THE “TRADITIONAL” vs. AN EVER-CHANGING DINNER MENU
When you sit down to your Turkey Day feast on the fourth Thursday of November, no doubt you will be serving some long-time favorite dishes fine-tuned to the preferences of your guests. Perhaps you will also place a few enticing new food combinations on that holiday table as well. Whether you have assembled the entire family as in a Norman Rockwell painting or, instead, have created an intimate occasion for only a select few, you will be serving the next chapter in a story that goes back almost 400 years. This installment of PUT THE “THANKS” BACK INTO THANKSGIVING traces the development of the traditional Thanksgiving menu and explores innovative ways to celebrate with favorite foods.
Just what was served on that 1st Thanksgiving table anyway?
Few actual records have survived to document the harvest celebration shared by the Pilgrims and Wampanoag Native Americans at Plymouth Colony in 1621, but we do have some limited correspondence about the event preserved in historic annals. Edward Winslow, an English leader who attended, wrote home to a friend:
Our harvest being gotten in, our governor sent four men on fowling, that so we might after a special manner rejoice together after we had gathered the fruit of our labors. They four in one day killed as much fowl as, with a little help beside, served the company almost a week. At which time, amongst other recreations, we exercised our arms, many of the Indians coming amongst us, and among the rest their greatest king Massasoit, with some ninety men, whom for three days we entertained and feasted, and they went out and killed five deer, which they brought to the plantation and bestowed on our governor, and upon the captain and others.
William Bradford, the governor Winslow mentions, also described the autumn of 1621, adding:
And besides waterfowl there was great store of wild turkeys, of which they took many, besides venison, etc. Besides, they had about a peck a meal a week to a person, or now since harvest, Indian corn to that proportion.
It is generally assumed that the Plymouth Colony menu included turkey, waterfowl, venison, fish, lobster, clams, berries, fruit, pumpkin and squash. The majority of the dishes in the traditional American version of Thanksgiving dinner would have been made from foods native to the New World, as according to tradition the Pilgrims received these foods from the Native Americans.
>>> MEAT, POULTRY, FISH <<<
Kathleen Wall, who is employed as a foodways culinarian at Plimoth Plantation, a living history museum in Plymouth, Massachusetts, has conducted extensive research into food history from that period. She suggests that turkey probably was not the centerpiece of the meal. Though it is possible the colonists and American Indians cooked wild turkey, she suspects that goose or duck was more likely the wildfowl of choice. In her research, she has found that swan and passenger pigeons probably would have been readily available as well. “Passenger pigeons—extinct in the wild for over a century now—were so thick in the 1620s, they said you could hear them a quarter-hour before you saw them,” says Wall. “They say a man could shoot at the birds in flight and bring down 200.”
As for preparation, small birds were often spit-roasted, while larger birds were boiled. “I also think some birds—in a lot of recipes you see this—were boiled first, then roasted to finish them off. Or things are roasted first and then boiled,” says Wall. “The early roasting gives them nicer flavor, sort of caramelizes them on the outside and makes the broth darker.” Since the first Thanksgiving was a three-day celebration, she speculates that poultry leftovers were probably soon recycled: “I have no doubt whatsoever that birds that are roasted one day, the remains of them are all thrown in a pot and boiled up to make broth the next day. That broth thickened with grain to make a pottage.”
Because Winslow wrote that the Wampanoag guests arrived with an offering of five deer, culinary historians speculate that the deer would have been roasted on a spit over a smoldering fire and that subsequently the colonists might have used some of the venison also to whip up a hearty stew for the remaining two days of the feast. In addition to wildfowl and deer, those colonists and their Wampanoag neighbors probably ate eels and shellfish such as lobster, clams and mussels. “They were drying shellfish and smoking other sorts of fish,” says Wall.
>>> SIDE DISHES <<<
When asked what side dishes might have been included in the spread of food at the 1621 celebration, Wall resorts to a process of elimination. “You look at what an English celebration in England is at this time. What are the things on the table? You see lots of pies in the first course and in the second course, meat and fish pies. To cook a turkey in a pie was not terribly uncommon [in England],” says Wall. “But it is like, no, the pastry isn’t there [in Plymouth Colony].” Both the Pilgrims and members of the Wampanoag tribe certainly ate pumpkins and other squashes indigenous to New England—possibly even during the harvest festival—but the fledgling colony lacked the butter and wheat flour necessary for making pie crust (that’s right: no pumpkin pie, as such, on that celebration table!). Moreover, settlers hadn’t yet constructed an oven for baking. According to some accounts, early English settlers in North America probably improvised by hollowing out pumpkins, filling the shells with milk, honey and spices to make a custard and then roasting the gourds whole in hot ashes.
So, if no pumpkin pie, then what else did those English colonists set out instead? Wall says, “I think meat, meat and more meat” — meat without potatoes, please note. White potatoes, which originate in South America, and sweet potatoes, coming from the Caribbean, had yet to make an appearance in North America. Also missing would have been cranberry sauce. At least another 50 years would pass before an Englishman wrote about boiling cranberries and sugar into a “Sauce to eat with. . . .Meat.”
As we have been taught since elementary school, the Wampanoags showed the colonists how to plant native crops. “The English colonists plant gardens in March of 1620 and 1621,” says Wall. “We don’t know exactly what’s in those gardens. But in later sources, they talk about carrots, onions, garlic and pumpkins as the sorts of things that they were growing.” New England’s native inhabitants are known also to have eaten other plant roots such as Indian turnips and groundnuts, which they may or may not have brought to the party.
Like most eastern woodlands people, the Wampanoag had a “varied and extremely good diet,” Wall surmises. The forest provided chestnuts, walnuts and beechnuts. “They grew flint corn (multicolored Indian corn), and that was their staple. They grew beans, which they used from when they were small and green until when they were mature,” says Wall.
>>> BEVERAGES <<<
When asked about the most likely beverage du jour, Wall says, “If there was beer, there were only a couple of gallons for 150 people for three days.” She thinks that to wash it all down, the English and Wampanoag probably drank water.
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After that very first Thanksgiving celebration the dinner menu has undergone significant changes over the ensuing years. Population growth, territorial expansion, immigration trends, transportation technology and communications improvements all played a part in expanding food choices and developing regional differences. In the next installment of PUT THE “THANKS” BACK INTO THANKSGIVING we will trace some of those trends.