Twain's Feast (33 page)

Given climate change, I ask Jannette, is Cranberry Day at risk? The question leaves her uncharacteristically quiet. “I don’t want to be the voice of doom,” she finally says. “But I think everything’s at risk. The berries are down so low, right by sea level. If the ocean rises . . .” She trails off.

In a good year, members of the tribe harvest with the kind of toothed wooden scoops used since at least World War I. Today there weren’t enough berries to take the trouble; instead they picked with their fingers. It rained all morning. But the serving trays are emptying; the room is full. And now seven drummers sing, each beat thrumming through the floor, their firm voices raised high and clear. One by one, dancers assemble, shaping a circle, forming a ring. It’s a thanksgiving.

For many Americans, New England is almost the default setting when imagining an inviting holiday landscape: snowy Christmases, Halloween under bright fall foliage, Fourth of July on the beach. So it’s worth remembering how threatening—how utterly alien—it felt to the English who settled on the site of the plague-decimated Wampanoag village of Patuxet in 1620, building the town that would enter American lore as the Plymouth of the first Thanksgiving. Some of the English later produced boosterish prose, as when Edward Winslow wrote in the 1622
Mourt’s Relation
that “the country wanteth only industrious men to employ, for it would grieve your hearts if, as I, you had seen so many miles together by goodly rivers uninhabited.” But they also had to admit that it was a country whose boughs and bushes “tore [their] very armor in pieces.” To the English it was a place of howling wolves, one where “two lions roaring exceedingly for a long time together” left them witlessly terrified.

But the worst thing may have been signs of the plague recently brought by coastal traders and fishermen from Europe; in the weeks after landing at Patuxet, the English saw it as a country of ghosts. Sometimes the plague had struck with such speed and force that the Wampanoag had been unable to bury one another, “their skulls and bones . . . found in many places lying still above the ground where their houses and dwellings had been, a very sad spectacle to behold.” The new arrivals could tell that “thousands of men ha[d] lived” at Patuxet, and “had died in a great plague not long since”; it was a pity, they said, “to see so many goodly fields, and so well seated, without men to dress and manure the same.” Several times they dug into what turned out to be graves, hacking through the icy ground with swords; they hoped to find baskets full of corn, like those they’d already stolen from a Wampanoag winter-storage cache.

Having arrived in December, the English struggled to build enough houses. Even so, half died before spring; it might have been even worse without the stolen maize. Stealing the winter provisions of people already devastated by plague was a dire theft (the English did eventually repay the corn, though long after it might have been needed). But, fortunately for the newcomers, the local sagamore leader, Massasoit, was badly in need of a political alliance and willing to overlook the offense.

Linda Coombs thinks that the biggest misconception about the 1621 gathering is that it was motivated by pure friendship. “This wasn’t because they were great friends,” she says. “People think it was the first celebration in a long series. It was a onetime thing, and it only happened because Massasoit was between a rock and a hard place, being pressed between the English to the east and the Narragansett to the west.” The latter hadn’t yet been struck as hard by disease, and Massasoit “had to choose what was best for his people. So he took a gamble, trying to avoid subjection to the Narragansett.”

In the months before the harvest, the English became heavily dependent on the Wampanoag man Tisquantum, or “Squanto,” to the point that other Native Americans sometimes viewed him as a collaborator (at one point, having learned that Tisquantum was demanding tribute in return for supposedly restraining European disease, Massasoit unsuccessfully demanded his head). Tisquantum was from Patuxet and had survived the plague only because he’d been in Spain and London when it struck. Now he taught the English to plant, fish, and hunt; in one famous episode, he told them that unless they used alewife fish from the local brook as fertilizer, the maize crop “in these old grounds . . . would come to nothing.” On another occasion he went fishing for “fat and sweet” eels that he “trod out with his feet,” returning at last “with as many as he could well lift in one hand.” Other Wampanoag fed the settlers a corn bread called
maizium,
along with “spawn of shads,” boiled acorns, bass, roasted crab, oysters, and “other dried shell fish.” The English planted in the fields of Patuxet; little by little, and with plenty of help, they learned to feed themselves from ocean and forest and marsh.

But the truly fearsome time was winter, and the newcomers would survive a second one only with a robust harvest. When it exceeded their hopes, they naturally celebrated with an event in the English “harvest home” tradition, feasting after bringing in the final crops. The only eyewitness account of the occasion is blink-and-you-miss-it short:

That’s it; that’s everything written at the time about the event that spawned a thousand pageants performed by kids in buckled hats. And, unsurprisingly, those pageants—showing a lot of prayerful English hosting a few Native American guests with a meal of turkey and pumpkin pie—have rarely gotten much right.

The 1621 harvest prompted a three-day gathering. About two of every three people there were Wampanoag; given the small size of the few houses, nearly everyone must have cooked and eaten outside, where there were various games and competitions (considering the politics of the moment, the fact that the English “exercised [their] arms,” or had target practice, seems less than casual). Along with venison, the main food was probably migrating waterfowl like ducks and geese, which were plentiful in autumn; Governor William Bradford does mention taking turkeys that year, but not in connection to the harvest celebration.

