However, none of these foods are high in energy, and the typical English farmer was accustomed to a diet that gave him almost six thousand calories a day. To get these calories, he ate a normal daily diet of one pound of meal or peas cooked up in a porridge, pudding, or bread, over a pound of butter and cheese, and a full gallon of strong, dark ale. Some dried or corned meat and fish were also eaten but usually only in small amounts—quarter pound a day. The Englishmen in the 1620s certainly did not live on flesh alone. William Bradford, for example, described a season of semistarvation, when “the best they could present their friends with was a lobster or a piece of fish without bread or anything else but a cup of fair spring water.” Simply to meet his daily caloric needs, a Pilgrim would have to eat a twenty-pound lobster at breakfast, lunch and supper. As they lacked dairy cows in 1621 and their peas and barley were insufficient, their survival hinged on the Indian corn. If this crop failed, so would the pilgrimage.
It did not fail. In October twenty acres of corn, laboriously planted and manured with shads in the Indian manner, ripened beautifully. Describing this bounty, Winslow religiously acknowledged in Puritan fashion that “our corn [grain] did prove well, and, God be praised, we had a good increase of Indian corn....” Thus, the corn yield was unexpectedly high. Each Pilgrim could look forward to two pounds of corn meal every day.
It might have seemed appropriate for the Pilgrims to formalize their thanks to God with a solemn day of thanksgiving. Instead, they opted for an older mode of thanksgiving known as Harvest Home. Most of them as boys had experienced the secular revelry of Harvest Home, when, after the main grain crop was ingathered, it was cakes and ale and hang the cost. Earlier in the sixteenth century it had been so rowdy during harvest time that Henry VIII had attacked the numerous feasts that prevented farmers from “taking the opportunity of good and serene weather offered upon the same in time of harvest.” So by the late 1500s the holiday was begun only after the harvest was safely home. Then came day after day of revelry, sports and feasts. As Thomas Tusser, the Elizabethan farmer-poet, described it:
In Harvest-time, harvest folk
servants and all,
Should make all together
good cheer in the hall,
And fill the black bowl
of blyth to their song,
And let them be merry,