If you see the image in the work of three or four different artists of the period, a different image emerges. Your 21st century instincts don't always help you when you're trying to reconstruct a kitchen of the early 17th century. What has been a great help, Marcoux says, is the fact that many cookbooks for wealthy English families emerged in the first third of the 17th century. What the cookbooks don't tell you is what the poor people were eating. Using the evidence to surmise After finding no formal cookbooks in the 1620s artifacts here, food historians started looking at recipes and methods published in the English books and trying to figure out how they might have been changed to fit the needs of Pilgrims in the new settlement.
Corn is a good example.
They slow-cooked it to a creamy consistency, in foods like potage and porridge, stews and cornmeal mash. Because it grew so well here, they had to figure out how to fit corn into diets. Dutch genre paintings show roasted turkeys with the wings and heads reattached after cooking. Sometimes a white collar was added for decoration. They wanted to see the whole bird.