Did the Pilgrims & Indians have mac and cheese?

[GeorgeG]

If my wife thought she could get away with it, she would stuff the turkey with mac n’ cheese.

Interestingly, one of my ancestors was at that famous Thanksgiving meal, Cotton Mather Legalsea, and he even wrote down what they had, with the letter being carefully preserved over the generations; Cotton was writing to his creditors back in London:

To Satan’s Brood:

It is with utmost regret that I fynd I am in a peculiar situation and so cannot remit to thou bloodsuckers the King’s Coin which You have been Promise by Me before I boarded the Shipp; I do Hope that You Leeches saw me Waving to You as we quitted the Shores of Plymouth. Should You Foule Servantes of Darkness find yeself in My area of this World do looke me Up and I shall pay my Debt with the Utmost promptness. If I am not In when You creep upon these Shores be pleased to Wait until my Return.

We Pilgrims (for thus the Captaine has taken to calling ourselfs, whereas I suggested “Supreme OverLords of All We Survey”), had Occasion to Sit and Dine with the Local Peoples Whom Calle themselves “The Blessed People of This Most Abundant Land” (which we shortened to Indian), and had a Feaste of Unparallel Delight. It is My Thought that, since you and your Satanic Brothers have been disappointed by the Lack of Coin you would be satisfied to read of what we Partook of at the Feaste. I had been Seated at a spot next to the Poop Pit, which I was assured was the Best Seat available.

The Feaste mainly consisted of Fowle of the Land. I cannot heartily recommend the Crow, since it Tasted As bitter as one would Imagine Crow to taste, but the Sparrow Fitted nicely in the Mouth with a Pleasing Crunch. The Indians did bring a Deere which they Roasted over the communal Fire, of which I had a hoof; they did Assure Me it was the Best Part of the Animal. We also Ate of the Fish of the Sea, of a species Unknown but Called Su-shee by the Indians. I do Wishe the Su-shee had been Cooked, and, lacking that, at least Gutted. I only Wishe that You and Yours could have eaten of it.

The Indians also served a Dish called “bees and cheese” which was as Foule as It sounds. The Cheese was rather Pleasing, but a Substitute Must be found for the bees.

We also had what these Savages called Appetizers consisting of Various Roots pulled from the very Dirt under our Feet and served on a Large Plate with instructtions to Dip said Roots into a Foul mixture that was called Dippe. No One Ate of These and it sat Untouched.

I did Excuse Myself prior to Dessert (which I believe consisted of Mice on a Sticke) and so did please myself by Not Offering a “tippe” to these Indians for the Foule Feast. I believe a Warrant has been Issued for my Failure to “tippe” so I Shall sign Off now as I am Traveling Quickly to Another Locale that I Hope and Praye has Better Food.

Cotton Mather Legalsea
November 1621

Hot dogs on the grill are looking better and better...

 

[Golf4food]

The real problem here is that the Pilgrims did not hold the first Thanksgiving feast in America.

The Spanish did, in St. Augustine, with the local Timucuan indians, 56 years before Plymouth, on September 8, 1565.

They ate bean soup.

So there you go.

I'm still eating turkey and mac & cheese.


Link to a story about the REAL first Thanksgiving in America.

Florida teacher chips away at Plymouth Rock Thanksgiving myth

By Craig Wilson, USA TODAY
ST. AUGUSTINE, Fla. — Robyn Gioia doesn't look like a troublemaker. Far from it.
Gioia is a wife, mother and teacher, and her green eyes twinkle when she talks about her fifth-grade students at the Bolles School just north of here in Ponte Vedra.

But Gioia, 53, has written a children's book, and just the title is enough to peeve any Pilgrim: America's REAL First Thanksgiving.

"It was the publisher who put real in capital letters," she says, "but I think it's great."

What does REAL mean? Well, she's not talking turkey and cranberry sauce. She's talking a Spanish explorer who landed here on Sept. 8, 1565, and celebrated a feast of thanksgiving with Timucua Indians. They dined on bean soup.

If you do the math, it is 56 years before the Pilgrims sat down and shared a meal with natives at Plymouth Rock.

