen
half-inch cuts in the tough surface skin and stuff raw bacon in each.
[Illustration: ADRIAEN VAN OSTADE]
Stuffing
Elizabethans were fond of a rich, sweet stuffing that was more like a
bread pudding than the dry, herbed variety we commonly prepare today.
It was used in all sorts of roasts, from boned venison to goose, and
when eaten with a gravy made with vinegar and the roast’s juices, a
savory, sweet-sour dish resulted. It is made by beating a cup of heavy
cream (the Pilgrims used goat’s milk) and two egg yolks together. Add
cinnamon, mace, nutmeg, and salt to taste (about a half-teaspoon to
mine). Thicken with grated rye or cornbread crumbs (about two cups) and
currants (one cup). A little sugar or honey can be mixed, but as the
Pilgrims had neither, it would be better to add a tablespoon or two of
dark beer or porter, which they did have and used for sweetening. A
little spinach juice or saffron will give it a green or yellow color,
but this is optional; it looks creamy and good just the way it is.
Stuff the goose or butterflied venison with it, making sure you tie or
sew up your roast carefully.
Stewed Pumpkin
Simply clean out, peel, and dice a medium pumpkin—a recycled
jack-o-lantern is fine. Simmer the diced flesh in a heavy casserole
with a cup of dark beer or porter, two or three tablespoons of malt
vinegar, salt, pepper, and spices to taste. It will take a couple of
hours over a low heat. As a tart “spoon meat” stewed pumpkin balances
the fatty goose and bacon-larded mock venison. Similar sweet-sour side
dishes can be made with squash, turnips, and parsnips, all common crops
in Plymouth that October 1621.
Ale
It’s still against federal law to brew beer or ale in your home. The
Pilgrim housewife, however, was under no such restriction and made
enough for each member of her family to have one-half to one gallon
daily. It was dark, sweet, and mildly alcoholic. The best substitute
is a bottle of good dark beer or porter mixed with a spoonful of malt
extract, which is sold as a powder or syrup. Or you can make your own
extract by boiling a cup of crystal or caramel malt (obtainable in
stores that sell wine- and beer-making supplies) in a quart of water.
Ale was drunk both cold and hot, the latter with chunks of apples and
spices often put in for additional sweetening. Homemade ale may take
some getting used to, but it has a rewarding honesty that’s lacking in
the thin, artificial stuff concocted by the big breweries.
Frumenty
The closest modern counterpart to frumenty is old-fashioned rice
pudding—rich, creamy, and aromatic with spices. Many regional
variations of it still exist in England—a tribute to its popularity.
Begin by boiling two cups of cracked or whole wheat in two quarts
of water for ten minutes. Then cover and leave it in a warm place
(an unlit oven is perfect) for a day. The wheat will congeal or
“cree”—or turn to a jelly in which the inner, golden-red husks are
visible. This was eaten on its own or with milk and honey as a cold
porridge—nutritionally, it is an almost perfect food.
To make frumenty from creed wheat, simply simmer it with an equal
amount of milk or cream and whatever spices, fruits, and sweeteners you
prefer. In Plymouth, mace, nutmeg, cinnamon and cloves were common,
along with berries, currants and apples, and a little porter or dark
beer in place of honey or sugar. Egg yolks were also added if the
frumenty was too thin. And brandy. It was served hot or cold and was
=the= symbolic harvest dish. The fourteenth verse of Leviticus 23 in
the English 1551 Bible, for example, admonishes: “And ye shall eat
neither bread, nor parched corn, nor frumenty of new corne, untill
the selfe same daye that ye have brought an offeringe unto your God.”
Frumenty has soul.
This Plymouth version is not as rich but still is soulful. Mix two cups
of roasted or parched corn meal with an equal amount of milk. Slowly
pour this into a quart of boiling water and simmer for at least half an
hour, stirring and adding fruits and spices all the while. Eat it hot,
or let it cool and congeal.
—Jay Anderson.
Transcriber’s Notes
pg 3 Changed: contructing a common house
to: constructing a common house
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