Immigration  Blog

I was born and grew up in Paris and moved to the States when I was eighteen to study modern dance. Coming to the US alone had a strong impact because I was leaving my family and friends for the first time, and I had some trouble adjusting to the different ways of life. I was nostalgic about the food I was used to and I missed the local markets. I found that supermarket fruit had no taste, but eventually I figured it out. I had some strange cultural adaptations; my daughter, who studies these things, tells me it is common for people from a different culture to do strange things with new ingredients: for example, I would put cream cheese on English muffins and top them with ketchup and salt and pepper, I guess because I didn't know how to use those things, I made them into an approximation of a pizza!
I am now studying history and I particularly love American history because it is still new to me.

The group I chose to study is the Dutch, who came to New York in the early 1600s. Because I live in the Hudson Valley, I see Dutch influence in the names of nearby towns like Peekskill, Catskill, Wallkill, all derived from the Dutch word "kils" meaning stream. I found a little bit of trivia in the fact that the colors of the old Dutch flag, the blue, white and orange are seen in the uniforms of the Ny Mets, Knicks and Islanders."
More importantly to the Native Americans of the Hudson valley, the Dutch were originally interested in trading fur pelts for kettles, linens, blankets and weapons, so it behooved them to keep the peace with the Iroquois Confederacy. But they brought with them disease and they altered the environment by causing Indians to hunt for commerce rather than sustenance, thereby killing considerably more beavers and muskrats than were needed for survival. The Dutch created a dependent relationship with the native people, whose priorities were changed. Eventually, as settlers followed traders, they needed more land and found that Indians were an obstacle to their development, and were no longer interested in peaceful cohabitation.
Around present day Kingston, Esopus Indians lived and farmed the land in close proximity to the Dutch, regular squirmishes between sides resulted in the building of a wooden stockade protecting houses that still stand today.
I was curious about the influence of Dutch food, so I looked up an article in the New York Times, titled: A Food Historian Works to Give the Dutch their Due. The author states that the Dutch contributed many sweet items, pancakes, waffles, and cookies (cookjes). He included a fun fact, that there was a ban in 17th Century New Netherlands, preventing "bartering bread and cookies with the native Indians for beaver pelts", indicating that a sufficient number of Native Americans must have been exposed to the baking of Dutch housewives, to have made a ban necessary!

Sources:
http://people.hofstra.edu/alan_j_singer/docket/docket/11.1.14_The_Dutch_Influence_in_New_York_City.pdf

http://www.hudsonrivervalley.com/NG_TheHudson/index.html

http://www.nps.gov/nr/travel/kingston/colonization.htm

http://www.nytimes.com/1989/09/13/garden/a-food-historian-works-to-give-the-dutch-their-due.html