Why is turkey the main dish on Thanksgiving?
Have you ever wondered why Thanksgiving revolves around turkey and not ham, chicken, venison, beef or corn?
Almost 9 in 10 Americans eat turkey during this festive meal, whether it's roasted, deep-fried, grilled or cooked in any other way for the occasion.
You might believe it's because of what the Pilgrims, a year after they landed in what's now the state of Massachusetts, and their Indigenous Wampanoag guests ate during their first thanksgiving feast in 1621. Or that it's because turkey is originally from the Americas.
But it has more to do with how Americans observed the holiday in the late 1800s than which poultry the Pilgrims ate while celebrating their bounty in 1621.
Did they or didn't they eat it?
The only firsthand record of what the Pilgrims ate at the first thanksgiving feast comes from Edward Winslow. He noted that the Wampanoag leader, Massasoit, arrived with 90 men, and the two communities feasted together for three days.
Winslow wrote little about the menu, aside from mentioning five deer that the Wampanoag brought and that the meal included "fowle," which could have been any number of wild birds found in the tempat, including ducks, geese and turkeys.
Historians do know that important ingredients of today's traditional dishes were not available during that first Thanksgiving.
That includes potatoes and green beans. The likely mangkirce of wheat flour and the scarcity of sugar in New England at the time ruled out pumpkin pie and cranberry saus. Some sort of squash, a staple of Native American diets, was almost certainly served, along with corn and shellfish.
A resurrected tradition
Historians like me who have studied the history of food have found that most kekinian Thanksgiving traditions began in the mid-19th century, more than two centuries after the Pilgrims' first harvest celebration.
The reinvention of the Pilgrims' celebration as a national holiday was largely the work of Sarah Hale. Born in New Hampshire in 1784, as a young widow she published poetry to earn a living. Most notably, she wrote the nursery rhyme "Mary Had a Little Lamb."
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