Food and Funerals Colonial New York City
New Amsterdam 1699, Courtesy of The New York Public Library
I have been going through WPA food sources from the Great Depression era found in the archives of the Library of Congress in Washington DC. Those of us who write about food traditions either choose to ignore those around death or just haven’t come across sources necessary to write about it. Here is a story from Dutch colonial North America. In New Amsterdam, New York City, funerals had been the occasion for heavy drinking. Among the Pennsylvania Dutch the tradition called for heavy eating. In Pennsylvania friends and family of the bereaved family would come together for several days before the funeral to perform all manner of cooking and baking of large amounts of food. Then on the day of the burial, the funeral service occurred in the morning and a repast meal set up in the afternoon were as many people as possible would be seated at one time. Tradition called for setting a table with seven Sweet and seven sour dishes. One of those dishes would be a dried and sour cherry or raisin funeral pie. This became a tradition for funerals that happened in the wintertime and that’s all people had available as a pie filling. To say that there would be a cherry or raisin sour pie soon was to say someone would be passing shortly.