Who knew? Not even Gioia, until she attended a teachers' workshop two years ago and heard Michael Gannon, a retired history scholar from the University of Florida, tell the story of Pedro Menendez de Aviles.

Gannon, 80, first laid out the premise of an earlier Thanksgiving in his scholarly book The Cross in the Sand in 1965, but few picked up on it. He says his mention of Menendez's meal was a "throwaway line that lay fallow for 20 years."

That was, until a reporter for the Associated Press in 1985 exposed Gannon's academic findings to the world, which caused what Gannon remembers as "a storm of interest. I was on the phone for three days straight."

Traditionalists, especially in New England, dubbed him "The Grinch who stole Thanksgiving."

Gannon took it with good humor.

"I became rather famous at the time for saying that by the time the Pilgrims came to Plymouth, St. Augustine was up for urban renewal."

Gannon thinks the word is finally, but slowly, getting out, but he's well aware that the victors write the history books. And history, once written, is hard to change.

"The English wrote the history and established the traditions," he says. "That's life. Get over it."

But Gioia believes the rising Hispanic population in America could spark interest in the nation's Spanish heritage and by association, Gannon's findings.

Meanwhile, Gioia is firing the next shot across the Mayflower's bow.

After Gannon's talk, she thought an illustrated book was the perfect way to tell the first Thanksgiving story to her students. It seems to have worked. With them, at least.

When Gioia recently asked her students who believes the first Thanksgiving was in Florida, every hand in her classroom flew up in the air.

Off the page and into the kitchen

Gioia, who serves her own family bean soup on the Sept. 8 anniversary, has her work cut out for her elsewhere, however. Even on the site where Menendez's Thanksgiving feast is believed to have been held.

"I always thought the first Thanksgiving was at Plymouth Rock," says Betty McDaniel, a gift-shop clerk at the Ponce de Leon Fountain of Youth Archaeological Park, which sits next door to Nombre de Dios Mission, where Menendez landed and celebrated with the natives after a Catholic Mass.

John Fraser owns the "Fountain of Youth" attraction and calls the where-was-the-first-Thanksgiving brouhaha "a ticklish issue."

"The people from the North just wouldn't believe it," he says when the idea of a Spanish Thanksgiving first surfaced in the press. "They just couldn't get it through their heads."

Martha Hird, a colleague of Fraser's at the site, thinks it might be as much Floridians' fault as anyone else.

"We just haven't had enough people to jump up and down and publish more books about this," she says.

Susan Parker, executive director of the St. Augustine Historical Society, says there's more to it than just getting the word out. She agrees with Gannon that written history is hard to change and adds that traditional accounts of America's past often come with "a Protestant twist," as that was the predominant culture.

"There's a tradition of diminishing the Catholic presence of our early history," Parker says.

But it also doesn't help that there's virtually no mention of the Thanksgiving feast anywhere in town. Not on the historic marker at the Menendez landing site —Tradition holds that the first Mass in the new colony was celebrated here — and not at the Government House Museum at the downtown Visitors Center. In 1565 Menendez established St. Augustine, named for the feast day on which he sighted land.

Not a word about Thanksgiving.

Bill Adams, director of Heritage Tourism for the City of St. Augustine, says people need to understand that much has happened in America's oldest city in the past four centuries.

"We're covering 400 years of history in the museum, and there are a lot of events we need to focus on. … We have so many firsts here, it's just one of the many."

He then voiced a sentiment of many St. Augustinians. "We're constantly overlooked and ignored … and we do a lousy job of marketing."

Gannon agrees that St. Augustinians are "somewhat reluctant to engage in such arguments" and are unsure about getting their facts straight.

"It's an area we need to work on," says Gioia. "Everyone I talk to doesn't know about it."

Or doesn't buy it. And that includes the city's tour guides.

Robert Makin drives an Old Town Trolley through St. Augustine, reciting the town's storied history. At Stop 17, the Menendez landing site, he talks about the founding of America's first permanent settlement but mentions nothing about a Thanksgiving feast.

"Well, it's very arguable," he says when asked. "I also don't think they called it Thanksgiving," he says. "You can't even call it Thanksgiving if it's not even English. Thanksgiving is an English word."

He then shrugged his shoulders as he drove on. "It's fine if they want to think that, I guess. It really doesn't matter."

Tourists who wander through the shops on St. George Street in St. Augustine's historic downtown are equally confused.

Did Jennifer Fagan, a banker from Dayton, Ohio, know she was visiting the site of America's first Thanksgiving?

"No, I'm surprised," she says. "We just assumed it's Plymouth Rock. You learn something new every day."

Her son, Evan, makes turkeys and Pilgrim hats in school, she says. And that's a key factor.

"What anyone did in fifth grade is probably what they think of as Thanksgiving," says the historical society's Parker. "So when you're 30, that's what you think is Thanksgiving."

Reclaiming local history

Not that the idea hasn't gained some traction here.

Herbie Wiles, a retired insurance executive in St. Augustine, who played Menendez in the annual September re-enactment this year, buys the first Thanksgiving story.

"From what I can gather from Mike Gannon, who is very thorough, there was a Thanksgiving meal. And I think Menendez had sense enough to realize he had to work with these Indians. He was greatly outnumbered."

Wiles didn't make it to "the lunch," as he called it, which followed the re-enactment ceremony, but he says he will next year. "I now see the need to coordinate the Mass and the meal."

The folks at Plimoth Plantation in Massachusetts, site of the 1621 Thanksgiving, acknowledge that most people visit their site with the belief that it's the birthplace of Thanksgiving.

"Plimoth Plantation prides itself in peeling back the layers on America's favorite holiday, but we never claim we held the first Thanksgiving," says Jennifer Monac, referring instead to the fact it's a national holiday decreed by Abraham Lincoln.

She's not sure any place can stake such a claim.

"What people celebrate today as Thanksgiving is pretty much a myth. It's nothing like what the people in Plymouth or Jamestown or St. Augustine, for that matter, celebrated."

So there.

Please pass the cranberry sauce.

 

[legalsea]

The real problem here is that the Pilgrims did not hold the first Thanksgiving feast in America.

The Spanish did, in St. Augustine, with the local Timucuan indians, 56 years before Plymouth, on September 8, 1565.

They ate bean soup.

So there you go.

I'm still eating turkey and mac & cheese.


Link to a story about the REAL first Thanksgiving in America.

Strangely enough, another one of my ancestors, Senor Legalsea de la Sanchez Poopoo, was at that meal in Florida. What is mainly remembered about it is that it was at 5 in the afternoon to accommodate the older people.

 

[shortbun]

Um, yeah, I don't think the Pilgrims were making pasta. Takes too much time and they mostly ate just the food as it came out of the ground or off the animal. I doubt they mashed potatoes, probably just roasted them and ate them by hand. Seriously-someone thinks they made mac and cheese? lol!!!

 

[Hoodie]

I love reading all the "traditions" people have for Thanksgiving food.

That said, I've NEVER heard of Mac n' cheese at Thanksgiving until this thread. And how could they not have mashed potatoes? How do they have gravy without mashed potatoes?

 

[wendy46001]

I love reading all the "traditions" people have for Thanksgiving food.

That said, I've NEVER heard of Mac n' cheese at Thanksgiving until this thread. And how could they not have mashed potatoes? How do they have gravy without mashed potatoes?

We do both
you need the gravy for the turkey anyway
well the non fried turkey…fried bird requires no gravy for some reason

 

[legalsea]

I love reading all the "traditions" people have for Thanksgiving food.

That said, I've NEVER heard of Mac n' cheese at Thanksgiving until this thread. And how could they not have mashed potatoes? How do they have gravy without mashed potatoes?

“I have often heard of gravy without mashed potatoes”, thought Alice. “But mashed potatoes without gravy?”

 

[disykat]

Strangely enough, another one of my ancestors, Senor Legalsea de la Sanchez Poopoo, was at that meal in Florida. What is mainly remembered about it is that it was at 5 in the afternoon to accommodate the older people.

In honor of Thanksgiving, legalsea is on a roll. Which brings another all important question - are rolls a traditional Thanksgiving food?

 

[Eeyore'sthebest]

In honor of Thanksgiving, legalsea is on a roll. Which brings another all important question - are rolls a traditional Thanksgiving food?

I prefer cranberry nut bread. It all depends on how busy Dsis is cooking if we have rolls or bread.

 

[Boxley]

I don't think it was traditional, but then again a good baked mac n' cheese is always welcome at my table.

 

[punkin]

But if you think about if we literally ate what was available in the first Thanksgiving it would not be all that appetizing.. venison, seal, and lobster..

Where did they get seal so far south? I guess that's global warming for you!

 

[mhsjax]

I was born and raised in the south and still live here and I've never seen or heard of mac and cheese being a "traditional" Thanksgiving food.

We always have turkey and dressing, mashed potatoes and gravy, cranberry sauce, sweet potatoes with marshmellows, rolls, green bean casserole, and pumpkin pie for dessert.

And, really, the MOST important thing in our family is the green bean casserole...you know, with the french fried onions on top...that REALLY says Thanksgiving!

Same here raised in the south and not a northerner in our family and we never had mac and cheese. Now when my nephew married a girl from MA, we started having mac and cheese. So who knows weather it is a southern thang or not. By the way, that "Yankee" girl makes the best mac and cheese I have EVER put in my mouth, and I don't even really like the stuff, but I sure love hers.

 

[WriteDisney]

Good question.. I have no idea so I searched about mac and cheese and found this on about.com..

Some believe the dish was created by founding father Thomas Jefferson, known for his great interest in food, and in a 1996 "Restaurants & Institutions" article, Barbara Bell Matuszewski wrote that Jefferson served the dish in the White House in 1802. However, noted food historian Karen Hess claims Jefferson did not invent the dish, though he did return from a trip to Paris with a macaroni mold. In the Featured Recipes, you'll find a recipe for the dish from Mary Randolph's (Jefferson's cousin) "The Virginia Housewife," first published in 1824.

 

[nutterbutter2010]

Well if you really want to keep your Thanksgiving true to what happened back then, you better find yourself a Native American to rape, pillage and slauter. Thats what really happened anyway.

 

[legalsea]

Thomas Jefferson also created ‘rolls’, or, as he liked to call them “sliced bread formed into a small ball”.

The reason was simple enough. As stated above, Mr. Jefferson had been in Paris when he was introduced to mac n’ cheese. Being an accomplished botanist he obtained some of the mac n’ cheese seeds and successfully transplanted them to the New World (or, as he liked to call it, “Virginia and illegitimate offspring states”). He planted the seeds in the rich loamy soil of Monticello and waited a year. He then discovered that mac n’ cheese does not, in fact, come from seeds (it turned out to be tobacco). He then returned to Paris, hunted down and killed the person whom sold him the ‘magic mac seeds’ (I believe it was Aaron Burr or his nemesis, George Hamilton), obtained a macaroni mold, and returned post-haste to Virginia.

Anyway, that is how he created the bread known as ‘rolls’.

 

[monkeybug]

Thomas Jefferson also created ‘rolls’, or, as he liked to call them “sliced bread formed into a small ball”.

The reason was simple enough. As stated above, Mr. Jefferson had been in Paris when he was introduced to mac n’ cheese. Being an accomplished botanist he obtained some of the mac n’ cheese seeds and successfully transplanted them to the New World (or, as he liked to call it, “Virginia and illegitimate offspring states”). He planted the seeds in the rich loamy soil of Monticello and waited a year. He then discovered that mac n’ cheese does not, in fact, come from seeds (it turned out to be tobacco). He then returned to Paris, hunted down and killed the person whom sold him the ‘magic mac seeds’ (I believe it was Aaron Burr or his nemesis, George Hamilton), obtained a macaroni mold, and returned post-haste to Virginia.

Anyway, that is how he created the bread known as ‘rolls’.

Well thanks Captain obvious!

 

[NotUrsula]

We never served mac 'n cheese (or pasta in any form) at dinner until someone married into the family who liked it. Once it hit the table it pleased a lot of the small children, so we've kept it on the list of regulars, but AFAICR, he's the only adult who eats it.

 

[melly]

Ok so my question is, which is more traditional mashed potatoes or macaroni and cheese?

And my question is can people not see how UNBELIEVABLY ironic the concept of thanksgiving is.

 

[Wendy31]

Originally posted by Golf4Food -

Florida teacher chips away at Plymouth Rock Thanksgiving myth

By Craig Wilson, USA TODAY
ST. AUGUSTINE, Fla. — Robyn Gioia doesn't look like a troublemaker. Far from it.
Gioia is a wife, mother and teacher, and her green eyes twinkle when she talks about her fifth-grade students at the Bolles School just north of here in Ponte Vedra.

But Gioia, 53, has written a children's book, and just the title is enough to peeve any Pilgrim: America's REAL First Thanksgiving.

"It was the publisher who put real in capital letters," she says, "but I think it's great."

What does REAL mean? Well, she's not talking turkey and cranberry sauce. She's talking a Spanish explorer who landed here on Sept. 8, 1565, and celebrated a feast of thanksgiving with Timucua Indians. They dined on bean soup.

If you do the math, it is 56 years before the Pilgrims sat down and shared a meal with natives at Plymouth Rock.

Who knew? Not even Gioia, until she attended a teachers' workshop two years ago and heard Michael Gannon, a retired history scholar from the University of Florida, tell the story of Pedro Menendez de Aviles.

Gannon, 80, first laid out the premise of an earlier Thanksgiving in his scholarly book The Cross in the Sand in 1965, but few picked up on it. He says his mention of Menendez's meal was a "throwaway line that lay fallow for 20 years."

That was, until a reporter for the Associated Press in 1985 exposed Gannon's academic findings to the world, which caused what Gannon remembers as "a storm of interest. I was on the phone for three days straight."

Traditionalists, especially in New England, dubbed him "The Grinch who stole Thanksgiving."

Gannon took it with good humor.

"I became rather famous at the time for saying that by the time the Pilgrims came to Plymouth, St. Augustine was up for urban renewal."

Gannon thinks the word is finally, but slowly, getting out, but he's well aware that the victors write the history books. And history, once written, is hard to change.

"The English wrote the history and established the traditions," he says. "That's life. Get over it."

But Gioia believes the rising Hispanic population in America could spark interest in the nation's Spanish heritage and by association, Gannon's findings.

Meanwhile, Gioia is firing the next shot across the Mayflower's bow.

After Gannon's talk, she thought an illustrated book was the perfect way to tell the first Thanksgiving story to her students. It seems to have worked. With them, at least.

When Gioia recently asked her students who believes the first Thanksgiving was in Florida, every hand in her classroom flew up in the air.

Off the page and into the kitchen

Gioia, who serves her own family bean soup on the Sept. 8 anniversary, has her work cut out for her elsewhere, however. Even on the site where Menendez's Thanksgiving feast is believed to have been held.

"I always thought the first Thanksgiving was at Plymouth Rock," says Betty McDaniel, a gift-shop clerk at the Ponce de Leon Fountain of Youth Archaeological Park, which sits next door to Nombre de Dios Mission, where Menendez landed and celebrated with the natives after a Catholic Mass.

John Fraser owns the "Fountain of Youth" attraction and calls the where-was-the-first-Thanksgiving brouhaha "a ticklish issue."

"The people from the North just wouldn't believe it," he says when the idea of a Spanish Thanksgiving first surfaced in the press. "They just couldn't get it through their heads."

Martha Hird, a colleague of Fraser's at the site, thinks it might be as much Floridians' fault as anyone else.

"We just haven't had enough people to jump up and down and publish more books about this," she says.

Susan Parker, executive director of the St. Augustine Historical Society, says there's more to it than just getting the word out. She agrees with Gannon that written history is hard to change and adds that traditional accounts of America's past often come with "a Protestant twist," as that was the predominant culture.

"There's a tradition of diminishing the Catholic presence of our early history," Parker says.

But it also doesn't help that there's virtually no mention of the Thanksgiving feast anywhere in town. Not on the historic marker at the Menendez landing site —Tradition holds that the first Mass in the new colony was celebrated here — and not at the Government House Museum at the downtown Visitors Center. In 1565 Menendez established St. Augustine, named for the feast day on which he sighted land.

Not a word about Thanksgiving.

Bill Adams, director of Heritage Tourism for the City of St. Augustine, says people need to understand that much has happened in America's oldest city in the past four centuries.

"We're covering 400 years of history in the museum, and there are a lot of events we need to focus on. … We have so many firsts here, it's just one of the many."

He then voiced a sentiment of many St. Augustinians. "We're constantly overlooked and ignored … and we do a lousy job of marketing."

Gannon agrees that St. Augustinians are "somewhat reluctant to engage in such arguments" and are unsure about getting their facts straight.

"It's an area we need to work on," says Gioia. "Everyone I talk to doesn't know about it."

Or doesn't buy it. And that includes the city's tour guides.

Robert Makin drives an Old Town Trolley through St. Augustine, reciting the town's storied history. At Stop 17, the Menendez landing site, he talks about the founding of America's first permanent settlement but mentions nothing about a Thanksgiving feast.

"Well, it's very arguable," he says when asked. "I also don't think they called it Thanksgiving," he says. "You can't even call it Thanksgiving if it's not even English. Thanksgiving is an English word."

He then shrugged his shoulders as he drove on. "It's fine if they want to think that, I guess. It really doesn't matter."

Tourists who wander through the shops on St. George Street in St. Augustine's historic downtown are equally confused.

Did Jennifer Fagan, a banker from Dayton, Ohio, know she was visiting the site of America's first Thanksgiving?

"No, I'm surprised," she says. "We just assumed it's Plymouth Rock. You learn something new every day."

Her son, Evan, makes turkeys and Pilgrim hats in school, she says. And that's a key factor.

"What anyone did in fifth grade is probably what they think of as Thanksgiving," says the historical society's Parker. "So when you're 30, that's what you think is Thanksgiving."

Reclaiming local history

Not that the idea hasn't gained some traction here.

Herbie Wiles, a retired insurance executive in St. Augustine, who played Menendez in the annual September re-enactment this year, buys the first Thanksgiving story.

"From what I can gather from Mike Gannon, who is very thorough, there was a Thanksgiving meal. And I think Menendez had sense enough to realize he had to work with these Indians. He was greatly outnumbered."

Wiles didn't make it to "the lunch," as he called it, which followed the re-enactment ceremony, but he says he will next year. "I now see the need to coordinate the Mass and the meal."

The folks at Plimoth Plantation in Massachusetts, site of the 1621 Thanksgiving, acknowledge that most people visit their site with the belief that it's the birthplace of Thanksgiving.

"Plimoth Plantation prides itself in peeling back the layers on America's favorite holiday, but we never claim we held the first Thanksgiving," says Jennifer Monac, referring instead to the fact it's a national holiday decreed by Abraham Lincoln.

She's not sure any place can stake such a claim.

"What people celebrate today as Thanksgiving is pretty much a myth. It's nothing like what the people in Plymouth or Jamestown or St. Augustine, for that matter, celebrated."

So there.

Please pass the cranberry sauce.

Random Musing Alert - I love St. Augustine!! And I would love to have Thanksgiving Dinner in St. Augustine w/ a piece of key lime pie from the Publix on A1A!

 

[GRUMPY PIRATE]

one thing I will admit, DW (Mrs Pirate) added mac and cheese to last years menu, but it was with a few "additions"

first she went and got several different chuncks of cheese and made her own sauce, then she had me fry up a pound of applewood smoked bacon. Then when it dried, I crumbled it into small bits.

she added all that into one of the best mac and cheeese side dishes we have ever eaten. I also found out that she put some onion in it.

(tried to add a rum topping but was vetoed because of the little pirates that attend the feast)