If you’re reading this in the United States, Thanksgiving
Day is nearly upon you/us. (If you’re reading this in Canada, I hope you had a
lovely Thanksgiving, and if you’re reading this in Europe, yes, we really do
eat that much, and no, we don’t do it every day. Honest.) If you’re the
red-blooded American I know you are, you’re fixin’ to chow down on turkey,
pumpkin pie, mashed potatoes, cranberry sauce, green beans, stuffing and Waldorf
salad.
Wait, was it just my family that served Waldorf salad? See,
this is why I don’t go home for Thanksgiving anymore.
But you probably never gave much thought to why we eat the
specific things we eat on Thanksgiving. You probably just assumed that we eat
the same things the Pilgrims ate at the First Thanksgiving. But while the
Pilgrims definitely feasted on some unspecified “wild fowl,” we have no way of
knowing that it was turkey. They also didn’t eat potatoes, or pumpkin pie, and
probably didn’t eat cranberry sauce – if they did, they would have sweetened it
with maple syrup because granulated sugar wasn’t a thing back then. Don’t even
get me started on the Waldorf salad.
In fact, the Pilgrims and the Wampanoag at the first
Thanksgiving feast ate a lot of venison, thanks to the generosity of the
Wampanoag chief, who
donated five deer to the feast. The “wild fowl” they ate could have been
turkey, but since wild turkeys are aggressive, hard to catch and kind of
stringy, they probably ate pheasant, goose or duck instead. They also probably
ate a lot of fish and seafood, onions, nuts, beans, a cornbread dish known as boiled
bread, and squashes of all kinds, including pumpkins, most likely stewed
with butter, vinegar, and spices.
So, if the Pilgrims and the Wampanoag ate random birds, venison,
fish, and boiled things for the first Thanksgiving, why do we eat turkey and
pumpkin pie? Well, obviously because pumpkin pie is much, much better than
boiled pumpkin slurry, duh.
There are different theories as to why we eat turkey on
Thanksgiving. Some feel that the choice was a practical one – turkeys are
perhaps the only birds large enough to satisfy the American appetite, I mean,
feed the entire family. Turkeys are also native to the Americas, and were apparently
almost
our national bird, which would have made Thanksgiving interesting indeed.
Others
point out that Scrooge gave the Cratchit family a turkey at the end of A Christmas Carol, a book that was
published right around the time that enthusiasm for the creation of a national
Thanksgiving holiday was building. I never actually read A Christmas Carol because fuck that, so this was news to me.
Yet another theory holds that the Thanksgiving turkey
tradition originates with Sarah Josepha Buell Hale, of
whom I have written before. The editor of Lady’s Magazine and Godey’s
Lady’s Book, Ms. Hale is credited with single-handedly nagging Thanksgiving
into existence by writing letters to Congress, the governors of every state,
and five Presidents. In her 1827 novel Northwood:
A Tale of New England, Ms. Hale wrote of a roasted turkey as the
centerpiece of a fictional Thanksgiving meal. The meal also included “a huge
plum pudding, custards, and PIES OF EVERY DESCRIPTION,” Mom.
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| No mention of Waldorf salad, however. Image by Nillerdk |
Hale took things a step further, detailing the preparation
of Thanksgiving turkey in her annual November editorials. It would take the 20th
century, and the advent of convenience foods, to bring such dishes as cranberry
sauce and pumpkin pie to our modern Thanksgiving tables.
While cranberry sauce was served at Thanksgiving meals as
early as 1623 – two years after the first Thanksgiving in 1621 – cranberries grow
in New England, and like most berries, they don’t keep well. Thanksgiving was
originally a New England tradition, but as it spread across the country thanks
to the efforts of Ms. Hale, cranberry sauce did not initially go with it. It
wasn’t until 1912 that the inventor
of canned cranberry sauce, Marcus Urann, came on the scene and left his
mark on both Thanksgiving and the cranberry industry. The innovation made it
possible for Americans around the country to enjoy “cranberry sauce” on
Thanksgiving Day, and I’m using quotation marks around that because I grew up
with homemade cranberry sauce, I don’t know what the fuck is wrong with you people.
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| It almost made up for the Waldorf salad. |
By the mid-20th century, the pre-packaged food
revolution was under way, bringing such Thanksgiving staples as stuffing (made
with stuffing mix), green bean casserole (I don’t know what that is either because
I grew up eating string beans that my grandmother grew, stringed while watching
Star Trek: The Motion Picture, and
canned herself) and pumpkin pie – made with canned pumpkin puree. Now everyone
can have Thanksgiving, even those of us who don’t want to spend half the day
doing whatever it is you need to do to a pumpkin to make it fit into a pie
shell.
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| I don't even know what is wrong with you people. Image by Rick Kimpel |
