Turkey and pertatoes - The origins of 17th century Massachusetts foods

Cattle and horses (but not lions) were among the unfamiliar animals that arrived with the colonists and disrupted the landscape and Native livelihoods, as this 19th century painting might help us imagine. Image: Edward Hicks, “The Peaceable Kingdom,” Brooklyn Museum. Wikimedia Commons.

The first English settler in present-day Boston was the Reverend William Blackstone, who arrived around 1623. Something of a hermit, he built his home on what is now Beacon Hill and planted apple trees. Today, apples are America’s favorite fruit. But, with the exception of crabapples, they are not native to North America. Like so many of the foods we now take for granted, apples and many other early New England staples were transplants, sojourners from across the globe, from Mexico and Central America to the Silk Road, from Ethiopia to the Andean mountains. 

Apples themselves originated in Kazakhstan in Central Asia. One of the translations of “Alma Ata,” Kazakhstan’s former capital, is “father of the apple.” 

The story goes that travellers on the Silk Road between the Middle East and China tossed apple cores aside, inadvertently planting trees as far as China in the east and the Roman Empire in the west. Enthusiastic planters of apple trees, the Romans introduced them to the lands of present-day England, while (following in Blackstone’s footsteps) the Puritans brought them to Massachusetts.

Peaches and pears originated in China. In the 1630s, Governor John Endicott planted a pear tree in today’s Danvers that still stands. It is the oldest fruit tree planted by Europeans in the U.S.

Historians call the colonial-era movement of plants, animals, people, and diseases the “Columbian Exchange" – a bland term that disguises the catastrophic impact of the colonial conquest on Native people throughout the Americas. New diseases such as smallpox and typhoid caused mass deaths and the importation of livestock devastated hunting grounds and disrupted planting fields. Colonial practices and the usurpation of land pushed Indigenous people out of the places that had fed them so well. Massachusetts was no exception to this process. 

While the results were far-reaching and often tragic, the path that foods took to America and our dinner tables remains fascinating. 

Native foods

Not all foods came from afar. Eastern Woodland foods were long cultivated by Native people. As many elementary school students now learn, native women did the planting and the “three sisters” of corn, beans and squash were staples. Women also gathered cranberries, blueberries, and grapes, among other foods. Native men did most of the hunting. All these foods became part of the English diet, some travelling to Europe (remember the turkey dinner featured in Charles Dickens’ Christmas Carol.)  

In 1675 Mary Rowlandson, a minister’s wife captured by Nipmuc Indians during King Philip’s War, gave a glimpse of the diet at a time of extreme deprivation. “The chief and commonest food was ground nuts. They eat also nuts and acorns, artichokes, lily roots, ground beans and several other weeds and roots…also bear, venison, beaver, tortoise, frogs, squirrels, dogs, skunks, rattlesnakes.” Reluctant at first, she came to regard some native foods as “savory.”  “For to the hungry soul every bitter thing is sweet.”   

The Great Migration

In England in 1629, the Puritans planned the establishment of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and prepared a list of foods to be brought to the New World: “wheat, rye, barley, oats…beans, pease, stones of all sorts of fruits, as peaches, plums, filberts, cherries, pear, apples, quince kernels, pomegranates…, liquorice seed…potatoes,” and “tame turkeys.” The selection – pomegranates! – seems exotic now but, ironically, potatoes and turkeys had New World origins, having been introduced to Europe by Spanish explorers. 

Seventeenth-century foods, both native and European, have interesting backstories.

Corn, beans and squash

Corn was first cultivated in Mexico and Central America. Gradually it spread north among native people, reaching present-day Massachusetts as early as 2,000 years ago. Squash took a similar route. 

By 1630 pea beans were familiar to both Native people in Massachusetts and English colonists, having been brought to Europe by Spanish explorers. Some scholars of “bean migration” trace the origin of beans to Peru, others to Mexico. 

While it’s difficult to determine the exact origin of common phrases, Boston’s moniker “Bean Town” may be part of the Puritan legacy. Nineteenth-century author Lucy Larcom wrote about the “puritanic custom of saving Sunday-work by baking beans on Saturday evening, leaving them in the oven over night.” Saturday night bean suppers remain popular in some rural New England churches. 

An invoice for a 1675 Admiralty Court dinner held in Boston, Massachusetts, with a menu of both imported and native foods, wine and turkey, “pertatoes” and veal. Image: Massachusetts Archives.

The humble potato 

The potato, a New World crop, arrived with English colonists. A bill for dinner for an Admiralty Court in Boston dated April 9, 1675, included two quarts of wine, “2 legg of porke and pertatoes,…A Loyne of veale… a Turkey and pertatoes.” 

In the 1500s, Spanish explorers observed Inca farmers in Peru planting thousands of potato varieties in the Andes mountains. With multiple hues of blue, orange and yellow, and in varying sizes and shapes, they were adapted to differences in altitude and temperature. The Spanish selected their favorite potatoes and sent them to Europe. 

They caught on slowly. Some Europeans thought potatoes gave you leprosy or other diseases.  Once finally planted in England, potatoes lacked prestige. Nonetheless, the Puritan colonists brought the potato to Massachusetts.  

“Massachusetset and Mexico met”

Because of the Tea Party of the Revolutionary period, many people associate tea with Boston.  As most people know, tea is another staple originating in China. 

Coffee has been traced to Ethiopia. According to legend, a herder discovered it when his flock was wide awake after chewing coffee beans. Because of Islam’s ban on alcohol, the alternative drink of coffee became popular in Turkey and the Middle East. From there, Dutch and Italian merchants introduced it to Western Europe. The first Boston license for the sale of coffee and “cuchaletto” was issued to Dorothy Jones in 1670.

In 1682 a shipment of cacao beans was sent from Jamaica to Boston. Massachusetts would become a center for high-quality chocolate production during the colonial period.

Some colonists knew the origin of chocolate. After a breakfast of venison and chocolate with the Lieutenant Governor in 1697, Judge Samuel Sewall recounted, “I said Massachutset and Mexico met at his Honour’s table.”  

Mexicans served chocolate as a drink, spiced with chili peppers and vanilla. The Spanish retained vanilla (another New World flavor) but sweetened chocolate with sugar. In Boston, Sewall gave “2 Balls of Chockalett and a pound of figs” to a sick man named Samuel Whiting. He presented a pound of chocolate and three printed sermons to a “Mr. Gibbs.”

Grainy images

English colonists brought with them familiar grains including barley, oats and wheat.  Although wheat was highly prized, it did not grow well in Massachusetts. Native corn became the most important grain for English settlers.

Colonists mixed it with scarcer grains for recipes like “thirded bread.” “There is very good Bread made of [Indian corn] by mixing half, or a third parte, more or less of Ry or Wheate-Meale or Flower amongst it,” wrote John Winthrop Jr. in 1662. 

Native Americans boiled dried corn, berries and nuts until it thickened into a porridge called nasaump. English settlers called a similar dish “samp,” and sometimes added bacon or sweeteners. Today’s “Indian pudding” follows the tradition. While there are various recipes, corn meal is the most important ingredient. It may be sweetened with molasses or brown sugar. (You can find the recipe for nasaump in our recipe booklet, The Pleasure of the Taste.)

Codfish aristocracy

Despite the obvious abundance of sea food, most Puritans were land dwellers and few had skills in fishing. Needing a product for export, John Winthrop and others focused on salt cod. Over time local fisheries developed and cod became important economically. There was a large divide between fishermen and the merchants who bought and exported their catch. Because of their transient lifestyle, fishermen in towns like Marblehead were seen as outsiders with higher rates of violent crime and drunkenness. 

A 17th-century London coffeehouse. Coffee, tea and chocolate were also sold in Boston, Massachusetts. Image: Wikimedia Commons.

Culture clash

Based on European ideas of property and their interpretation of the Bible, English Puritans thought that land should be enclosed with walls and fences to demarcate private ownership and separate cattle from crops. It should also be what the colonists called “improved” by permanent settlements. Those who failed to live up to these standards of cultivation, in the English view, had no claim to the land. “As for the Natives in New England,” wrote John Winthrop before his departure to Massachusetts, “they enclose noe Land, neither have any settled habytation, nor any tame Cattle to improve the Land by.” 

But in contrast to the English, Native people moved with the seasons in pursuit of food. Spawning fish, migratory birds, animals for hunting, and ripening fruits were found at varying times and places.  The Puritans found Native mobility suspect, but today it is widely recognised how effectively Indigenous people adapted to their land and its seasonal offerings. 

Nor were North American animals suitable for European-style farming or domestication. The Reverend Francis Higginson described North American animals in 1645, “For Beasts there are some Beares… Also… several sorts of Deere... Also Wolves, Foxes, Beavers, Otters… Great wild Cats, and a great Beast called a Molke [moose] as bigge as an Oxe.”  

The colonists imported hundreds of farm animals – cattle, sheep, and goats – and horses, crowding out these native animal species such as deer, a traditional Native food source, and trampling the land. 

For Native people the new species were not merely curiosities. Pigs are hearty animals that could hold their own with wolves. Sometimes they were enclosed but colonists also set their pigs loose, where they ran through Native corn crops, devastating the fields, and gobbled up the clams in clam flats.  

Cattle were even more disruptive. Europeans felled the forests to create open land for grazing and to plant their crops. Temperatures fluctuated and contributed to floods. Above all, the relentless pressure for more land and increasingly harsh terms in purchasing it pressed Native people toward revolt.  

In a single generation, Native people lost their land, their mobility, and traditional lifestyles.  In 1675 King Philip’s War began in New England between Native people and colonists. It is estimated to be the deadliest war, per capita, in American history. 

We can’t undo every change of the past four hundred years. Today’s issues of migration and globalization echo the earliest days of the European colonization of Massachusetts, with the remarkable transport of food across the globe to European settlers and across the Americas to Native communities. People and food have been in motion since before recorded history, producing pain and conflict but also enrichment. The culinary legacy of 17th century Massachusetts is one example. 

Stephen Kenney is director of the Commonwealth Museum, the Massachusetts state history museum. He has a PhD from Boston University and has been a faculty member and administrator at several area colleges, including service as Interim President at Quincy College. 

Find out more

Pollan, Michael. The Botany of Desire: A Plant's-Eye View of the World, New York: Random House, 2002.

Cronon, William. Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England, Revised Edition, New York: Hill and Wang, 2003.

The Cambridge World History of Food, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000.