North American Cuisine |
||
|
Early on, until about 2000 BC, people in North America ate only wild foods that they could hunt or gather. These foods varied according to the environment where each group of people lived. Inuit people, who lived in the far north along the coasts of the Arctic Ocean and in Alaska, ate a lot of fish and seal meat, and gathered seaweed. Chinook people, who lived a little further south in the Pacific Northwest (modern Oregon and Washington) ate a lot of salmon, and wapato, which was a lot like potatoes. Further south, Californian people ate a lot of bread made from acorns. In the southwest (modern Arizona and New Mexico), Pueblo people ate cactus fruit. The people who lived in the Rocky Mountains and the Great Plains, like the Blackfoot, the Sioux, the Ute, and the Navajo, ate a lot of mammoth, at first, and then when the mammoth all died out, they began to eat a lot of buffalo meat. They dried and smoked the buffalo meat so they could eat it for a long time after a hunt, making beef jerky. Ute people also ate a lot of pine nuts, which they gathered from the trees, and sunflower seeds. Further east, along the Mississippi and Missouri rivers, people also ate a lot of fish and gathered nuts and berries. Along the Great Lakes, Cree people ate fish with wild rice that they gathered in the wetlands around the lakes. And on the East Coast, the Iroquois and the Algonquians ate venison (deer meat) and fish, and also pigeon and turkey and rabbit. Sometimes they ate bear, which was important even though it was hard to get, because it had a lot of fat, and the deer and fish didn't. Like the Californians, they gathered acorns to make bread, and they also made bread out of sunflower seeds. To sweeten their food, they used maple sugar and maple syrup, and also honey. Cooks put maple sugar in bread, stew, tea, and vegetables, and people sprinkled it on top of their berries. In the southeast, Cherokee people ate a lot of turtle, fish, and venison, sweet potatoes and also acorn bread. |
|
An important food for people who were travelling or hunting was pemmican, a sort of energy bar made of berries and chopped meat, that people could eat without having to stop and cook anything. But around 1000 BC, people began to eat very differently in North America. The Pueblo people began to farm about this time. They got corn and beans and squash from the pre-Olmec people of Mexico, and they began to eat a lot of these three crops (the "Three Sisters" instead of the wild foods. People made corn into a flat bread, like modern tacos and tortillas, and rolled up mashed beans inside these wrappers. Farming soon spread to other parts of North America, and by 1000 AD most people in the Mississippi Valley and along the East Coast were eating a lot of corn, beans and squash (the Three Sisters) along with their wild food. Along the East Coast, people also ate a lot of sunflower seeds that they grew, and used sunflower oil. One important food that these farming people ate was succotash, which was a kind of stew made of beans, corn, meat, and bear fat. People also ate roasted or boiled corn on the cob, bean soup and pumpkin soup. Whether they were farming or not, everybody's main drink was water. When they could, though, many people liked to drink tea better than just plain water. People made tea with sassafras, or added pumpkin blossoms or corn silk to thicken their water. People in California added lemonade berries to their water to make a sour drink like modern lemonade.
|
 |
|
Food of North America after 1500
People eating in Virginia, about 1550 AD |
||
 |
In 1500 AD, most of the people living in North America, like the Pueblo, the Cherokee, the Iroquois, and the Mississippians, ate mainly beans and corn and squash. Sometimes people ate their corn baked into tacos or tortillas; other times they boiled it into mush or soup. To go with the beans and corn, they ate the meat of wild animals - venison (deer meat), rabbit, or pigeon. If they lived near a lake or a river, they ate trout or salmon or the other fish that were in those rivers. They also ate berries and nuts that grew in the wild, and roots like potatoes and carrots and sweet potatoes, and another root we don't eat much today called wapato. Some people, like the Chinook, the Inuit, or the Navajo, did not eat beans or corn at this time. They didn't farm, so they ate only things that could be gathered in the wild. In place of the corn and beans, they ate acorns or wild grass seed mashed up and cooked into flat bread or soup. When European settlers began to settle in North America, they soon learned to eat like the Native Americans - mainly a lot of sweet potatoes and corn and beans and meat and berries and nuts. But the Europeans also brought European animals with them, so they also ate pork and beef and mutton (from sheep) and chicken. They smoked the pork to make hams and bacon, and they got eggs from the chickens. Instead of cooking on open fires like the Native Americans, the Europeans mainly cooked over fireplaces. By the 1700's, more of the European settlers had arrived, and they began to plant wheat and barley to make into flour for bread. Now they didn't eat as much corn, but instead they ate more bread and porridge. In some places, there were so many settlers that it got hard to find enough deer or wild birds or rabbits to hunt, so keeping animals for food was the only way to get meat. In the 1800's, as people came to settle in North America from all over the world (especially Europe, Africa, and China), they all brought their own foods with them. From Africa, people brought yams, or sweet potatoes, and black-eyed peas, and okra. From Europe came noodles, pies and cakes, and vegetables like lettuce and peas. Chinese people brought with them rice and many Chinese vegetables like bok choy. The biggest changes in food came in the 1900's, when the use of oil and machines made it possible to bring fresh milk and vegetables to the cities all year round, by putting Florida oranges and California avocados on fast trains. Oil engines also made possible canned food and refrigerators, both in stores and in people's houses. Because of the machines being used to plant and harvest food, and the machines being used to process it, food became much cheaper and easier to get than it had been before. The most important difference of the 1900's is that suddenly very few people were hungry, where in the past - from the Stone Age to the 1800's - most people never knew what it felt like to have enough to eat. But some things still stay the same. Most of the crops grown in North America today are the same ones grown before the Europeans came - corn, sunflowers, beans and potatoes. And the fruit and meat that people ate before the Europeans came are also still important in North America today - salmon and turkey and blueberries. |
|
