A Not-So-New World. Christopher M. Parsons
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are not worth one single species of the most ordinary fruits of Europe.133
Details of subjective experiences such as tasting Native foods reveal the colonialist intent of these otherwise descriptive accounts. Whether travel narrative or natural history, description was not an end in and of itself. Instead, authors such as Le Jeune seized upon these moments to invite readers to understand the need for French intervention in cultural and natural landscapes that were deemed lacking.
Authors who based their descriptions on their own experiences positioned their bodies as instruments in the production of natural knowledge and their own subjective tastes as the metric for comparisons between New France and Old. In 1640, for example, Pierre-Joseph-Marie Chaumonot described sagamité, a porridge that the Wendat made with corn, as he wrote that “the whole apparatus of our kitchen and of our refectory consists of a great wooden dish, full of sagamité, whereto I see nothing more similar than the paste which is used in covering walls. Thirst hardly annoys us,—either because we never use salt, or because our food is always very liquid. As for me, since I have been here, I have not drunk in all a glass of water, although it is now eight months since I arrived.”134 A letter from François du Peron to his brother from the Wendat village of Ossossanë written a year earlier similarly explained that “one does not have undisturbed rest here, as in France; all our Fathers and domestics, except one or two, I being of the number, rise four or five times every night … the food here causes this.”135 In this way, du Peron’s digestion became an opportunity to highlight deficient indigenous relationships with American nature; colonial bodies became an essential and authoritative mediator of both American environments and authorized judgment of aboriginal ecological practice.
Narratives equally promised that sauvage plants that might differ subtly from their French counterparts could nonetheless be counted upon to support French lives. While the use of a name such as “oak,” “cherry,” “vine,” or “lemon” certainly implied the existence of specific morphological features expected by French audiences and colonists, these familiar French names also implied a set of potential uses and ways of living with the plant and its products. On both sides of the Atlantic, North American plants became knowable through lived experience of working with them, and their possible uses and incorporations into French ecological and domestic regimes figured prominently in early written accounts. Experience with American crops demonstrated that they could also be understood through practice—through experience of cultivation, harvest, cooking, and digestion. Where corn was integrated into French fields and lives, for example, it was because it was valuable as a substitute for other grains. In Nicolas de Ville’s Histoire des plantes de l’Europe et des plus usitées qui viennent d’Asie, d’Afrique et de l’Amérique he wrote, for example, that “the flour is white … but thicker and more viscous than that of wheat; it is less easily digestible. The peasants make a porridge of it with butter and cheese which is agreeable enough, even if heavy on the stomach. The flour is excellent for plasters which ripen. The juice of the leaves is good for inflammations and erysipelas.”136 Where botanical science relied upon morphology and other visual cues to provide differentiation, narrative and a dwelling perspective could promise familiarity far more effectively.
Only a few decades later in 1709, Louis Liger confidently assumed a widespread knowledge and experience of the plant when he wrote that “the Turkish wheat, otherwise known as Indian wheat, is known well enough, such that there is no need to describe it.”137 After detailing the method and timing necessary to plant the crop, Liger continued to situate the plant within a French geographical and social setting.
It is not difficult to acquire Turkish wheat to sow, because it is very common in Burgundy, in Franche-Comté and in Bresse where a lot of it is cultivated, its usages … are very advantageous, the grain is milled and the flour is used to make bread of which almost all the laborers of these regions feed their families during the entire year. The flour is also used to make beignets, galettes, tarts seasoned with dairy products, and a type of porridge that they call Gaude, that they make like rice or millet; this serves as breakfast for everyone in the house, it is for this reason that from the morning on a pot is put in front of the fire, then when the Gaude is cooked, each can take a full bowl, which is enough to fill the stomach to capacity.138
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