Franklin asserted that this plucky fowl would have been a better choice in the first place. Eagles were found in many countries, but the turkey was an American native and “a bird of courage,” a fitting symbol of America’s valor and virtues. It “would not hesitate to attack a grenadier of the British Guard who should presume to invade his farm yard with a red coat on,” he wrote to Sally. Turkeys were tasty, too, Franklin further explained to her, first brought to France by the Jesuits and served to citizens of note including “at the Wedding Table of Charles the ninth,” in 1570. Some 200 years later, Franklin had served turkey to guests of his own in Philadelphia, and now the sumptuous fowl were often on his diplomatic table in Passy, France. Ever practical, Benjamin “Waste not, want not” Franklin clearly appreciated that a bird of taste and courage could nourish both the body and spirit of the nation.

I write about food, using it as an interpretive tool to understand history and historical figures, so I was delighted to see that Benjamin Franklin liked writing about the topic as well, in his letters and political articles. Franklin realized the impact that foods—particularly, native foods—had in building the identity of a new nation. By the time he wrote that letter to his daughter praising the courage of turkeys, Franklin had pondered and promoted the idea of an American identity for more than 40 years, first as a loyal colonist, later as an emerging patriot, and then as one of the nation’s founders. He championed the things that set his homeland apart from its English and European heritage. Out of his ponderings he would come to define the essential American persona and the ingredients of American success. American geography and its bounty, including its food, were central to the recipe.

Franklin recognized American potential early. In his 1751 essay Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind, written 25 years before the Declaration of Independence, he explained, “so vast is the territory of North America, that it will require many ages to settle it fully; and, till it is fully settled, labor will never be cheap here, where no man continues long a laborer for others, but gets a plantation [farm] of his own, no man continues long a journeyman to a trade, but goes among those new settlers, and sets up for himself, &c.” Franklin contrasted this vista of opportunity with life across the Atlantic, where “Europe is generally full settled with husbandmen, manufacturers, &c. and therefore cannot now much increase in people ….”

Throughout his political and diplomatic career—including 26 years spent in England and France, before and during the American Revolution—Franklin worked hard to convey the strengths of the American setting and the American character. He became a celebrity when he lived near Paris from 1776 to 1785, his image adorning all manner of objects. People felt as though they knew him personally, and he would happily answer their questions about America.

Often, his message was that success in America required persistent hard work, and that no one should travel to the New World unprepared for the challenge. “Many I believe go to America with very little; and with such romantic schemes and expectations as must end in disappointment and poverty,” Franklin wrote in another 1783 letter to Sally and her husband Richard Bache. “I dissuade, all I can, those who have not some useful trade or art by which they may get a living; but there are many who hope for offices and public employments, who value themselves and expect to be valued by us for their birth or quality, though I tell them those things bear no price in our markets. But fools will ruin themselves their own way.”

Products of the land fit easily into Franklin’s vision of American industriousness and greatness. When he lived in London and worked as an agent for the Pennsylvania Colony, in two postings between 1757 and 1775, his wife Deborah sent him a wide variety of his favorite American foods: smoked wild venison, home-cured hams, and dried peaches—he preferred those dried without the peel. She sent kegs of cranberries, which caused great wonder among Franklin’s landlady’s kitchen staff. Deborah shipped barrels of her husband’s favorite Newtown Pippin apples, an American native variety famed for its superior keeping qualities. She sent grafted trees for planting on Franklin’s friends’ estates, symbols of the productive exchange of ideas and commerce he sought to encourage between the Colonies and the Crown.

But it was maize, the primary American grain, that was Franklin’s most ideologically impactful import. Shared by Native Americans with the pilgrims and, now, after more than 100 years of European settlement, widely cultivated on farms across the colonies, this “Indian corn,” as it had been commonly known, was often praised by Franklin for its taste and variety of uses. Deborah’s packages included dried or parched corn kernels, cornmeal, and nocake—a flour made from parched corn that Franklin’s London cook probably used to make pancakes. In letters home to Philadelphia, Franklin thanked Deborah for the corn meals and flours she sent: “For since I cannot be in America, every thing that come from thence comforts me a little, as being something like home,” he wrote, noting specifically that, “The nocake proves very good.”

Benjamin Franklin often considered the essence of his homeland from afar, especially as the 1760s brought the disintegration of the mutually supportive and respectful relationship between England and its American Colonies, which he and other patriots had sought to cultivate. In 1764, during the height of the Stamp Act controversy, Franklin, then living in London, wrote several letters to the editor using pen names such as “Homespun” to make the case for the Colonies. Again, his thoughts turned to corn. He employed it as a metaphor to dramatize the differences between the dynamic, diverse American settlements and the staid English homeland.

In one essay published in several London newspapers in early January 1764, Franklin contrasted the essential American grain’s virtuosity and variety with the limitations of lowly English wheat. “[Maize] is one of the most agreeable and wholesome grains in the world; that its green ears roasted are a delicacy beyond expression; that samp, hominy, succatash, and nocake, made of it, are so many pleasing varieties; and that a johny or hoecake, hot from the fire, is better than a Yorkshire muffin.” Franklin continued saying that British essay writers who preferred “the roast beef of Old England” and condemned corn as “disagreeable” and “indigestible” without even tasting it, suffered from a misguided sense of superiority. He saw their snobbery as a metaphorical parallel to the Crown’s (faulty) assumption that it understood American people and possibilities, and thus knew best how to rule the colonies.

