ISSUE 96, FOOD OF THE 50 STATES, Part 6: The New England Question

The New England Question

Do states really matter when considering the food of the American northeast? You can go to the New England Explorer website and read the article on New Hampshire’s 11 signature foods and walk away wondering if these same foods couldn’t be assigned as signatures for Maine, Vermont, Massachusetts, or Connecticut: Boiled Dinner, Apples, Seafood, Maple Syrup, Stoneyfield Yoghurt, Wild Game, Chocolate Mice, Mead, Lake Bass, Cheese, Poutine. [https://newenglandexplorer.co/new-hampshire-food/] While Stoneyfield Yoghurt is a product that has been produced in NH since the 1980s, how intrinsic is yoghurt to the foodways of the state. The first newspaper article to suggest that Hampshire citizens should eat it was published in July of 1960 when Fredrick J. Stare, MD, recommended it for its health benefits in “The Dr. Speaks” column of the Manchester Guardian. Claiming poutine as New Hampshire food seems a rather bald act of appropriation from Canada. Vermont has too long promoted its own claim to maple syrup to look at its neighbor’s claim with benignity. But truth be told, maple syrup is something made in ME, NH, VT, and NY.

There is no doubt that food has important historical associations for certain New Englands. Natives. The idea of reenacting the Wampanoag harvest feast with the settler of Plymouth Plantation first occurs in 1769 in the Old Colony Club of Plymouth Massachusetts. The Club came to be because political wrangling has gotten so bad among Patriots and Tories, that the young men of the town decide they have to revisit the one shared legacy everyone possess—their Pilgrim ancestry. They create a club, a holiday (not Thanksgiving, but Forefather’s Day), hold the feast indoors roasting meats on the original fire jack brought over on the Mayflower, sitting in Gov. Bradford’s Chair, and dining on the foods they thought had been served in 1621:

1. large baked Indian whortle berry pudding—[that’s huckleberries]

2. a dish of succotash

3. a dish of clams

4. a dish of oysters and a dish of codfish

5. a haunch of venison roasted on the first jack brought to the colony

6. a dish of sea fowl

7. a dish of frost fish and eels

8. an apple pie.

9. A course of cranberry tars and cheese made in the old colony dressed in the plainest manner.

No turkey, no ham, no sweet potatoes, no pumpkin pie. No descendants of the Natives either. But instead of bracing New England water, alcoholic beverages were served including cider and cider brandy. While the bulk of the items were native products of New England—certain things had been brought over from England—the wheat and the apples in the apple pie, the cheese. [The seal presents a man regarding an Old World turnip.] A core of New England foods claim Native origin: Vermont’s maple syrup, Maine’s lobsters, Massachusetts’s Boston marrow squash (really a rebranded Buffalo Creek squash from the 6 nations). Even the Old Colony Sweet Corn (the first nationally distributed variety of sweet corn) as an improved version of the papoon corn seized from the Seneca during the American Revolution. Boiled and salted cod was not an European innovation, but a Native foodway. Yet as the 19^th century wore on, the items that the peoples of the North East embraced were importations or their own innovations. The great horticultural innovations shaped the tastes of the whole region: the Red Weathersfied Onion, the Blue Hubbard Squash, the Danvers Yellow Globe onion, the Danvers Half Long Carrot, the Marshall Strawberry, the Early Rose Potato, the Red Bliss Potato, the Roxbury Russet, Northern Spy, Baldwin, and Rhode Island Greening apples, Meech’s Prolific Quince. It was telling that the principal venue for horticultural conversation in the 19^th century born the name The New England Farmer, and not the name of one of the state agricultural societies.

The potency of “New England” has a food category can be measured I suppose by its aggressiveness in appropriating and rebranding food from someplace else. I lived in the Hudson Valley in the 1980s when the fiddlehead, a Spring-foraged and now cropped fern bracken, became the fashion of New England restaurants. Outside of Maine it had little history as an Anglo Spring green vegetable. And even in Maine its few citations in print in the early 20^th century little suggest the rage for fiddleheads that would flare in the 1980s. Where did the produce stands and restaurants in the 1980s snag their fiddleheads—not from foragers in Maine. But from Canada where the vegetable has long been popular and part of foodways. So with the rival claims of Canadian heritage as a background, newspaper writers began devising the broadest sort of regional mythology for its place in Spring wild foods foraging in New England. So New England remains useful as an intellectual construct about food.

Over the years I’ve collected files of articles about foods from the northeast. Some are quite distinctive and wonderful, such as the eel chowder of Nantucket, or Vermont cider jelly. sweet corn varieties in the early 19^th century), the Marshall Strawberry. Certain iconic dishes—baked beans—Boston brown bread—hasty pudding—pumpkin pie—blueberry pie—apple cider—depended upon crops grown intensively in the region: navy beans, white when, flint corn, field pumpkins, blueberries, cider apples. These were crops not strictly cordoned off in one state. Even Rhode Island’s famous White Cap Flint—that flint was grown in Massachusetts, Connecticut, and even southwestern New Hampshire. So it will not shock you if I say the best lobster roll I ever consumed was had in Portsmouth NH, not Portland ME, or the best pot of baked beans I consumed was in Weston VT not Boston. That’s the way things are up in the American northeast.