Thanksgiving Dinner: Food from the Americas
Hello my lovelies,
as many of you will know, I am European. What fewer of you may know is that I used to do Medieval reenactment and that sparked a passion for historical cooking. There are a few recipes on this blog if you are curious but ancient cuisine requires quite a bit of interpretation. Like the sesame honey cakes: we know they existed but how to actually make them is guess-work.
However, one of the major themes for a budding reenactor dabbling in culinary history is which ingredients simply weren't available to the medieval European cook because they come from the Americas. This is often surprising because so many American vegetables have become staples of modern European cuisine: tomatoes, zucchinis, and bell peppers in French ratatouille, potatoes in German dumplings, maize in Romanian polenta, or ground paprika in Hungarian goulash.
So today I want to introduce a few foods that weren't available to Europeans before the 16th century, namely the common ingredients of a US Thanksgiving dinner:
Turkey
European substitute: goose
Turkeys are native to North America and embody Thanksgiving like little else. Wild turkeys evolved in North America 20 million years ago and were domesticated by the Maya in Mesoamerica around 2000 years ago. The Mexican turkey is the ancestor of all domestic turkeys consumed in the world today and Mesoamerica's only indigenous domesticated animal. But the Mexican turkey originates – you guessed it – from central Mexico, which lies outside the Maya cultural area. This means animal exchange occurred from northern Mesoamerica to the Maya cultural region between 300 BCE to 100 CE. Ideograms of turkeys also appear in Mayan manuscripts. Spanish chroniclers tell us that you could buy tamales made of turkey in the Aztec city of Tenochtitlán, where Mecxican turkeys would be readily available.
Turkeys didn't come to Europe before 1519 CE. So what did we eat for a festive dinner before? Up until the present day, a roasted goose is still quite common at a traditional Christmas dinner. Not quite as large as a turkey but that means you just gotta make more than one if there are numerous guests.
(Mashed) Potatoes
European substitute: turnips or chestnuts
Potatoes are so ingrained in modern European cuisines that it is hard to believe they only became part of the European diet less than 500 years ago.
Wild potato species grow naturally from the southern United States to southern Chile but the potato was first domesticated in southern Peru and northwestern Bolivia around Lake Titicaca. Tubers do not preserve well in the archaeological record, making identification and dating difficult. The earliest archaeologically verified potato tuber remains have been found at the coastal site of Ancón in central Peru, dating to 2500 BCE, but they may have been domesticated much earlier and just didn't leave a record.
Potatoes were an integral part of the Andean diet alongside the grain quinoa and animals such as llamas. Andean people prepared their potatoes in a variety of ways: they were boiled, mashed, baked, and stewed in ways similar to modern methods. But there was a genius invention by the Andean people: chuño. Letting potatoes freeze overnight and thawing them in the morning in a repeated process and extracting the potatoes' water, meant that they could be stored for years without refrigeration, a literal life-saver during years of famine or bad harvests. This long shelf life also made it the staple food for the Inca armies.
The first written mention of the potato in Europe is a receipt for delivery dated 28 November 1567 CE. By the 19th century it had replaced former European staple foods due to its lower rate of spoilage, its satiability, and its cheapness.
It's hard to find a perfect European substitute for potatoes because turnips and beetroot are not nearly as starchy but filled a similar niche before the potato was introduced. Possibly the best fit for a European substitute is actually the chestnut: just as potatoes were grown where crops like maize couldn't be cultivated, chestnuts were grown and eaten in areas where no grain could be harvested, for instance in the mountainous regions of the Alps. Chestnuts were used to make bread and pasta and they were a cheap "poor people's food" before the potato pushed them from this dishonourable throne. What do you think? Are chestnuts the European potato or turnips?
Pumpkin (Pie)
European substitute: gourds
I learned Latin in school and I studied botany at uni, so I knew that the Latin word for pumpkin is cucurbita. Colour me surprised when this word cropped up in Roman and some medieval recipes from the Mediterranean. And because I am a curious person, I tried to find out what those Roman pumpkins actually were. As it turns out, the Romans were talking about the gourd or calabash. Gourds were cultivated in Africa, Asia, Europe, and yes, also the Americas, for thousands of years. Humans have eaten them and made containers and musical instruments from them. See an Italian gourd here!
In modern taxonomy, cucurbita is the genus that includes American pumpkins. The ancestors of modern pumpkins are native to the Americas and grew there long before the arrival of humans during the Ice Age. With the arrival of humans, 5 of the 27 Cucurbita species in the Americas were domesticated 8000 years ago: 4 species in Mesoamerica and 1 species in South America. The typical orange "Halloween pumpkins" (Cucurbita pepo) likely originated in what is now Mexico.
Can we make a European gourd pie? I will be honest and tell you that I don't even know where to get a gourd nowadays while pumpkins are an Autumn and Winter staple. But if I can get my hands on one, should I try?
,Gourd Alexandrian fashion: Drain boiled gourd, season with salt, arrange in a dish. Crush pepper, cumin, coriander seed, fresh mint, asafoetida root. Moisten with vinegar. Add caryota date, pine kernel; crush. Blend with honey, vinegar, fish sauce, concentrated must and oil, and pour the whole over the gourd. When it has boiled, season with pepper and serve.
Apicius 4.2.14
Sources
Cook a classical feast: nine recipes from ancient Greece and Rome, britishmuseum.org
Ova Elixa et Cucurbita – Ancient Roman Recipes, historicalitaliancooking.home.blog
Earliest use of Mexican turkeys by ancient Maya, University of Florida
