Strange Tastes in Familiar Dishes
Living side by side, all three cultures saw and smelled one another’s most (and least) appetizing food. Often, curiosity won over fear of the unfamiliar. Historic recipe collections, oral histories, and surviving traditions tell us about culinary blending between these groups.
Sapaun
Just about everyone every day ate sapaun (from the Lenape word nzáapaan), a simple cornmeal mush perfected by Indigenous people. Europeans enjoyed it with butter, milk, cheese, or syrup. Africans may have prepared it like a porridge, mixing in leafy greens and squash.
Carved Wooden Mortar
HHS Permanent Collection
Corn Pones
The Esopus Lenape pounded corn into meal to make ash-baked bread, called ápwaan (from which the English word ‘pone’ is derived), and a dense boiled bread called chooskunápwaan, often filled with beans or berries. European and African cooks adopted these handheld cornmeal breads, giving them many names (johnny cake, cornbread, hoe cake).
Wooden mortars like this were made by Indigenous people by carving and hollowing out tree trunks. The flared form of this mortar relates to an example in the National Museum of the American Indian (Smithsonian) with origins in Ulster County. In particular, wooden mortars were used with pestles by Indigenous people to grind corn and nuts with hard shells, like acorns and beechnuts.
When they wish to make use of [maize] for bread or porridge they first boil it and then beat it flat upon a stone; then they put it into a wooden mortar, which they know how to hollow out by fire, and then they have a stone pestle, with which they pound it small, and sift it through a small basket of rushes. The finest meal they mix with lukewarm water, and knead it into dough, then they make round flat little cakes of it, of the thickness of an inch or a little more, which they bury in hot ashes, and so bake into bread; and when these are baked they have some clean fresh water by them in which they wash them while hot, one after another, and it is good bread, but heavy. The coarsest meal they boil into a porridge, and it is good eating when there is butter over it.
—Isaack de Rasieres, Dutch colonist, describing Lenape cooking ca. 1628
Stews
Everyone knew that flavors marry deliciously in a stewpot. Esopus stews brought together game, corn, and squash with seasonings like pounded dry shellfish or spicebush leaves. African stews mixed sorghum or pounded yams with goat, poultry or fish, greens, and palm oil. Dutch hutspot combined carrots and onions with other root vegetables. French-speaking colonists braised meat and vegetables in wine, cinnamon, and nutmeg.
Waffles
A favorite of Dutch and Flemish people, waffles took on local flavor when made with cornmeal and drizzled with maple syrup.
Waffle Iron
18h centry
HHS Permanent Collection, gift of Ronald and Mary-Elizabeth Atkins in Memory of Alfred Hasbrouck (1906-1994)
Pewter Measuring Cups
18th century
HHS Permanent Collection, Museum Purchase
Cooking in Captivity
Whenever they could, colonial women shifted kitchen chores onto enslaved people. What was it like to fill the bellies of one’s enslavers? Culinary historian Lavada Nahon imagines the experience of a woman newly enslaved in what is today New York:
It is easy for me to imagine what it must have been like for those first African women being trained to cook as they struggled to get a sense of balance in a kitchen they did not understand. We look at the handwritten recipe books, and admire the countless recipes for the varieties of these common dishes, yet, we never give thought to what it took for an African woman to make thin, crisp, lightly brown, melt-in-your-mouth wafers or what may have happened to her when she failed. We don’t consider the pain of burned palms from the heat of the handles after hours of trying. Her aching arms, her sore back. We choose not to envision the touch of a whip on her back when she fails, embarrassing her owner. For this charter generation of cooks, women in the most dangerous jobs, we have nothing but our imagination to help us begin to understand what it took for them to master the feel of wheat in all its various batters and doughs, from smooth, lump free, and runny for waffles, wafers, and pancakes, to malleable pounds of it mixed with just the right amount of yeast and water, and formed into round loaves for bread or smoothed between their hands into nicely shaped rolls for the bakers to cook off.
—Lavada Nahon, “Sight, Sound, Touch, and Taste: Africans Sensing the Dutch in New Netherland
Culinary historian Lavada Nahon demonstrates outdoor cooking.