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Feast and famine for Jamestown colonists, Powhatan Indians

December 5, 2004 1:09 am

IMAGINE trying to feed yourself on a day when all the supermar- kets are closed, the public water supplies are foul, power and natural gas are cut off and roads to other communities are destroyed.

This is the modern-day equivalent of what English colonists in Jamestown faced in 1607. Without supermarkets, running water, stoves or microwaves, they still managed to make delicious meals--when food was available.

Food and nutrition were vastly different in Colonial times, as historical interpreters demonstrated last weekend during Jamestown Settlement's annual Foods and Feasts of Colonial Virginia festival.

During good times, extravagant feasts featured succulent roasted fish, duck, and pork; lavish amounts of butter and lard, pies and bread; and mouthwatering sweets and puddings.

People routinely ate 4,000 to 8,000 calories a day to fuel their heavy labors, according to staff at the settlement. (For comparison, modern Americans need about 2,000 calories a day.)

But during bad times, people starved. One winter began with 500 colonists; by spring there were only 60.

Foods were scarce at certain times of the year and abundant at others. The water in the James River was so foul and brackish that even the colonists' children drank beer instead. Insects pillaged stores of flour, and starving colonists had to wait for ships to come in with basics such as flour and then-exotic oranges, lemons and pineapples.

Your options for dinner were: grow it, kill it, or hope an Indian or a boat arrives with it. Ships came in every four to six months.

One thing is sure, the colonists would not have survived without the help of the Powhatan Indians, although their relationship was rocky. We know little about Powhatan cooking.

"Everything we know comes through English eyes, and they make mistakes," said Lynn Powell, a historic interpreter at the Jamestown Settlement's festival.

"The Powhatan women are not going to be trading their domestic secrets with these strange men," said Anastasia Triantafillos, another interpreter dressed in fringed buckskin tending a wood fire.

Triantafillos used a stick to push coals in the fire around a clay pot.

"I call it the original Crock-Pot," she said, adding that her soup of pumpkins and squash eventually would come to a simmer.

Cooking was laborious--instead of turning on a stove, one would build a fire. At the Jamestown festival, the interpreters cooked meats and poultry directly over the hot fire. Clay pots of stew were cooked in embers. Flat rocks heated in the fire served as primitive griddles.

Old recipes measured things in pounds, not cups or teaspoons--except for occasional instructions such as "half an eggshell full of milk."

Colonists had vague instructions about handfuls of this or that, or seasoning things to taste. The seasonings were probably very different.

"Spices were new, they were exciting [and the colonists] used them in abundanceto make that gingerbread really burn," said Laura Templin, supervisor of the riverfront site. "Your gums tingled. It was spicy. It was gingerbread."

She said pies and pasties, similar to modern-day Hot Pockets, were popular because pastry crust is quicker to make than yeast breads.

Last weekend, women demonstrated the niceties of making pies, puddings, breads and interesting sweets such as jumbles, anise-flavored cookies shaped like pretzels. Men demonstrated how to butcher a hog, cure ham and make sausage.

Contrary to popular belief, venison was not in abundant supply in Jamestown. The Powhatans killed off the deer in the area before the colonists arrived, said Katie Preisser, supervisor of the riverfront area.

The Indians traveled about 50 miles inland, near what is now Richmond, to hunt deer.

The Indians also caught their protein. Common protein sources were catfish, white perch, croaker, sturgeon, shad, crab, oyster, terrapin (turtle), wild turkey, quail, otter, squirrel and rabbit.

An even less common "treat" included black bear meat.

"It tastes like a real lean steak when it's fried on a rock," said Powell.

She said modern-day hunters often donate their game to Jamestown Settlement to be cooked at demonstrations such as the one last weekend. Unfortunately, the public cannot taste the food, interpreters said, because the health department has said the cooking premises are unsanitary.

(Last weekend, this left salivating visitors thronging to the settlement's modern cafeteria for pizza and other familiar dishes.)

