Ethnic Foods: American Ethnic Food before Immigration

North America had ethnic foods of both categories long before Columbus. Native American tribes were differentiated and sometimes named by their foodways and met in trading networks to sample foreign foods. Plains Indians traded dried buffalo meat, skins, and fat for corn and beans at the pueblos or for wild rice in the Midwest. Pacific coastal Indians traded dried salmon for the acorns and berries of the interior tribes. Smoked fish and perhaps salt were traded up the Cherokee trail for venison. Christopher Columbus exchanged dinners with the Hispaniola Taino chief Guacanagari over Christmas in 1492. Columbus’s log of his first American dinner is lost, but Guacanagari’s review of Spanish shipboard food was eventually retrieved by Father Ramon Pan: “It is like human food. It is large and white, and it is not heavy. It is something like straw, but with the taste of a cornstalk, of the pith of a cornstalk. It is a little sweet, as if it were flavored with honey; it tastes of honey, it is a sweet-tasting food.” Because Guacanagari’s home food was a crispy cassava flatbread, it is speculation whether the cook on the Nina had devised wheat-flour bread, cake, or a hardtack pudding. New Yorkers in the twenty-first century who want to experience what Columbus experienced can pick up a package of cassava bread at any bodega catering to immigrants from the Dominican Republic.