Foods of Puritan Mass.?

[WoodsRoamer]

I have an English project where I have to make a cookbook. It is from around the time periods as the Scarlet Letter and The Crucible took place in. I am wondering what kind of ingredients they would have had access to and what would have been popular dishes. Sorry for bothering you guys it is just that I have been having trouble finding info on their food with Google.

 

[crockett]

Well I guess we are getting close to Thanksgiving. Pilgrim food? Corn, succotash, venison, turkey, pumpkin pudding/pie. I think "pudding" was a pie without crust on top. Cranberries? Did the NDN's parch corn for the Pilgrims? I heard it was "popcorn" for desert but have since figured in was parched. The pilgrims were all upset, thinking the NDN's were going to crack their cast iron pots.
Or so I have been told.
But olives on the ends of your fingers, definitely not pc :grin:

 

[WoodsRoamer]

What is parched corn?

 

[coloradoclyde]

Guess this would be a good place to start. http://thescarletletter.wikia.com/wiki/Puritan_Life

Then try searching the Gutenberg project https://www.gutenberg.org/

Good luck!

 

[coloradoclyde]

Some more light reading :grin: http://books.google.com/books?id=b...se Markham's English Huswife [1615].”&f=false

you'll have to scroll it to the begining.

It should be noted that cookbooks from the 16th-19th century often contained more than just food recipes.

 

[crockett]

parched corn is dried kernels taken off the cob and heated on a dry cast iron pan until they slightly puff up.

 

[WoodsRoamer]

Thanks you guys are life savers :bow:

 

[tenngun]

Check out the Jas Townsend and son cooking blog and 'savoring the past' Many of the meals cooked here are colonial but several go back to earlier ages. There is also a cooking blog for Henery VIII meals. Welthy for sure but only a few years pre Mass.
Don't forget the time spent in the low countries. Exposure to dutch foods may have influnenced the puritan cooking.

 

[Wes/Tex]

Was a really informative show some time back about the real first Thanksgiving and what might actually been served. Seems the early settlers were more into fowl (though turkey is never mentioned) and it's assumed waterfowl is what was being referred to. Deer, probably, but a lot of the diet was vegetables as mentioned above. Contrary to our modern conception of them, the good old Pilgrims were a merry band who made lots of their own beer! :wink:

 

[Alden]

I saw that show years ago and it was tastefully done. Lack of sufficient beer drove the off-course Mayflower to stop where it did. Luckily there was a rock there with a monument built around it so they could figure out where they were...

I posted a recipe for succotash here -- I recently made some with stinky bear grease for half of the oil and it was fine. But just plain old butter is better to me, and half bacon grease I'm trying next would probably be at least as good -- yummy.
Cooksinfo.com says the Plymouth version uses navy beans instead of lima beans, and includes a few different kinds of meat, potatoes, turnips and uses hominy corn [which is dreadful grits the Northeast otherwise grew out of] instead of fresh corn. It is served on Forefathers Day, 21 December, to commemorate when the Pilgrims landed. Some historians believe that the pilgrims would have actually used cranberry beans.

 

[crockett]

Didn't the Pilgrims at Plymouth Rock bump into Samoset who already knew how to speak English.
Pilgrims.."You know how to speak English!!!"

Samoset...."Yeah, Been there, done that."
:grin:

 

[WoodsRoamer]

Was boston brown bread made back then and if so was baking soda also around

 

[coloradoclyde]

You tell us! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brown_bread

 

[gearheart]

Remember the days before google and wiki? Research meant time spent in a library and your sources had to be catalogued.

 

[Alden]

Your avatar always looks like Predator out of the corner of my eye...

 

[TNGhost]

Saw a show about the Mayflower/Pilgrims/early MA. Don't know if it was the same one Wes/Tex cites, but I recall it saying the Mayflower landed where it did because they needed to go ashore as they were running low on beer. :thumbsup:

It also spoke of seafood being predominant in their diet. It said lobster was easily available, to the point they were sick of eating it and it was used to feed prisoners :hmm:

It would make sense in considering the amount of labor and difficulties in producing food in that era, that plentiful, easy to collect foods, particularly protien would be availed of.

Lobster, clams, fish and other seafood would have been easy pickings in the tide pools and shallows along the MA coast. So it would seem lobster was likely on the menu for Thanksgiving.

 

[coloradoclyde]

Yes! it was so much less efficient back then, kind of like writing a letter to comunicate with someone far away. I love the past, but I'm not sure I would want to actually live there.

 

[zimmerstutzen]

I read a diary excerpt by one that they continued living on ship through the winter and that during that time they lived on clams and two tubs of rancid butter left from the crossing.

 

[Alden]

There was a slave revolt on Long Island, NY, because of the constant diet of lobster.

They were so plentiful, and not considered a delicacy with or without drawn butter, that they were always on the shoreline to be picked up by the bucketfull and essentially they were all that was fed to the slaves there. They got so sick of it finally they staged an organized revolt against their masters...

'course they abolished slavery about the same time they did grits.

 

[coloradoclyde]

Alden,
Can you provide a source or reference to the Newton rebellion of 1708?
I can find no reference regarding the lobsters.