Who  wants to make a traditional Thanksgiving dinner similar to the one the Lost Colonists would have had?

If so, we hope you’re hungry for boiled grain pudding, roots, and salted fish. The first inhabitants’ rudimentary guns were not able to bring down deer or large fowl. In fact, the first colonist had very little in the way of what we now think of as typical dishes for a meal of thanks.

Fast forward to the 1800s on the Outer Banks and not much had improved. A few sources confirm a duck and goose added to the menu, or oysters and clams, as well as persimmon pie. The persimmon tree is native to the Outer banks and since its fruit doesn’t ripen till late, it made for the perfect pie ingredient.

By the early 1900s, families shared butchered pigs, hung hams, and set aside enough salt pork for frying fish. Shrimp weren’t eaten, but traded for corn to farmers on the mainland, thus, cornbread as added. Also chowders, included our famous Hatteras-style chowder, were included by the mid century.

What’s for Dinner?

Fish was eaten for breakfast, lunch, dinner and special occations.

Dolly Gray Jones, whose chowder has won local competitions, remembers eating chowders often as a girl on the Outer Banks. “Everybody had onions and potatoes in dry storage. Everybody had salt meat, the pork. And anybody could get out and get the clams,” she says.

Without refrigeration, beef was hard to keep fresh, so Bankers rarely bothered to slaughter them for meat. The sandy soil doesn’t allow for many animals to graze, so even milk was in short supply. In 1945, in what’s now downtown Manteo, a herd of six cows grazed at the present elementary school. That explains why traditional coastal Carolina clam chowder has no cream!

So no standing rib roasts, no turkey, no recipes with cream, few fruits, and very little sugar. I’ll stick with my modern turkey dinner, sweet potato casserole, green beans, and apple pie!