“a humble feast, of an ordinary proportion which any good man may keep in his family, for the entertainment of his true and worthy friends ... that is, dishes of meat that are of substance, and not empty, or for show; and of these sixteen is a good proportion both [for your] first and second and third course....”
This “humble” smorgasbord, totaling forty-eight dishes, from the first popular English cookbook, Gervase Markham’s The English Huswife (1623), was for the housewife more ideal than real. The typical harvest feast was more modest. A Yorkshire farmer, Henry Best, wrote that
“it is usual, in most places, after they get all the pease pulled or the last grain down, to invite all the workfolks and their wives (that helped them that harvest) to supper, and then they have puddings, bacon, or boiled beef, flesh or apple pies, and then cream brought in platters, and every one a spoon; then after all they have hot cakes and ale; for they bake cakes and send for ale against that time.”
In communities where labor was pooled at harvest and families helped each other, there would be a round of these meals—in form and function similar to small parish tureen suppers today except that one hostess at a time would assume overall responsibility, excepting neighborly help from other wives.
The atmosphere at Plymouth’s Harvest Home feast was similarly warm and close. A year of privation, culminating in the death of half of the community, had pulled the rest together. Communal farming was adopted—cooperation legalized. By breaking bread together in the open, they sanctified in a robust, secular way their communion. The familiar scene to which we have been accustomed, of Pilgrims and Indians feasting together while seated at tables in the open, is mostly a creation of later artists. It is doubtful that there were enough tables to accommodate even a tenth of the number who were celebrating. It is more likely that food was taken, not at an appointed time and place, but at frequent intervals throughout the time of the festival. Seating was almost certainly on the ground for the most part. Lacking forks, which did not appear in Plymouth until a century later, food was taken with fingers, from the tips of knives, and with spoons. Wooden trenchers (small shallow dishes) were probably much in evidence, while other foodstuffs could have been consumed directly from large kettles, or, in the case of meat, eaten with the hands, hot from the roasting fire. Far from the formality of a single meal taken together, the consumption of food at Plymouth’s first Harvest Home was but one event that mixed with the gaming and “exercising of arms” in one happy blend.
What did they eat? Essentially the yeoman fare noted by Henry Best but with some intriguing American additions. Fresh meat was rare in the farmer’s everyday diet, but feasts featured it. The traditional meat was a young, lean goose. Tusser warned that despite
... all this good feasting
yet are thou not loose
till thou geve the Ploughman