[Turkey is practical for serving to a large crowd. In England,
King Henry VIII regularly enjoyed turkey on Christmas day a century
before the Pilgrims’ feast.]
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PORTSIDE CULTURE

WHY TURKEY FOR CHRISTMAS AND THANKSGIVING?  
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Troy Bickham, The Conversation
November 23, 2023
Modern Farmer
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_ Turkey is practical for serving to a large crowd. In England, King
Henry VIII regularly enjoyed turkey on Christmas day a century before
the Pilgrims’ feast. _

Boy holding large turkey, Photography from the Library of Congress.

 

Most modern Thanksgiving traditions began in the mid-19th century,
more than two centuries after the Pilgrims’ first harvest
celebration.

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 area,
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 absence of wheat
flour and the scarcity of sugar in New England at the time ruled out
pumpkin pie and cranberry sauce. 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 modern 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.”

In 1837, Hale became the editor of the popular magazine Godey’s
Lady’s Book. Fiercely religious and family-focused, it crusaded for
the creation of an annual national holiday of “Thanksgiving and
Praise” commemorating the Pilgrims’ thanksgiving feast.

Hale and her colleagues leaned on 1621 lore for historical
justification. Like many of her contemporaries, she assumed the
Pilgrims ate turkey at their first feast because of the abundance of
edible wild turkeys in New England.

This campaign took decades, partly due to a lack of enthusiasm among
white Southerners. Many of them considered an earlier celebration
among Virginia colonists in honor of supply ships that arrived at
Jamestown in 1610 to be the more important precedent.

The absence of Southerners serving in Congress during the Civil War
enabled President Abraham Lincoln to declare Thanksgiving a national
holiday in 1863.

Turkey marketing campaign

Godey’s, along with other media, embraced the holiday, packing their
pages with recipes from New England and menus that prominently
featured turkey.

“We dare say most of the Thanksgiving will take the form of
gastronomic pleasure,” Georgia’s Augusta Chronicle predicted in
1882. “Every person who can afford turkey or procure it will
sacrifice the noble American fowl to-day.”

A second one is that turkey is also practical for serving to a large
crowd. Turkeys are bigger than other birds raised or hunted for their
meat, and it’s cheaper to produce a turkey than a cow or pig.

The bird’s attributes led Europeans to incorporate turkeys into
their diets following their colonization of the Americas. In England,
King Henry VIII regularly enjoyed turkey on Christmas day a century
before the Pilgrims’ feast.

Christmas connection

The bird cemented its position as the favored Christmas dish in
England in the mid-19th century.

One reason for this was that Ebenezer Scrooge in Charles Dickens’
“A Christmas Carol” sought redemption by replacing the
impoverished Cratchit family’s meager goose with an enormous turkey.

Published in 1843, Dickens’ instantly best-selling depiction of the
prayerful family meal would soon inspire Hale’s idealized
Thanksgiving.

Although the historical record is hazy, I do think it’s possible
that the Pilgrims ate turkey in 1621. It certainly was served at
celebrations in New England throughout the colonial period.

Troy Bickham is a Professor of History at Texas A&M University.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative
Commons license. Read the original article.

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