Thanksgiving for Culinary Contributions from the New World
( Photo by Tim Provinsal - Look closely to spot the pumpkin oreo.)
With the holidays coming up, a recipe for acorn squash with red onions and currents caught our eye. We remembered, vaguely, that squash is one of the culinary contributions of the new world â various members of the cucurbita genus being first cultivated somewhere in Mesoamerica 8 - 10 thousand years ago.
Native Americans grew squash as one of The Three Sisters - beans, corn and squash. The beans fixed nitrogen; the corn provided stalks for climbing and the squash leaves shaded the soil.
So in a addition to the menu presented below we thought a few morsels of food history might enrich our Thanksgiving anticipation.
Thanksgiving 
Thanksgiving, the U.S. reification of traditional Harvest Festivals, is perhaps the preeminent foodie holiday. Often associated with the harvest moon - the full moon nearest to the autumnal equinox - Thanksgiving is actually closer to the Hunter's Moon - the first full moon following the Harvest Moon - when the moon because of its elliptical orbit is closest to the earth.
The only two surviving original documents from the Plymoth Colony â William Bradfords, History of the Plimoth Plantation and A Journal of the Pilgrims at Plimouth by Edward Winslow both describe Thanksgiving preparations:
"Our harvest being gotten in, our governor
sent four men on fowling, that so we might
after a special manner rejoice together
after we had gathered the fruit of our
labors. They four in one day killed as much
fowl as, with a little help beside,served the
company almost a week."
( A Journal of the Pilgrims at Plymouth )
"All ye somer ther was no wante. And now
begane to come in store of foule, as winter
approached, of which this place did
abound. And besids water foule, ther was
great store of wild Turkies, of which they
took many, besids venison, &c. Besids they
had aboute a peck a meale a weeke to a
person." (History of the Plimoth Plantation)
( Photo: Brookhaven National Laboratory )
Ironically, though wild turkies are indeed native to the New World and were featured in the first Thanksgiving menu, the Plymoth pilgrims brought two turkeys with them on the voyage of the Mayflower. Having been introduced in Europe by Christopher Columbus, turkeys were at the time mistaken for guinea fowl, also known as turkey-cocks because of their importation to Europe through Turkey. Thus both Indians and Turkeys suffer from a naming convention in which Europeans undertook the first transatlantic transmogrification.
The first American recipe for preparing turkey was written by Amelia Simmons in American Cookery published in 1796:
To Stuff and Roast a Turkey or Fowl
"Hen Turkey in almost every instance is preferable to the male is higher and richer flavorâd, easier fattened and plumber.
One pound soft wheat bread, 3 ounces beef suet, 3 eggs, a little sweet thyme, sweet marjoram, pepper and salt, some add a gill ( 1/4 of a cup ) of wine; fill the bird therewith and sew up, hang down to steady solid fire, basting frequently with salt and water and roast until a steam emits from the breast, put one third of a pound of butter into the gravy, dust flour over the bird and baste with the gravy; serve up with boiled onions and cranberry sauce, mangoes, pickles or celery.
Others omit the seet herbs, and add parsley done with potatoes."
Most notable in this recipe is the instruction to "hang down to steady solid fire."
Until the mid-19th century most American homes lacked a cook stove and relied on various devices associated with an open fireplace to cook their meals.
( Amish Made Cookstove ) Cookstoves in American History
American Cookery was the first cookbook written by an American for Americans. While attempting to recognize and use American products, specifically corn, cranberries, turkey, squash and potatoes, all uniquely indigenous to the New World, American Cookery is a testament to the fact that food in the new world, while plentiful, was not exciting.
"Americans in the new world mostly ate
wheat and beef in the North, corn and
pork in the South. Milk, cheese, and
butter were plentiful, potatoes came to
be added in the North and sweet potatoes
in the South. Fruits appeared only in season
except insofar as women could preserve
them in pies or jams; green vegetables, now
and then as condiments, salads, virtually
never. Monotnous and constipating, too
high in fat and salt, this diet nevertheless
was more plentiful and nutritious, part-
icularly in protein, than that available in
most of the Old World."
( Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought
citing Sarah McMahon,"Laying Foods By.")
Potash
Perhaps the single most important innovation in American Cookery was the use of pearlash as a chemical leavening for dough, an American practice which has influenced worldwide baking methods. Prior to the late 1700s, the preferred lightness in baked goods was attained by beating air along with the eggs, or adding yeast or various spirits to produce a leavening. But by the first publication of American Cookery , Americans were adding pearlash (a refined form of potash, an impure potassium carbonate obtained from wood ashes, and a common household staple in the early American kitchen) to their doughs to produce carbon dioxide quickly. This was the forerunner of modern baking powders which were soon to revolutionize both home and commercial baking, here and elsewhere.
Here is her recipe for Christmas Cookies:
To three pound flour, sprinkle a tea cup of fine powdered coriander feed, run in one pount butter, and one and half pound sugar, dissolve three tea spoonfuls of pearl ash in a tea cup of milk, kneed all together well, roll three quarters of an inch thick, and cut or stamp into shape and size you please, bake slowly fifteen or twenty minutes; tho;hard and dry at first, if put into an earthen pot, and dry cellar, or damp room, they will be finer, softer and better when six months old.
Potatoes Make the Round Trip
Thought to have their origin in either Peru or Chile, potatoes
( solanum tuberosum ), are the world's fourth most cultivated crop ( behind rice, wheat and maize ). Potatoes spread, again via the Spanish to Europe, where they were quickly adopted throughout the new world.
Uncorroborated suggestions have it that potatoes shipwrecked and washed ashore in the destruction of the Spanish Armada may have hastened their introduction to Ireland, but genetic evidence demonstrates that a potato version adapted to the short growing day of the Andes was introduced to Ireland in 1565 where because of the tonnage per acre available from potato cultivation it soon became a staple of the Irish diet.
In the Southern Bolivian town of San Andreas, as many as 300 varieties or potatoes may be showcased at the town's annual potato festival.
Amelia Simmons ( American Cookery ) claims that "potatoes take rank for universal use, profit and easy acquirement: a good potatoe comes up in many branches of cookery: A roast potatoe is brought on with roast Beef, a Steake, a Chop or Fricassee; good boiled with a boiled dish; make an excellent stuffing for a turkey, water or wild fowl; make a ggood pie and a good starch for many uses; the Irish have preserved a genuine mealy rich Potatoe, for a century, which takes rank of any known in any other kingdom.
While potatoes have long been known to be both efficient to grow and nutritionally dense, it turns out that what may be the biggest bang from potatoes results from their starch specifically 'resistant starch', which "resists" being processed by the small intestine and passes on to the large intestine where it acts like fiber - lowering fat and glycemic uptake, increasing satiety and improving bowl function.
Problem is to get this bang you have to eat your potatoes cold with a little vinegar. German Potato Salad Anyone?
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