The atmosphere at Plymouth’s Harvest Home feast was similarly warm and close. A year of privation, culminating in the death of half of the community, had pulled the rest together. Communal farming was adopted—cooperation legalized. By breaking bread together in the open, they sanctified in a robust, secular way their communion. The familiar scene to which we have been accustomed, of Pilgrims and Indians feasting together while seated at tables in the open, is mostly a creation of later artists. It is doubtful that there were enough tables to accommodate even a tenth of the number who were celebrating. It is more likely that food was taken, not at an appointed time and place, but at frequent intervals throughout the time of the festival. Seating was almost certainly on the ground for the most part. Lacking forks, which did not appear in Plymouth until a century later, food was taken with fingers, from the tips of knives, and with spoons. Wooden trenchers (small shallow dishes) were probably much in evidence, while other foodstuffs could have been consumed directly from large kettles, or, in the case of meat, eaten with the hands, hot from the roasting fire. Far from the formality of a single meal taken together, the consumption of food at Plymouth’s first Harvest Home was but one event that mixed with the gaming and “exercising of arms” in one happy blend. [Illustration: Cooking meat over fire] What did they eat? Essentially the yeoman fare noted by Henry Best but with some intriguing American additions. Fresh meat was rare in the farmer’s everyday diet, but feasts featured it. The traditional meat was a young, lean goose. Tusser warned that despite ... all this good feasting yet are thou not loose till thou geve the Ploughman in harvest his goose. In England it would have been a domesticated bird, fattened on the grain stubble. In Plymouth it was a wild one, part of the large haul of fowl that Winslow mentions. William Bradford remembered many years later not only these waterfowl but also a “great store of wild turkeys.” These would certainly have been eaten, and with relish, but roast goose constituted the feast’s foundation. Englishmen preferred its flavor and housewives the ease with which it could be roasted. [Illustration: Women preparing food]