History of oats in North America

Oats were cultivated in Switzerland and Northern Europe by 2500 BC, and two millennia later they were widely cultivated in Europe by the ancient Roman, Germans and Celts.

Oats were introduced by the Spanish into the southern part of North America and into the northern part of the continent by the English and North Europeans. Oats were first brought to North America by early explorers such as Captain Bartholomew Gosnold with other grains in 1602 and planted on the Elizabeth Islands off the coast of Massachusetts.

The Dutch grew oats in New Netherland by 1626 and oats were cultivated in Virginia prior to 1648. Oats were generally grown throughout colonial America mainly for animal feed but Scottish, Dutch and other immigrants used them in their traditional porridges, puddings, and baked goods.

As early as 1786, George Washington sowed 580 acres to oats. By the 1860s and 1870s, the westward shift of oat acreage in the United States had moved into the middle and upper Mississippi Valley, which is its major area of production today.

Most oats grown in North America today descend from Russian, Swedish and Greek ancestors. Oats were not widely consumed in North America until the late 19th and early 20th century when the health benefits of oats were more widely understood, due in part to the efforts of physician like Dr. John Kellogg.
History of oats in North America

Banana fruit: Journey from South East Asian to North America

Portuguese sailors brought bananas to Europe from West Africa in the early fifteenth century. Portuguese called it by its Arab name of al-vaneyra. The islanders of Sao Tome called the fruit abana. Its Guinean name banema, which became banana in English, was first found in print in the seventeenth century.

The original banana has been cultivated and used since ancient times, even pre-dating the cultivation of rice. The wild ancestor of edible bananas (M. acuminata Colla and M. balbisiana Colla), except for the fe’i bananas, are centered in Malesia, a term that refers to the entire region from Thailand to New Guinea roughly the main trading are of the Malay mariners.

Bananas may initially have been introduced into Africa by Arab traders who brought the plants from Malaysia. By the fourteenth century banana had colonized the whole of Africa. An Arab traveler mentions it as existing in the south of Morocco.

The banana was carried by sailors to the Canary Islands and the West Indies, finally making it to North America with Spanish missionary Friar Tomas de Berlanga is believed to have been the first to bring bananas plants to the New World.

Friar Tomas de Berlanga set up the first New World banana plantation in 1516. Banana plantation were soon established throughout European colonies in the Caribbean as well as in South and Central America.

The yellow sweet banana, much different than its starchy cousin the plantain was discovered in 1836 in Jamaica Jean Francois Poujot, who found one of the banana trees on his plantation was bearing yellow fruit rather than green or red. Upon tasting the new discovery, he found it to be sweet in its raw state, without the need for cooking. He quickly began cultivating this sweet variety.

The sweet banana quickly made its way around the fledging colonies and onto Europe, where it was used extensively in baked goods and desserts. Soon they were being imported from the Caribbean to New Orleans, Boston, and New York, and were considered such an exotic treat, they were eaten on a plate using a knife and fork.

In the United Sates, the banana was initially regarded as a luxury fruit and a foreign one at that. Bananas began appearing in New Orleans markets during the 1830s and 1840s. Sweet bananas were all the rage at the 1876 Philadelphia Centennial Exposition, selling for a hefty ten cents each.
Banana fruit: Journey from South East Asian to North America

History of doughnuts

Doughnuts first surface in the US around the beginning of the nineteenth century, when they were also called oly-cooks (oliecoek or oilcake in Dutch meaning round cake, deep fried in rape oil). In those days they were still simply small dumplings.

A traditional story about the origin of doughnuts says they were introduced into North America by Dutch settlers. Another story credits the invention of the doughnuts hole to a Danish sea captain named Hanson Gregory. He was credited for his innovation of the hole in the center of doughnuts. 

The first printed reference to be found about doughnuts was in 1809 when Washington Irving reference to ‘doughnuts’ in his History of New York. He wrote: Sometimes the table was graced with immense apple pies, or saucers full of preserved peaches and pears; but it was always sure to boast an enormous dish of balls of sweetened dough, fried in hog’s fat, and called doughnuts.

Doughnuts are also mentioned in the Little House on the Prairie series of books by Laura Ingalls Wilder.

By the early twentieth century, the doughnut was firmly established as an American favorite. They even found their way onto the battlefields of France during the First World War, when members of the Salvation Army provided coffee and doughnuts to American Soldiers as a comfortable reminder of home.
History of doughnuts

History of cranberries

Cranberry is a native of northern Europe, northern Asia and North America. Remnants of cranberries have been found in Bronze Age tombs in Denmark. The Scandinavians used them to make beer.

From very ancient times Cranberries have been used for culinary purposes. In summer they form a cool and refreshing drink and in winter they are made into tarts and pies.

In America, pilgrims may have made cranberry sauce sweetened with maple syrup instead of sugar. 

Cranberries, which grew in wet swamps and marshes, were plentiful in the area. Long before Europeans arrived, Native Americans picked and ate cranberries, and used them to make pemmican.

The luscious red berry, a symbol of peace was also used to dye clothing and blankets and to extract poison from wounds, as well as their practical uses.

‘Cranberry’ is usually interpreted as a corruption of ‘crane-berry’, and early American for the plant in use since the late seventeenth century.

Dutch settlers are said to have originated the English word from their word kranbeere, which in turn comes from the Low German kraanbere, ‘crane berry.’ It was the Germans and Scandinavian, too, who probably popularized the notion of eating cranberries with meat in the English-speaking world, which led to today’s pairing of turkey with cranberry sauce.

By the beginning of the 18th century, the colonists were exporting cranberries to England. But, the history of cranberry cultivation changes forever in 1840 when a Massachusetts man observed that cranberries grew in abundance when the winds and tides filled hos bog with sand.

Bogs became the ideal medium for cranberry. It is believed that first commercial cultivation of cranberries was initiated in the early 1800s at Dennis, Massachusetts by Henry Hall.
History of cranberries

Grapefruit in history

The grapefruit’s scientific name gives away its association with the sun-drenched islands of the Caribbean: Citrus paradis.

The story of the grapefruit begins in southeastern China and Japans with its nearest relative the shaddock or pummelo.

The shaddock was named for Captain Shaddock, an English ship commander of an East Indian ship who brought the seeds of the large fruit from China to Barbados during the seventeenth century.

Trees of it were growing there in 1687 during the visit of Hans Sloane to Barbados, who was in the island in that year. Hans Sloane was a physician and naturalist.

Griffith Hughes in 1750 first mentioned grapefruit as being found in Barbados and Patrick Browne reported it from Jamaica under the names ‘forbidden fruit’ and ‘smaller shaddock’.

The first recorded use of the word ‘grapefruit’ was by John Lunan in 1814, who also assumed it to be a variety of the pummelo or shaddock.

About 1809 a Spanish nobleman Don Philippe, migrated to Florida and first planting grapefruit in the United States.

The originally grapefruit varieties planted in Florida were the seedy types such as the Duncan.

In 1895 the March Seedless was introduced; since then both the seedless as well as the seedy varieties have been planted extensively.
Grapefruit in history