Along with game, the Indians relied on corn (boiled, parched, dried, ground and cooked into cakes, you name it), as well as beans, squash, black walnuts, persimmons, mulberries, grapes, dried fruit and sunflower seeds. By winter time, the only fresh thing available was acorns. The first food of spring was tuckahoe, a marsh plant whose roots can be eaten.

Menus were determined by the seasons, not by people's cravings.

"Strawberries were a two-week phenomenon," Templin said.

The only way to eat something out of season was to preserve it. The Indians dried fruit and smoked any leftover meat and fish, storing it in baskets inside their yehakins, or houses made of woven reeds lashed over wooden frames.

In contrast, the colonists preserved food by salting it.

Preisser explained that salting a fish takes several days. You spread salt on the fish, and every few minutes wipe the wet salt off and put dry salt on, producing a light, hard, almost wooden-textured fish that would have to be soaked in water before being eaten. Salt fish keeps indefinitely.

Colonists also pickled vegetables and fruits, even things that sound unusual by today's standards, such as pickled plums.

This gave them a much wider variety of foods to choose from than they had during their original voyage from England to Virginia.

The colonists came to Virginia on three ships, and today's visitors to Jamestown can board replicas of the vessels, with their amazing carved woodwork, brightly painted exteriors and tall masts and sails.

The largest of the ships was the Susan Constant. It was 116 feet long and carried 71 sailors and colonists. The kitchen was a tiny, dark room with a ceiling too low for a man to stand. Blackened pots and spoons, a rolling pin and some wooden platters hung from the walls and ceiling.

The cook mostly would have prepared stews.

Each passenger had a weekly ration of one pound of beef, two pounds of pork, some white Cheddar and butter if available, one pound of oatmeal, two pints of dried peas, seven gallons of beer and a whopping 10 pounds of ship's biscuits, explained interpreter Tina Cronin, standing behind a table of such food near the ship's pier.

The biscuits looked like brown hockey pucks, and felt just as hard. She said they were made of flour, salt and water that had been baked dry. To make them edible, the biscuits were soaked in soup or beer. Years later, sea biscuits were called "hardtack" and were a soldier's staple during the Civil War.

If the Colonial crew and passengers were lucky, captain Christopher Newport might have paid for root vegetables, such as potatoes, carrots, turnips and parsnips to supplement the rations.

And during the 4-month voyage, the boats likely stopped at the Canary Islands and West Indies, where pineapples, oranges, lemons, pomegranates and sea birds' eggs were available, as well as arrack, a tropical liquor, according to Dutch Schultz, maritime historical interpreter.

Without the extras, the ship's rations provided about 4,800 calories a day, Cronin said.

On land, the colonists consumed even more, up to 8,000 calories a day, in meals loaded with lard and butter, according to Templin.

"You're working it off," she explained.

Colonists chopped wood, carried water and were active most waking hours.

One summer, Templin's husband spent six to eight hours each day sawing wood by hand as part of a re-enactment. She said he worked up such an appetite that he and his co-workers were banned from going to the Golden Corral restaurant after work because they would eat 14 plates of food from the buffet.

She said her husband still lost weight!

Hearing about the lean times at Jamestown reminded me of how rich we are today, with supermarkets packed with fresh fruits and vegetables from across the globe all year round, and no ships to wait for or wood to chop. Yet even without modern conveniences, we can learn from the delicious meals early Americans made from limited ingredients.

For British and Colonial recipes of the times, some of the interpreters at Jamestown recommended these books:

"The Good Housewife's Jewel" by Thomas Dawson, 1596

"Elinor Fettiplace's Receipt Book" by Lady Elinor Fettiplace, 1604

"Martha Washington's Booke of Cookery and Booke of Sweetmeats," 1749

"The Martha Washington Cook Book" by Marie Kimball, 2004, based on 1749 original

"The Gourmet's Guide 1580-1660" by Stuart Peachey.

For more information about Jamestown Settlement, go to historyisfun.org or call 888/593-4682.

JENNIFER MOTL, a registered dietitian in Fredericksburg, welcomes reader questions via her Web site, brighteating.com, or mailed to Nutrition, The Free Lance-Star, 616 Amelia St., Fredericksburg, Va. 22401.