Original Thanksgiving Foods | New Leaf Foods
Written By UW-Green Bay’s Vicki Medland
While the “first” Thanksgiving story that most of us know is inaccurate, we do know there was a harvest celebration meal organized by the English colonists sometime in the autumn of 1621 and attended by Wampanoag leaders. Exactly what they ate is unknown, but it had to mostly been made from locally sourced American indigenous foods.
English celebrations at that time still followed the medieval feasting traditions where meat was king and any plant foods were limited to their meager first harvest and what they could forage. Little of what was eaten in that meal was recorded, but we know that most of the old-world seeds the English planted that year did not survive. Only the barley thrived, and that grain was fed to the few pigs they may have brought on the Mayflower and rest was brewed into beer. Fortunately for the colonists, diplomatic efforts by the Wampanoag included teaching the colonists traditional farming techniques. The corn they harvested was enough to feed the entire Plymouth colony of 50-70 individuals through that first winter.
The Wampanoag were skilled farmers that grew corn, beans, and squash in traditional three-sisters gardens. Evidence now suggests that domestication of maize (corn) began in Mexico at least 10,000 years ago. Several vegetables were domesticated in South and Central America at the same time including Maize seed. The techniques to cultivate and process the crop was widely shared along with beans, squash, and peppers by the diverse communities of people that inhabited the Americas, reaching southwestern Native American tribes by 4000 years ago. Ancestors of the Wampanoag would have been growing corn, beans, and squash in three-sisters gardens by 1600 years before the first Europeans arrived.
The three-sisters companion growing system is as old as the domestication of corn. It was so successful that it became integral the lifeways of most corn growing communities throughout the Americas. Corn is planted first, often in mounds fertilized with compost, fish remains, or manure. After the corn is several inches tall, climbing beans and squash are planted at its base. The beans grow up using the corn stalk as a support while the squash grows out, covering the ground with its large spiny leaves, shading out weeds, discouraging animal, and conserving water. Corn is what farmers call a heavy feeder, using up soil nutrients like nitrogen, but beans add nitrogen back to the soil as bacteria in their roots convert nitrogen from the air into a form that plants can use.
Hundreds of squash varieties adapted to local climates were developed by indigenous communities all over North America. The English word squash comes from a coastal Algonquin language. Northeastern Native American tribes grew several types including winter squash pumpkins like Long Island cheese pumpkin and Boston marrows that are still available today, yellow crooknecks and patty pan summer squash.
There were three types of corn grown in North America in the 1600s. Dent corn, the variety that would become the dominant type grown today, was common in the south and west. As it dried, the end of each kernel developed a dent. Flour corn is a soft starchy variety, originally grown in the drier southwest, but is now grown by indigenous communities throughout North America. In the wet, cool growing season on the northeastern coast, harder, dryer flint corn was preferred. This is the multicolored Indian corn we now associate with decorating and might be the first native food the pilgrims encountered. They report finding and stealing an underground cache of colored corn and a large metal cooking pot from an abandoned village on Cape Cod where they first made landfall.
Several flint corns were developed by Indigenous communities for the short North Atlantic growing season including Canadian Mi’kmaq red flint corn that can mature in just 45 days. A sweet red Wampanoag flint corn that was later named King Philip was named after Wampanoag intertribal leader Metacom, who was also known to early settlers as King Philip, is still grown in the Wampanoag community garden near Plymouth. Flint corns were traditionally pounded into grits or flour in large mortar and pestles. Grits were mixed with other ingredients in stews or porridge or was baked into cakes.
Common beans were another crop that spread and diversified quickly as they moved north from Central America. Easter tribes were recognized for the small round speckled beans they developed. Beans were eaten green, fresh, or dried. Many of these, including Algonquin, Mohawk, Seneca pinto, Iroquois cornbread, Jacob’s Cattle, and Skunk beans.
