Old Fashioned Cooking

I’m not much of a cook. I enjoy baking but for some reason cooking is completely different for me. I can’t imagine what it must have been like to cook back in the 17th century.

A bit of culinary history from the Plimoth Plantation website:

There were four ways the Wampanoag gathered food during the 1600s and before. These were hunting, fishing, harvesting wild plants and the planting of crops, which began about 1200 years ago. Many animals were hunted and eaten including deer, moos, beaver, rabbit, skunk, and raccoon. Whatever was hunted became not only food, but the whole animal was used. For example, hides were used for clothing and materials for many things, the bones for tools, and the sinew for sewing.

Wampanoag fished in the fresh-water ponds and rivers for herring, trout, perch, catfish and eels. The Wampanoag fished in the salt-water ocean for cod, tautog , pollock , bluefish, flatfish, bass, sea eels, mackerel and others. Our men went out on whaling trips as well. Women usually caught the shellfish such as oysters, soft-shelled clams, quahogs, mussels, razor clams, lobsters, crabs, and conch.

Those are muscles in the bottom right corner. I’m not sure if these muscles were actually dug up by one of the Native American men/women or if they just bought them at the supermarket. I believe the red tide warning has been lifted for shellfish in the Plymouth area. I suppose back then they didn’t have to worry about red tide.

In the top right corner is a pot brewing with some corn, squash, beans and a few other ingredients. I couldn’t really smell anything from the pot, but it did look pretty good.