Abstract. − The anthropology of food has made little use of historical source materials. Eighteenth-century North America boosts a vast number of sources rich in ethnographic detail, particularly the notes and publications of the missionaries of the Moravian Brethren. This article attempts to reconstruct the native cuisines of the Northeast and their transformations, focusing mainly but not exclusively on the Delaware and Iroquois. Their foodways were not tribal or “ethnic” but part of a broader culinary pattern or regional cuisine. Although structurally simple, they were more varied than commonly acknowledged. Everyday dishes were differentiated from festive ones, but a culinary differentiation into “high” and “low” cuisine was unknown. Some foreign foodstuffs crossed the culinary frontier and were incorporated into native foodways. But no fusion food or crossover cuisine emerged. Only with the adoption of sugar, tea, coffee, and chocolate culinary stratification did start. These imported “drug-foods” became prestige and luxury foods, thus anticipating similar colonial and postcolonial processes in the centuries to come. [North America, Delaware, Iroquois, anthropology of food, Native American foodways]