The names of table furnishings varied somewhat in the eighteenth century. There were milk-pots, milk-ewers, milk-jugs, ere there were milk-pitchers; sugar-boxes, sugar-pots, sugar-basins, ere there were sugar-bowls; spoon-boats and spoon-basins ere there were spoon-holders. Terrines were imported about 1750. There were pickle-dishes and pickle-boats, twifflers, mint-stands and vegetable-basins.
One other appurtenance of a dining-room is found in all early inventories--a voider. Pewter voiders abounded and were advertised in newspapers, as were wicker and china voiders in 1740. The functions of a voider were somewhat those of a crumb-tray. They are thus given in Hugh Rhodes's "Boke of Nurture" in 1577:
"Wyth bones & voyd morsels fyll not thy trenchour, my friend, full Avoyd them into a Voyder, no man will it anull. When meate is taken quyte awaye and Voyders in presence Put you your trenchour in the same and all your resydence. Take you with your napkin & knyfe the croms that are fore thee In the Voyder your Napkin leave for it is curtesye."
There is a tradition of short commons, usually extending even to stories of starvation, in the accounts of all early settlements in new lands, and the records of the Pilgrims show no exception to the rule. These early planters went through a fiery furnace of affliction. The beef and pork brought with them became tainted, "their butter and cheese corrupted, their fish rotten." A scarcity of food lasted for three years, and there was little variety of fare, yet they were cheerful. Brewster, when he had naught to eat but clams, gave thanks that he was "permitted to suck of the abundance of the seas and the treasures hid in the sands." Cotton Mather says that Governor Winthrop, of the Bay settlement, was giving to a poor neighbor the last meal from his chest, when it was announced that the food-bearing Lion had arrived. The General Court thereat changed an appointed Fast Day to a Thanksgiving Day. By tradition--still commemorated at Forefathers' Dinner--the ration of Indian corn supplied to each person was at one time but five kernels.
Still there was always plenty of fish--the favorite food of the English--and Squanto taught the colonists various Indian methods of catching the "treasures of the sea." With oysters and lobsters they were far from starvation. Higginson said of the latter shellfish, in 1630, "the least boy in the Plantation may both catch and eat what he will of them." He says that lobsters were caught weighing twenty-five pounds each, and that the abundance of other fish was beyond believing. Josselyn, in his "New England Rarities," enumerated two hundred and three varieties of fish; yet Tuckerman calls his list "a poor makeshift." The planters had plenty of implements with which to catch fish--"vtensils of the sea"--"quoils of rope and cable, rondes of twine, herring nets, seans, cod-lines and cod hookes, mackrill-lines, drails, spiller hooks, mussel-hooks, mackrill hooks, barbels, splitting knives, sharks hookes, basse-nettes, pues and gaffs, squid lines, yeele pots," &c. Josselyn also tells some very pretty ways of cooking fish, especially eels with herbs, showing that, like Poins, the colonists loved conger and fennel. Eels were roasted, fried, and boiled. Boiled "eals" were thus prepared: