What They Ate

CAMPBELL MCGRATH

All manner of fowl and wild game: venison, raccoon, opossum, turkey.

Abundant fishes, excepting salmon, which ws. found distasteful.

Meat of all sorts, especially pig, which roamed free and was fatty.

Also shellfish: quahogs and foot-long oysters; lobsters, though considered wasteful.

Wild fruit: huckle and rasp, blue being known as “skycolored” berries.

Parsnips, turnips, carrots, onions: these sown loosely and rooted out;

while these were cultivated in orchards: apples, peaches, apricots, cherries.

Cabbage—favored by the Dutch as koolslaa, by the Germans as sauerkraut—

was boiled with herbs brought from England; thyme, hyssop, marjoram, parsley.

Pumpkin, dried, or mashed with butter, where yams grew sparsely.

Corn, with beans as succotash; called samp when milled to grist;

in the South, hulled and broken, as hominy; or fried with bacon as grits.

Maple ws. not favored; loaves of white sugar worth considerable money

were kept under lock, cut with special sugar shears. For honey,

bees were imported, called “English flies” by the Narragansett.