Forget the pumpkin pie. If you were a pilgrim or a Wampanoag at the Plymouth Colony in 1621, you would have feasted well for three days but you wouldn't have ended with pie.
The pilgrims and Wampanoag didn't have the butter and wheat flour to make pie crusts so that eliminates one of the main courses an English immigrant might have hoped for in a feast. No sweet pies and no meat pies, a staple of English cuisine.
Kathleen Wall, who studies foods at the Plymouth Plantation living history museum, suspects that the feast was filled with meats and fish, including a variety of shellfish.
Some evidence for the dinner comes from colonist Edward Winslow who wrote of a great store of wild turkeys, waterfowl, and Indian corn. The 90 or so Wampanoag also brought five deer to the feast.
After the first day, leftover meats were probably boiled into a rich broth. Corn flour was added to the broth to make a pottage.
There was no doubt an abundance of nuts such as chestnuts, walnuts and beechnuts, but no mashed potatoes or potatoes of any kind. White potatoes, which originated in South America, and sweet potatoes from the Caribbean, had not yet reached the shores of North America.
