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food that abounded along the eastern seaboard: the turkey. A not unreasonable question is how a native American bird came to be named for a country four thousand miles away. The answer is that when turkeys first appeared in England, some eighty years before the Mayflower set sail, they were mistakenly supposed to have come from Turkey. They had in fact come from Spain, brought there from Mexico by Hernan Cortes’s expedition of 1519. Many other European nations made a similar geographical error in naming the bird. The French thought they came from India and thus called them chickens ’d’Inde,’ from which comes the modern French dindon. The Germans, Dutch and Swedes were even more specifically inaccurate in their presumptions, tracing the bird to the Indian city of Calicut, and thus gave it the respective names Kalekuttisch Hün, kalkoen and kalkon. By the 1620s, the turkey was so well known in Europe, and its provenance had so long been assumed to be the Near East, that the Pilgrims were astounded to find them in abundance in their new-found land. A similar linguistic misunderstanding was obtained with another native American food, the Jerusalem artichoke, which is not an artichoke at all – indeed it doesn’t even look like an artichoke – but rather is the root of the sunflower Helianthus tuberosus. Jerusalem is merely a corruption of the Italian word for sunflower, girasole.

Under the patient tutelage of the Indians, the colonists gradually became acquainted with, and even developed a fondness for, native products like pumpkins, at first generally called pompions, and squashes, which the colonists confusingly also called pompions. Pumpkin pie became a big hit after the Pilgrims were introduced to it at their second Thanksgiving feast in 1623, but the conventional spelling didn’t become established until much later. As late as 1796, the first American cookbook – a slender volume with the dauntingly all-embracing title of American Cookery, or the Art of Dressing Viands, Fish, Poultry and Vegetables, and the Best Modes of Making Pâtés, Puffs, Pies, Tarts, Puddings, Custards and Preserves and All Kinds of Cakes, from the Imperial Plumb to Plain Cake, Adapted to this Country and All Grades of Life, by Amelia Simmons: An American Orphan – called the dish ‘pompkin pie’. Pumpkin pie was also called pumpkin pudding until the mid-1600s, pudding then suggesting a pie without a top crust.

The Indians introduced the colonists not only to new foods, but to more interesting ways of preparing them. Succotash, clam chowder, hominy, corn pone, cranberry sauce, johnnycakes, even Boston baked beans and Brunswick stew were all Indian dishes. In Virginia it was the Indians, not the white settlers, who invented Smithfield ham.3 Even with the constant advice and intervention of the Indians the Puritans stuck to a diet that was for the most part resolutely bland. Meat and vegetables were boiled without pity, deprived of seasonings and served lukewarm. Peas, once they got the hang of growing them, were eaten at almost every meal, and often served cold. The principal repast was taken at midday and called dinner. Supper, a word related to soup (and indeed at the time still often spelled souper), was often just that – a little soup with perhaps a piece of bread – and was consumed in the evening shortly before retiring. Lunch was a concept yet unknown, as was the idea of a snack. To the early colonists, ‘snack’ meant the bite of a dog.

Johnnycake is sometimes said to be a contraction of journey cake, the idea being that it was a food packed for journeys, but since it is a kind of corn-bread and corn-bread patently is not a travelling food, the explanation is unconvincing. Another suggestion is that it is a corruption of Shawnee cake. As Ciardi notes, in New England it was called jonakin or jonikin long before it was called johnnycake, suggesting that johnnycake is a folk etymology based on some earlier, forgotten Indian term.4 Two other travelling foods known to early Americans were pemmican and jerked beef. Despite the name, nothing is jerked to make