Norah Van Riper is a passionate historical interpreter who loves helping others grasp what life was like in the past. You can experience her insightful and always amusing take on history in her program “Founding Foods: Seasonal Eating on Martha’s Vineyard, 1642–1850,” at the Vineyard Haven library on Jan. 9 at 6 pm.
Speaking about why she selected food as an entryway into history, Van Riper says, “It’s an easy (and delicious) way to connect today with yesterday. There are two ways of approaching history: look at it as a foreign world with nothing in common with ours, or see it as a place with everything in common with ours today, even if the trappings are a little different. But the underlying premise is the same whether we’re talking about 1924, 1778, or 1655.”
The program spans the period from 1642 to 1850. Van Riper explains, “Indigenous people — locally, the Wampanoag — were eating seasonally, and had been for thousands of years by the time the first English colonizers arrived here in 1642. However, because I am not an Indigenous person, my research and presentations focus primarily on the Anglo-European aspect of history. It intersects with and runs in conjunction with Indigenous history, but the Wampanoag story is not mine to tell.” She selected 1642 “because that is when Mr. Mayhew and company showed up here. And 1850ish is a nice endpoint. With the Industrial Revolution, major technological advancements were spreading across the world and rapidly changing the way people grew food crops, raised livestock, and subsequently ate and drank.”
At the library, Van Riper will be in period costume. The discussion will center on the foods on display that Vineyarders would have eaten at different seasons of the year. There will also be tasty samples from historical recipes and a participatory activity to keep everyone engaged.
Regarding her seasonal focus, Van Riper explains, “We live in a world where we can have virtually anything we want to eat at any time of year, assuming we can afford it.” At the same time, there is an awareness of seasonal eating for health and environmental reasons. “This was how people ate for thousands of years, but with limitations that we also don’t consider. You could not get everything you wanted or needed to eat locally. The big difference between now and then is getting fresh fruits and fresh vegetables from other parts of the world that are completely out of season. You can go to Stop and Shop right now and get asparagus for less than five dollars, whereas, say, on this date in 1778, no amount of money could put asparagus on your table.”
Asked about what would have been significantly different during the colonial period regarding taste, Van Riper refers to how much less sugar was in people’s diets. Where it might have been at most just a few pounds a year, today the average American consumes between 60 and 100 pounds annually. Another difference was alcohol consumption. “In early colonial history, alcoholic beverages were simply what you drank; they were not deemed morally different from anything else. In most cases, they were considered to be safer beverages in terms of your health than water. Beer, cider, or wine, if you could afford it, were your table beverages, even for children, for hundreds of years in Western Europe, and subsequently in the colonies and early America. Wheat bread would have been the foundation of your diet with meat or fish and some dairy. And maybe, eventually, we might get a vegetable,” Van Riper shares. The most unusual historical food or recipe she has encountered is “hands down, boiled salad, which is an artifact of how people’s understanding of nutrition changes. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, raw vegetables and raw fruits were considered suspect and not very nutritious. They thought that if you cooked a vegetable, it would bring out its virtues. So, we’re talking about blanched lettuce dressed with olive oil and vinegar.”
Van Riper reflects, “What I want folks to think about is that the past is an awful lot more nuanced and a lot more real than we sometimes give it credit for. It is much too easy to think about the past as that foreign place that has nothing to do with anything today; that they were so backward and weird, and they didn’t know anything. Well, one hundred or two hundred years from now, historians will look back at us and say the same thing. So, wouldn’t it be nice if we could temper our judgment of the people who have come before us and treat them with the same respect and understanding that we would hope to receive from future historians?”
Founding Foods: Seasonal Eating on Martha’s Vineyard, 1642–1850, will occur at the Vineyard Haven Public Library on Thursday, Jan. 9, at 6 pm.