Since there were at least ninety Wampanoag and only fifty English, the gathering must have been shaped largely by the former’s ideas about what a harvest celebration should look like. Nancy Eldredge, a Nauset Wampanoag, writes that offering thanks was “woven into every aspect of Wampanoag life.” When harvesting a plant, netting a bird, or catching a fish, “acknowledgment and gratitude were given for the lives that were taken.” Winslow, on the other hand, never mentions either prayer or offering thanks. It’s a particularly striking omission, because when the English Separatists wanted to offer thanks to God, they said so: Winslow wrote in 1623 of a “solemn day . . . set apart and appointed . . . wherein we returned glory, honor and praise, with all thankfulness, to our good God” after the end of a particularly dire drought. Surely the English were grateful for the harvest, but as an expression of communal thanksgiving the feast was probably more in the Wampanoag tradition.

Whether anyone offered thanks over Wampanoag-style food depends on who exactly Massasoit brought with him; the gathering was, after all, a political event, cementing the alliance between him and the English, and the one account specifically mentions only “some ninety men.” But, as food historians Kathleen Curtin and Sandy Oliver point out, those men are said to have come “among the rest.” If “the rest” included women—something Linda thinks possible enough that she’s included Massasoit’s wives in several exhibits—then the feast is more likely to have included such dishes as sobaheg
,
a stewed mix of corn, roots, beans, squash, and various meats.

Though we only know about venison and fowl for certain, this was, after all, a harvest celebration, and the English may have cooked many things they’d been wanting since leaving Europe a year before. Along with the vital corn, squash, and beans, crops grown in the first year may have included pumpkins (pies wouldn’t appear for at least another generation), onions, turnips, greens from spinach to chard, and dozens more. Still, the harvest festival was built around deer, and birds, and very possibly clams, lobsters, cod, eels, and other fish and game. Twain’s Thanksgiving dinners were domestic meals with wild roots; this was a wild meal with some domestic foods.

If anyone at the gathering ate cranberries, it definitely wasn’t as a sweet sauce. The Wampanoag often ate the berries raw, or else in boiled or ash-roasted corn cakes (other tribes pounded the berries with dried meat or fish, making long-lasting pemmican, a preparation Linda says the Wampanoag didn’t share). The English would probably have used them the way they did barberries—as one element in a wine- or gravy-based sauce, which added an acidic, cleansing edge (an updated recipe for roasted duck with cranberries and wine in Curtin and Oliver’s
Giving Thanks
was enough to convince me that English cooking has been getting a bad rap for centuries). Sweet sauce would have to wait for a regular supply of cane or maple sugar; the first mention of such a thing comes from John Josselyn in 1672, who wrote that “the
Indians
and
English
use them much, boyling them with Sugar for Sauce to eat with their Meat.”

Josselyn suggested that the sauce was particularly good with mutton; it was also paired with game such as venison. But increasingly the meat seems to have been turkey. In the very first American cookbook, the 1796
American Cookery,
Amelia Simmons suggested that roasted turkey should be accompanied by “cramberry-sauce,” along with boiled onions, pickles, mangoes, and celery. By the time the first actual sauce recipe appeared a few decades later, turkey was becoming the default meat for Thanksgiving dinner—and the dinner itself was becoming, for the first time, the heart of the holiday.

Throughout the colonial era, says historian and
Thanksgiving
author James Baker, the true New England Thanksgiving had been “an officially declared weekday event marked by a day of religious meetings and pious gratitude for God’s favorable providence.” Until the late 1700s, Thanksgiving remained a mostly regional celebration, a day of prayer declared annually by various state governors (the Continental Congress declared the first genuinely national Thanksgiving in 1777; George Washington followed in 1789 and ’95). Many families attended church twice; the meal was an afterthought, a break between services. For over a century, the holiday was more like the 1623 day of end-of-drought worship than the 1621 harvest celebration.

When dinner did become the day’s focal point, it was usually built around New England foods—or at least a particular idea of what New England foods had once been. For many New Englanders, the Thanksgiving feast was as much an aspirational meal as were the Victorian banquets at Nook Farm: a chance for families who normally ate salted beef, beans, peas, cornmeal mush, apples, and brown bread to enjoy a “gentry-style meal of roasted and boiled meat, vegetables, and pies.” Still, it took Americans a while to settle on a standard menu; the wildly popular 1877
Buckeye Cookery,
for instance, suggested oyster soup, boiled cod, corned beef, and roasted goose as good Thanksgiving choices, accompanied by brown bread, pork and beans, “delicate cabbage,” doughnuts, “superior biscuit,” ginger cakes, and an array of fruits. Chicken pies were a particular favorite and seem to have been served nearly as often as turkey (usually as an additional dish rather than a substitute).

Just as Thanksgiving was becoming something we’d recognize today—a day with less church and substantially more food—cranberries were systematically cultivated for the first time; the fruit and the holiday were a perfect match. In 1820 Hall shipped thirty barrels from his “cranberry yards” to New York; a decade later, cultivated berries were being shipped as far off as New Orleans and even to Europe. Wild berries did remain common for decades, and city markets often mixed them with farmed fruit; in 1830 Bostonian Lydia Child wrote in
The Frugal Housewife
that it was better for children to “pick cranberries from the meadow, to be carried to market” than to “romp away their existence” (other approved anti-romping measures included making patchwork, braiding straw, and knitting garters, suspenders, and stockings). But the trend was all toward cultivated fruit, and thus toward more widespread use. Cranberries were a genuine New England food, one that Victorians liked to think had been eaten by the earliest English settlers, but they also shipped well, especially when packed into straw or brine. The fruit and the holiday would be partnered for centuries.

Then, as now, the ideal Thanksgiving dinner was immense. In her 1827 novel
Northwood,
Sarah Josepha Hale described a mind-blowing feast: