Remember our Pilgrim dinner, HERE, from a few years back? We did one again this year but this time with friends.
Our book, Eating The Plates: A Pilgrim Book of Food & Manner by Lucille Recht Penner. This is the book we based our dinner off of.
We only had one chair at our table because in many pilgrim homes only the parents had chairs to sit in. The children typically stood around the table. This was because many pilgrims were too poor to have more than one or two chairs but it was also because many pilgrims believed it was disrespectful for the children to sit in the presence of the adults. If guests were over for dinner the adult guests were offered the chairs. All of the children, even guest children, would stand around the table though.
Turkey cups Annie made for everyone as place settings.
Pilgrims hated to drink water. They much preferred to drink cider. They disliked eating fruit but enjoyed drinking cider so much that they planted apple and pear trees as soon as they could so they would have the fruit to make cider. They often ran out of cider though and were forced to drink water. Most families only had one or two cups per family. They would therefore sit a big bucket of water on the table and would dip a cup into the bucket and each person would take a drink from the same cup and then pass it to the next person. We didn't do that but we did sit a bucket of water on our table to represent this and each of the kids got water from the bucket for their own cups. We also had some apple cider in the white cups to represent the pilgrims love of cider.
Did you know that many pilgrims did not own plates? Some brought over only a few of their best dishes from England/Holland when they came, but most did not have plates to eat on. Instead they used stale bread to eat on. The pilgrims ate a lot of soups and would break off the stale bread and dip it into their soups to soften it and thus, they would eat their plates. That is where the title of our book came from. We put out tortillas as plates to represent this and Annie and I made bread bowls to put soup in.
Just as many of the pilgrim families did not own plates, they also did not own silverware. Many of them brought over a couple of large serving spoons and some knives and that was it. Forks had not even been invented yet. Since the pilgrims ate a lot of stews and soups they would tie seashells onto sticks and use them to eat their soups with. We had a seashell sitting at each place setting to represent this.
Corn is what helped to keep many of the pilgrims alive. They brought over seeds to plant but many of the things they tried to plant that first year did not grow well in the New England soil and climate. They found some corn kernels left by the Indians and planted it and it was the crop that grew really well for them. We therefore had corn chowder in our bread bowls for lunch to represent this.
We all know the story about how Squanto eventually taught the pilgrims to plant fish in with the corn kernels and other crops to produce a better harvest but did you know that the fish smell attracted wolves and other creatures to the corn fields? The pilgrim children were given the duty of sitting nearby with a pile of rocks and throwing them at the wolves to try to scare them off. I don't know about you but I don't think I would want my children throwing rocks at wolves!!
Chickens were brought over on the Mayflower. The pilgrims used the chickens primarily for eggs. They used a lot of eggs in custards and puddings that they would make but they also ate them hard boiled a lot. We therefore had a bowl of hard boiled eggs on our table to represent this.
Pigs were also brought over on the Mayflower but they didn't eat the pigs the first few years because they wanted to breed them. Instead of fencing the pigs in, they fenced in their gardens and let the pigs run free throughout the village.
The pilgrims evaporated salt from the sea. It was one of the only seasonings they had for those first few years here in America. They would sit a big bowl of salt out at the head of the table and the adults sat above the salt and all of the children stood below the salt. Any visitors that came to dinner would sit above the salt. We sat our salt at the head of our table near our only chair and the kids stood below it.
The pilgrims ate a lot of nuts. Of course they were not shelled like these but we sat out a bowl of nuts to represent the nuts they ate.
Our Plymouth Rock cookies (sugar cookies) which Natalie helped me make.
My friend Regina reading a book about Plymouth Rock to the kids.
We played a popcorn game outside after lunch.
With cups filled with popcorn that were attached to the top of their feet they had to race down and dump their popcorn into buckets. Whichever team had the most popcorn in the bucket at the end, won.
{*Note-The photos in this post that all have Zenfolio written on them are pictures taken by my friend, Allison. You can check out her photography website, HERE.}
"The Pilgrims made seven times more graves than huts. No Americans have been more impoverished than these who, nevertheless, set aside a day of thanksgiving." ~H.U. Westermayer
