Historic partnership showcases food in 17th century Boston

Rose Doherty, president of the Partnership of the Historic Bostons, speaks to attendees before the Founders Monument in Boston during a Founders Walking Tour. Photo courtesy Jacob SconyersRose Doherty, president of the Partnership of the Historic Bostons, speaks to attendees before the Founders Monument in Boston during a Founders Walking Tour. Photo courtesy Jacob Sconyers 
They would need meal, peas, vinegar, and butter. They would carry cloth for bedding, few stockings, few clothes. Between the hoe and the handsaw, they may have had a spoon, but no forks.

When colonists settled in New England in 1630, they had little, living in improvised wigwams and scraping by on food.  Yet, by the 1640s, they were established residents. “It was an amazing, amazing feat to go from nothing, starting from scratch,” said Rose Doherty, president of the Partnership of the Historic Bostons.

“When people arrived in Boston and Dorchester, they faced the same challenges,” Doherty said. The great equalizer in those days was food, or lack thereof. So, to mark this year’s Charter Day festivities, celebrating the Sept. 7, 1630 naming of Boston, Watertown, and Dorchester, the Partnership is taking interested parties on a gastronomic tour of 17th century Boston. 

Each year, Charter Day festivities have expanded, Doherty said. The 2015 day itself was marked by bell ringing at King’s Chapel and Park Street Church, followed by a well-trod Founders Walking Tour. But Doherty has more in mind, and for longer. The one-year-in president is overseeing a Charter Day events schedule lasting until Nov. 4, all focused on the early food and drink in Boston.

Only two events have passed so far – the Old South Meeting House celebration and an illustrated lecture discussing the survival challenges in early Boston. Doherty presented the lecture on Sept. 9 to some 60 people in the central branch of the Boston Public Library. As last year’s Charter Day theme was survival, Doherty recapped colonial struggles, which she said offered a perfect prequel to a focus on food. 

Dorchester and Boston, though named at the same time, have different settlement histories. As the famous Winthrop fleet traveled north to Salem, a separate ship, the Mary and John, arrived off Nantasket in late May or early June, according to Earl Taylor of the Dorchester Historical Society.

While the Dorchester colonists settled in, Salem proved an unpleasant experience for the Winthrop fleet due to its lack of readily available food, Doherty said. Moving to Charlestown, the colonists found that there was an inadequate amount of fresh water. By the time the exhausted and hungry colonists arrived in Boston, a fierce winter that would freeze the harbor was bearing down on them. “Who would want to live in Boston during the winter?” Doherty asked attendees at the lecture, to laughs.

When assessing the availability of sustenance in those early colonial years, historians rely on the journals of the few men who specifically mentioned food. One among them, Roger Clap in Dorchester, said that there was a distinct want for food and the colonists were starving, Taylor said.

Though, “it really is, from my perspective, hard to believe they were starving,” Taylor said. “There was enough fish in the harbor to be caught, plenty of birds and small game.” A man expressed similar confusion at the illustrated lecture. Taylor’s theory: “I think that, maybe, [Clap] was talking about a lack of English food.”

To be fair, he allowed, they did have to adapt to a new land, new methods of farming, new animals. “There was that period of transition,” Taylor said. According to the Dorchester Historical Society, most efforts by the colonists in the early years were expended on building and maintaining shelter, relying upon shipments of livestock and food from England as theirs were too few to be reliable sources of food.

But adapt they did, throughout the region. The Puritan history of the colonies manifested itself in an interesting relationship with food, work, and civic engagement, Doherty said. This and other topics for the historically and culinarily curious will be delved into in a series of tours, tastings, and lectures over the next few months.

The coming two weeks are loaded with events, starting Friday with “Repast from the Past: A Taste of 17th-Century New England” at the First Church in Boston. This is the only Charter Day event to have a fee, as Kathleen Wall, a culinarian with Plimoth Plantation, will be making some early colonial foods for visitors as it was prepared at the time, sans forks. The Loyal Nine, in Cambridge, will also serve a selection of 17th-century food.

A more intellectual highlight, “The Proof is in the Pudding: New England’s First Food Fight,” is scheduled for next Monday, Sept. 21, where two of the top scholars in Native American and colonial interactions will discuss the effect of Puritan farmland expansion on the native populations and problems with the idealized narrative. (For a full schedule of events, seven to come, visit historicbostons.org.)

Despite the already elongated celebration schedule, Doherty would like to host similar events all year round, but she noted that monthly gatherings and tours will start up again come April. “There is a real hunger in the city for this history,” she said.


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