Wampanoag farmers were also growing sunflower for oil and had added at least one European import to their gardens by 1620. Small green watermelons acquired by trade with Europeans were grown with the squash in their gardens. Melons, originally domesticated in Africa, were one of the earliest Old-World crops adopted by Indigenous American farmers, probably because they worked well in the three-sisters farming system.
By the time The Mayflower landed at Plymouth in 1620, several American domesticated crops were well known in Europe. Beans, corn, squash and pumpkins, tomatoes, potatoes, and peppers were already being cultivated in different regions of Europe. Domesticated Mexican turkeys were raised by the European elite and wild North American turkeys had been imported and released on game lands owned by the aristocracy.
Beans were quickly adopted in Europe and different varieties were being grown in Europe by the mid 1500s. It is possible that new varieties of beans developed in Europe then made a return trip to America with sailors and settlers. Yankee beans and Cranberry beans developed in Italy, made their way back to indigenous gardens. Runner beans, a domesticated bean closely related to common beans, were domesticated in Mexico. However, they make their way to the northeast with settlers traveling to North America from Europe. The Mayflower bean is said to have come over with Mayflower colonists, but this, like most of the Thanksgiving story, is probably apocryphal.
There are many indigenous crops that had not yet been introduced to northeastern North America in 1620 including most of the other south and Meso American vegetables and fruits. Indigenous families living in the upper Great Lakes region traded foraged wild rice for goods between regional communities as early as the mid-1600s. Wild rice collection and processing is time consuming and most families collected only as much as they needed for the household. Wild rice domestication was pursued by botanists in Europe as early as the 1600s, but domesticated varieties of wild rice and cranberries, another other bog plant, were not developed until the 20th century due to the unique life cycles and genetics of these plants.
What else would they have eaten? Unfortunately, we don’t really know much about traditional recipes using native foods because much of that knowledge was lost by 200 years of suppression of traditional Wampanoag lifeways. Along with the garden harvest, there would have been autumn foraged foods, including nuts, cranberries, blueberries and other fruits and Concord grapes that would be dried, bulrush seeds, cattail tubers, sumac, and many different woodland herbs.
Small animals would have been hunted as well. The English probably didn’t hunt turkey for that meal, but they sent out men to shoot enough ducks and geese to allow the colony to feast for a week. Several deer were brought by the Wampanoag who were only invited after they came to investigate the celebratory shooting. Five deer would have equaled over 200 pounds of venison, enough to feed the colony for the winter. These were roasted on spits and cooked in pots with pounded corn and likely seasoned with Indigenous and European herbs and spices. Shellfish were collected extensively by the tribes and by the English.
The indigenous diet was diverse and nutritious. While the English colonists favored meat, dairy, and wheat bread, and increasingly imported sugar, the Wampanoag diet was 70% plant based. Most of these recipes and many of the seeds were lost after 200 years of destabilization and reliance on commodity foods. There are some existing recipes handed down from the 1600s or recorded in the settlers recipe books. A new generation Indigenous farmers and chefs are working together to recover their seeds and reclaim their food heritage.
Celebrate native plants and the creative minds that made them by reading about indigenous foods:
The Sioux Chef’s Indigenous Kitchen by Sean Sherman with Beth Dooley. University of Minnesota Press, 2017. This book includes essays and recipes using indigenous American fruits and vegetables, wild and foraged grains, game, and fish.
Our Precious Corn: Yukwanénste by Rebecca M. Webster. 1924 Birchbark Books. Rebecca M. Webster (Kanyʌʔtake-lu), an Oneida woman and Indigenous corn grower, weaves together the words of explorers, military officers, and anthropologists, as well as historic and other contemporary Haudenosaunee people, to tell a story about their relationships with corn.
Foods of the Americas: Native Recipes and Traditions by Marlene Divina Fernando Divina. Ten speed Press 2004. The culinary traditions of the native peoples of the Americas are celebrated in this lavish book produced in association with the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian. Nine essays by native writers on a variety of indigenous food traditions and 140 modern recipes that incorporate a wide array of foods cultivated by native people throughout North and South America.