The first shots of the Revolution were at the battle of Lexington and Concord in April 1775, and in June and July of 1776 members of the Continental Congress wrote and signed the Declaration of Independence, with its aspirations to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”—truths that were, in the word Benjamin Franklin himself wrote into that founding document, “self-evident.” Franklin would spend the next 10 years in France promoting American freedom and possibilities.

After the war, when an old English friend, the Earl of Buchan, sought resettlement advice, Franklin told him that, “The only encouragements we hold out to strangers, are a good climate, fertile soil, wholesome air, and water, plenty of provisions and fuel, good pay for labor, kind neighbors, good laws, liberty, and a hearty welcome. The rest depends on a man’s own industry and virtue.”

Franklin cautioned that America’s streets were not paved with gold. But, he might also have added, the new nation’s fields and orchards were indeed filled with delicious turkeys, exceptional apples, and golden grains of opportunity.

The post What Benjamin Franklin Ate When He Was Homesick appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

On Cranberry Day, we gather to eat, drink, and celebrate together. It’s a day for remembering and maintaining a way of life. The Aquinnah Wampanoag is a small tribe, with a membership of approximately 1,300, which makes remembrance even more important. Despite contemporary technology, Aquinnah Wampanoags are oral people, and it is up to the Elders to carry our stories, ceremonies, and traditions forward. My grandmother used to say, “if you show up at a tribal function and you are the oldest one there then you are an Elder.”

Cranberry Day has been a big holiday for the Aquinnah Wampanoag people for a long time. Tribal children are excused from school. Relatives come from the mainland. Families prepare food for days. There might be chowder, various kinds of fish, clam fritters, stuffers—stuffed quahogs, or hard-shell clams —and potato bargain, a dish made of potatoes and salt pork that was called “bargain” because potatoes and salt pork used to be especially economical. Also blueberry slump, which is like a cobbler; Johnny cake; and my favorite, seaweed pudding—made from boiling native seaweed, which coagulates and forms a custard all on its own.

The Aquinnah Wampanoag Tribe celebrate Cranberry Day each year on Noepe, also known as Martha’s Vineyard. Photo by Beverly Wright.

On Cranberry Day we make a bonfire, eat, and pick cranberries. Cranberry bogs form in the lowlands between sand dunes, where the fruit grows on low-lying vines in bogs or marshes layered with sand, peat, clay, and fresh water. Windy days can leave a layer of sand from the dune which stunts the growth of weeds and prevents insect infestations. The bogs are owned by the tribe as part of our trust lands. Only tribal members can pick there. Our tribe has been tending some bogs and vines for over two hundred years. Long ago, Elders decided that the bogs would not be commercialized—that is, not be weeded and flooded and otherwise manipulated to create a bigger crop, as Ocean Spray or other commercial growers do. This means that some years there are no cranberries and the next year the bogs overflow. The Great Spirit takes care of it.

In past years most of the cranberries we picked would be sold on the mainland to supplement tribal families’ income. But today, most people freeze the berries to use over the winter for cranberry bread, sauce, pies, chutney, tea, and jelly—plus, stringing cranberry garlands for the Christmas tree. You don’t even have to freeze them. My grandmother would keep cranberries “under the eaves” in the attic, where it was just cold enough that cranberries would keep. All winter she would say, “Go under the eaves and get me a couple of cups of cranberries.”

Cranberries form an important part of New England history. Wampanoag men have always been great sea warriors, sea captains, and harpooners—Tashtego in Moby Dick is a Wampanoag. Whaling vessels would store barrels of cranberries below deck for the long voyages. Cranberries are a good source of vitamin C and would help stave off scurvy.

My earliest memory of Cranberry Day comes from when I was five or six. I was allowed to stand at the roadside early in the morning before the sun was up with my cousins and wait for one of my relatives, Jack Belain, to come along with his team of oxen and cart. He would pick up all the kids along the road and then cut off at the cow path over the sand dunes, past the blueberry bushes and beach plum bushes, and come out at the cranberry bogs. As kids we were glad to get there early before the grown-ups arrived so we could pick out our spot on top of the dune for the cranberry races.

Races began after lunch, when we children had eaten our full. The crust of a sand dune makes an excellent racetrack. We would look for the biggest round cranberries and pick our partners. Whoever was at the top would roll the cranberry down and the partner at the bottom would catch the berry and throw it back to the top. The race would usually end when someone fell down the dune and broke the crust.

These days, we still meet at the bogs early in the morning but mostly come by car. Tribal members live all over the country. Some can’t return for Cranberry Day. I always send a box of fresh picked berries to my grandson in Denver.

And since the town is no longer home to only tribal members, we invite our neighbors to a potluck dinner at our community center at the end of Cranberry Day. The harvest of the day is on full display. We drum, sing, and dance and offer blessings to the Creator for the harvest and hope for the next year.

At night, Elders tell stories about our history and our home.

The post Every October, on Martha’s Vineyard, We Celebrate Cranberry Day appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.