Recommended : THE LANGUAGE OF FOOD
English: turkey cock, cock of Inde
French: poulle d'inde, poulle d'afrique
Dutch: Calkoensche henne, Turcsche henne
German: Indianisch hun, Kalekuttisch hun, Welschhun
Italian: Gallina D'India
Portuguese: Galinha do Peru
The two birds were immediately confused, in Antwerp and throughout Europe. The English word "turkey cock" or "cocks of Inde", and the French word "poules d'Inde" were used sometimes for turkeys, sometimes for guinea fowl, for the next hundred years. Even Shakespeare sometimes got it wrong, at least once using "turkey" (1 Henry IV II.1) when he meant guinea hen. Flemish texts from 1555 cited by the Woordenboek der Nederlandsche Taal (WNT), show that the Dutch had the same confusions, as did the Portuguese themselves; the word for turkey, galinhas do Peru ("Peru chickens") was used to describe the guinea fowl that the Portugese Jesuits saw in Ethiopia. Conrad Gesner, the Swiss naturalist whose Historiae animalium was the most encyclopedia zoological description of animals of its time, confused the turkey and the guinea fowl in his bird descriptions in 1555.
Mavi Boncuk |
(1552): Meleagrides, byrdes, whiche we doo call hennes of Genny, or Turkie hennes.
(1578): With white and blacke spots, lyke to the feathers of the Turkie or Ginny hen.
Archaeologist Anne E. Yentsch found early archeological evidence for this African-American tradition of using clay pots, and argues that it comes from Mandinka traditions of stewing guinea fowl in earthenware pots. It's even quite possible that the fried chicken traditions of our South derive from West African fried guinea fowl cooking methods.
Turkey also made the journey back to the United States, The turkey in England was very popular by the 1560s and was a standard roasting bird for Christmas and other feasts by 1573, when a poem celebrated:
Christmas husbandlie fare... pies of the best, ... and turkey well drest
The English colonists brought domestic turkeys to Jamestown in 1607. In 1612, Captain John Smith talks of Virginia having "wilde Turkies as bigge as our tame". Domestic turkeys were also shipped from England to the Massachusetts Bay colony from England in 1629, where colony members compared the wild turkey to "our English Turky". Thus even if the mythical Pilgram Thanksgiving had actually happened, it would certainly have been following a fine English tradition of roast turkey celebrations.
In other words, both the Africans and the English managed, despite the horrors of slavery and the terrible hardship of exile, to bring the food of their homelands to help create the cuisine of our new country. That's another beautiful myth about America, one that I still cling to: that we've created something truly extraordinary in our stone-soup America by throwing into the pot, each of us, ingredients from the fiercely-preserved traditions that we each brought from wherever we came from to make this place home.
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