Pass the Eel Please...

I think it would be really interesting (and most appropriate) to have a traditional Wampanoag feast instead of the usual fare for Thanksgiving one year...

--ryan

Pilgrims More Likely Passed the Eel, Not the Potatoes
November 21, 2004

By Susan Palmer
The Register-Guard


It's almost Thanksgiving, and what says holiday more than a bucket of eels?

Honestly, it's the sort of thing that Americans newly arrived from England would have likely eaten in the autumn in Massachusetts in the 1600s.

Roast turkey and pumpkin pie may epitomize the high culinary arts of Thanksgiving now, but the written record from 1621 is pretty sketchy when it comes to the harvest celebration menu.

According to the Plimouth Plantation, a living history museum in Massachusetts, the only known record of the food eaten that day among the Pilgrims and the Wampanoags, the original Americans, puts seasonal wild fowl - including turkeys, ducks and geese - and venison brought by the Wampanoag on the table.

Other foods that were amply available at the time: Indian corn, and from the nearby ocean bay, mussels and eels.

So what about cranberries? Unlikely in a sauce, according to food historian Kathleen Curtin, although they may have been part of a Wampanoag dish.

Curtin writes that it would be 50 years before an Englishman boiled the tart berries with sugar to make a sauce.

Potatoes, a South American tuber, wouldn't be widely grown in North America for another 100 years. Sweet potatoes had barely migrated from the Caribbean to Spain, where they were considered a rare delicacy.

Pumpkins and other squashes probably were harvested in the Plymouth area, but Curtin thinks it unlikely that the colonists had the butter and flour to make pie crusts.

The food that fills our tables today came to us late in the 1800s, when educators trying to instill a sense of place in new immigrants developed the traditions we know now.

And boy, are we dedicated to them. Nobody knows exactly how many tons of turkey, cranberries, sweet potatoes and pumpkin pie America will shovel down its collective gullet come Thursday.

But the U.S. Census Bureau has estimated the amount of such staples produced this past year for our consumption.

They report that turkey farms produced 263 million of the birds this year, about 46.5 million of them in Minnesota, the bulk of the rest in North Carolina, Arkansas, Missouri, Virginia and California.

Wisconsin, Massachusetts, Oregon, New Jersey and Washington together will produce about 658 million pounds of cranberries this year.

Sweet potatoes - a couple hundred years ago, Europeans thought they were an aphrodisiac - registered on the scales at about 1.6 billion pounds, most of them grown in North Carolina, followed by Louisiana and California.

Pumpkin growers dished up 805 million pounds of the squash we make our pies from. Illinois was the most productive state, followed by California, Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania and New York.

The wheat for rolls and bread totaled 2.2 billion bushels this year, about a third of the total grown in Kansas and North Dakota.

One last little trivial detail: When it comes to Europeans giving thanks on American shores, the Pilgrims can't actually lay claim to the first such celebration.

For that, you have to go north to Canada and back in time about 43 years to 1578, when British explorer Martin Frobisher gave thanks after surviving a perilous ocean crossing and landing in what is now New Foundland.

Happy dining.