|Native Americans |Dutch |English | French | Spanish |

In the 1700's when the United States was just thirteen colonies, people cooked and harvested all their own food. Corn, pumpkins, squash and other vegetables and fruit were common. There was also porridge, served either hot or cold. Porridge is a soft food made by boiling oatmeal or another meal in water or milk.

Getting food back then wasn’t as easy as going to the store. Men and boys, not girls, had to fish and hunt. This was difficult work, especially in the winter. Meat was salted and dried and the fruits and vegetables were hung. In colonial times there was no meal called lunch. Breakfast was eaten very early if you were poor, and later on if you were rich. The poor early settlers had to get up early to do their chores.  On farms and in small towns, families drank cider or beer and had a bowl of porridge that had been cooking slowly all night in the fireplace.  Dinner was the mid-day meal and was considered the main meal. It was the biggest meal of the day.  In the early settlements, poor families ate from trenchers, which included slabs of stale bread, and stews.  Supper was the evening meal, and was normally a light meal. There was no such thing as a typical colonial meal.  It all depended on where in the colonies you lived and where you came from.

Native Americans

Native Americans (Indians) were the first people to live in the Americas. They had settled in their villages thousands of years before the Europeans arrived.

In order to get food they had to hunt, farm, and grow their own crops such as maize (corn), beans, and squash. Native Americans survived on mainly fish and berries. They were always in search for food that they barely even had time to build shelters, make clothes or develop tools.

The Native Americans taught the European explorers many things. They taught them how to plant, hunt, and fish.  Many of the food the Native Americans grew, such as avocados, corn, peanuts, peppers, pineapples, potatoes, squash, and tomatoes, were never heard of by the newcomers.

In Plymouth colony, Massachusetts, the Pilgrims were helped by the Wampanoag Indians.  During the 1600's the Wampanoag Indians gathered food by hunting, fishing, harvesting wild plants, and planting crops.  The animals that were hunted were deer, moose, beaver, rabbit, skunk, and racoon.  These animals were not only hunted for food.  The entire animal was used.  The hides were used for clothing, the bones for tools, and the sinew for sewing. They fished for eels, catfish, trout, herring, bluefish, bass, flatfish, and mackerel.  The women of the tribe usually caught the shellfish such as lobsters, crabs, conch, soft-shelled clams, quahog clams, razor claims, and mussels.  They planted corn, beans, different kinds of squash, and melons.

In addition to the local foods introduced by the Native Americans, the food the colonists ate depended upon where they came from and where they landed.  The English in Plymouth, New York, and Jamestown, the Dutch in New York, the French who settled in New France which is now Canada, and the Spanish in St. Augustine all ate differently.  They brought their own recipes, supplies, and cooking methods.

Dutch

In 1625, three Dutch ships, the Horse, the Sheep, and the Cow, sailed from the Netherlands to America. These Dutch ships brought the 103 horses, steers, and cows with them. Foods like doughnuts, waffles, cole slaw, and the Dutch koekie (cookies), were brought to us from the Dutch.  The most important contribution the Dutch made to the New World was the introduction of grain. Their chief crop was wheat.  They also raised barley, rye, and buckwheat.  The early Dutch colonists loved sweets.  Dumplings, pancakes, were almost always in their daily diet.  They brought long-handled waffle irons from Holland, and used them in their fireplaces to make waffles. 

In 1656 the Dutch opened the first public bakeries in America. A law was passed by the Dutch stating that cookies and other sweet cakes could not be sold by the bakery unless bread was also sold.  These bakeries sold Oliekocken which were pastries made with a raised yeast dough, then shaped into balls, and fried in hot lard until lightly browned.  We now call these pastries doughnuts.

The Dutch settlers used the dairy cows which they brought with them from Holland to produce milk, butter and cheese.  The Dutch also used corn (which they called "turkey wheat") from the Native Americans to make porridge.  The Dutch often made a dish called Hutspot which means hodgepodge, which was made up of porridge and cooked chunks of corned beef and root vegetables.  For holidays, the Dutch colonists ate roast duck with dumplings, pork with cabbage, or roast goose.  The Dutch colonists also had tea, sugar, spices, chocolate, wines, and brandies.

English

Archeological digs in Jamestown, Virginia, have shown that the 104 men and boys who landed in Jamestown ate primarily fish and turtles.  These colonists also ate rays, herons, gulls, oysters, raccoons, and other native animals, as well as beef, pork, and fish provisions they brought with them from England.  They brought domestic animals with them from England to breed them, but, unfortunately, they were eaten during the winter of 1609-1610, which is referred to as the Starving Time.  During this time there is also evidence that the colonists ate poisonous snakes, musk turtles, and even horses to try to survive.

In Plymouth colony, in addition to the foods mentioned above from the Wampanoag Indians, the Pilgrims ate foods they were used to back in England.  They considered meat, bread, and beer the best foods, even though they weren't always available.  Lobsters, which the Native Americans taught them about, were considered every-day food.  There were so many of them in the water around Plymouth.  People ate according to the season.  You ate what was available.  There was no such thing as freezing foods and shipping them long distances.  There were no food stores. 

The Pilgrims had to learn to survive in this new land.  They had trouble fishing at first because they brought the wrong-sized fish hooks with them.  Supplies didn't come from England as often as they should, so sometimes years went by without any butter or sugar.  After a while, however, the Pilgrims began to adapt to their new land.  They learned how to hunt animals such as rabbit, turkey, geese, duck, and deer.  They were able to breed the animals they brought from England and eventually had more than enough chickens, pigs, goats, sheep and cows.  Later on sugar, spices, oil, vinegar and wine began to be shipped from England more frequently. Beer was one of the items that the Pilgrims still missed. Beer was the preferred drink - even for children. Some families brewed beer from barley, but most of the Pilgrim families had to drink water.  In those days, water was thought to be unhealthy to drink. Milk was also not thought to be very healthy either.  Isn't that hard to believe?  The milk from the cows was made into butter, cheese and used to make porrridge.

The three meals the Pilgrims ate were the same as in most of the colonies.  Breakfast was a meal to break the fast - usually just a little bread and butter or cheese.  Dinner (which we now call lunch) was the largest meal of the deal with porridge or bread made from Indian corn and some kind of meat, fish or fowl.  Supper, which was later on in the day, was a smaller meal and was sometimes just leftovers from dinner.

The Plymouth settlers had to plan very carefully to make sure they had enough to eat.  There was no waste. Those of us here in America today can learn a valuable lesson from them.

French

Spanish

St. Augustine, Florida, is the oldest European city in the United States.  It was settled almost 50 years before Jamestown was founded by the British. The 100 settlers had similar problems with food and famine that other colonists had.  The Spanish brought seeds for oranges, lemons, and other tropical fruits with them, but they did not properly care for them since they were too busy searching for gold.  However, these orange and lemon trees did grow wild and are still found in Florida.  The Spanish also brught Caribbean fruits and vegetables to Florida.  In addition, they introduced black beans. A typical meal in St. Augustine was garbanzo soup, which contained dried chick beans and other vegetables.  The soup also contained chorizo which is a Spanish sausage.  St. Augustine was not a permanent settlement.  Therefore, there was not a major Spanish influence on colonial foods.

In conclusion, the American colonists ate foods that they brought with them from their homelands; that were introduced by the Native Americans, as well as by the French and Spanish explorers.  Most colonists produced all the foods they ate.  Colonists eventually were able to store vegetables by pickling them and to store meat by salting and smoking. Later on coloniests stored foods in cool cellars where they stored the ice from the winter.  This helped preserve them.