Thanksgiving 2012

HAPPY THANKSGIVING

I don't know of any traditional Thanksgiving music, so I have chosen an animated jazz piece from the Walt Disney studios.

All the Cats Join In

1946

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Thanksgiving lithograph postcards from the past

Thanksgiving films

Thanksgiving has sparse reference in literature

First Thanksgiving food...sparse but filling

Leptospirosis yield dead Pilgrims

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First Thanksgiving food...sparse but filling

"What Was on the Menu at the First Thanksgiving?"

The history of the holiday meal tells us that a tasty bird was always the centerpiece, but other courses have since disappeared from the table.

by

Megan Gambino

November 21st, 2011

Smithsonian

Today, the traditional Thanksgiving dinner includes any number of dishes: turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes, candied yams, cranberry sauce and pumpkin pie. But if one were to create a historically accurate feast, consisting of only those foods that historians are certain were served at the so-called “first Thanksgiving,” there would be slimmer pickings. “Wildfowl was there. Corn, in grain form for bread or for porridge, was there. Venison was there,” says Kathleen Wall. “These are absolutes.”

Two primary sources—the only surviving documents that reference the meal—confirm that these staples were part of the harvest celebration shared by the Pilgrims and Wampanoag at Plymouth Colony in 1621. 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.”

But determining what else the colonists and Wampanoag might have eaten at the 17th-century feast takes some digging. To form educated guesses, Wall, a foodways culinarian at Plimoth Plantation, a living history museum in Plymouth, Massachusetts, studies cookbooks and descriptions of gardens from the period, archaeological remains such as pollen samples that might clue her in to what the colonists were growing.

Our discussion begins with the bird. Turkey was not the centerpiece of the meal, as it is today, explains Wall. Though it is possible the colonists and American Indians cooked wild turkey, she suspects that goose or duck was the wildfowl of choice. In her research, she has found that swan and passenger pigeons would have been 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.”

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.”

It is possible that the birds were stuffed, though probably not with bread. (Bread, made from maize not wheat, was likely a part of the meal, but exactly how it was made is unknown.) The Pilgrims instead stuffed birds with chunks of onion and herbs. “There is a wonderful stuffing for goose in the 17th-century that is just shelled chestnuts,” says Wall. “I am thinking of that right now, and it is sounding very nice.” Since the first Thanksgiving was a three-day celebration, she adds, “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.”

In addition to wildfowl and deer, the colonists and Wampanoag probably ate eels and shellfish, such as lobster, clams and mussels. “They were drying shellfish and smoking other sorts of fish,” says Wall.

According to the culinarian, the Wampanoag, like most eastern woodlands people, had a “varied and extremely good diet.” 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. “They also had different sorts of pumpkins or squashes.”

As we are taught in school, the Indians 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 turnips, carrots, onions, garlic and pumpkins as the sorts of things that they were growing.”
Of course, to some extent, the exercise of reimagining the spread of food at the 1621 celebration becomes 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,” says Wall. “But it is like, no, the pastry isn’t there.” The colonists did not have butter and wheat flour to make crusts for pies and tarts. (That’s right: No pumpkin pie!) “That is a blank in the table, for an English eye. So what are they putting on instead? I think meat, meat and more meat,” says Wall.

Meat without potatoes, that is. White potatoes, originating in South America, and sweet potatoes, from the Caribbean, had yet to infiltrate North America. Also, there would have been no cranberry sauce. It would be another 50 years before an Englishman wrote about boiling cranberries and sugar into a “Sauce to eat with. . . .Meat.” Says Wall: “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 drank water.

All this, naturally, begs a follow-up question. So how did the Thanksgiving menu evolve into what it is today?

Wall explains that the Thanksgiving holiday, as we know it, took root in the mid-19th century. At this time, Edward Winslow’s letter, printed in a pamphlet called Mourt’s Relation, and Governor Bradford’s manuscript, titled Of Plimoth Plantation, were rediscovered and published. Boston clergyman Alexander Young printed Winslow’s letter in his Chronicles of the Pilgrim Fathers, and in the footnotes to the resurrected letter, he somewhat arbitrarily declared the feast the first Thanksgiving. (Wall and others at Plimoth Plantation prefer to call it “the harvest celebration in 1621.”) There was nostalgia for colonial times, and by the 1850s, most states and territories were celebrating Thanksgiving.

Sarah Josepha Hale, editor of the popular women’s magazine Godey’s Lady’s Book, , a real trendsetter for running a household, was a leading voice in establishing Thanksgiving as an annual event. Beginning in 1827, Hale petitioned 13 presidents, the last of whom was Abraham Lincoln. She pitched her idea to President Lincoln as a way to unite the country in the midst of the Civil War, and, in 1863, he made Thanksgiving a national holiday.

Throughout her campaign, Hale printed Thanksgiving recipes and menus in Godey’s Lady’s Book. She also published close to a dozen cookbooks. “She is really planting this idea in the heads of lots of women that this is something they should want to do,” says Wall. “So when there finally is a national day of Thanksgiving, there is a whole body of women who are ready for it, who know what to do because she told them. A lot of the food that we think of—roast turkey with sage dressing, creamed onions, mashed turnips, even some of the mashed potato dishes, which were kind of exotic then—are there.”


Previous Thanksgiving posts...

Thanksgiving lithograph postcards from the past

Thanksgiving films

Thanksgiving has sparse reference in literature

When all else fails, this works good...

 

Thanksgiving has sparse reference in literature

Thanksgiving

by

Julie   

2000   
       
My Home Page
Light, airy scent
Caught and inhaled
Warm aroma of a turkey in the oven
With the sweet smell of fresh bread
Decorative centerpiece
Surrounded by delicious dishes
And the spicy whiff of apple cider
Heat radiating off the stove
My name drifts above the noise
Ears at attention, I watch intensely
Sniffing the air as I find my chair
The feast will begin soon
Glancing out the window
Bare trees sway in the November wind
Dry and golden grass is dead
Snowflakes stray from an overcast sky
Plate of food lying before me
Steam rising to thaw my rosy cheeks
Teeth sinking into tender meat
Mashed potatoes melt in my mouth
Main courses over, time for dessert
Foamy lemon meringue
Crunchy, gooey pecan
And soft chocolate cream
Belly bloated and satisfied
Tired eyes drooping
Curled in big, soft chair

Sleeping snuggly on Thanksgiving

"Thanksgiving in Literature"

by

Lisa Bramen

November 23rd, 2011

Smithsonian

When I first set out looking for references to the Thanksgiving celebration in literature, I had a hard time finding them. A few people suggested Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House on the Prairie. Although the series is set in the latter half of the 19th century, after Abraham Lincoln encouraged the celebration of Thanksgiving as a national holiday, there’s no apparent mention of its observance by the Ingalls family (I searched in Google Books and on Amazon).

That other 19th-century classic about a struggling rural family, Little Women, by Louisa May Alcott, also contains no mention of Thanksgiving, but in 1882 the author released An Old-Fashioned Thanksgiving. First published as part of a series of short stories narrated by Jo (the aspiring writer sister from Little Women), the children’s tale is like an early version of the movie Home Alone—with slightly less mayhem.

When their parents are called away to Grandma’s deathbed the day before Thanksgiving, the Bassett children decide to prepare the meal on their own. Prue pulls the wrong “yarbs”—herbs in the country dialect Alcott uses for her rural New Hampshire characters—and puts catnip and wormwood in the stuffing instead of marjoram and summer savory. The kids nearly shoot a neighbor friend who comes to the house dressed as a fearsome bear (a misguided prank). In all the commotion, the turkey is burned and the plum pudding comes out hard as a rock. But all’s well that ends well, and Ma and Pa return in time for dinner, along with some other relatives, explaining that Grandma wasn’t dying after all—it had just been a big mix-up.

Before all the hullabaloo, Ma has this to say about the effort that goes into the annual feast:

“I do like to begin seasonable and have things to my mind. Thanksgivin’ dinners can’t be drove, and it does take a sight of victuals to fill all these hungry stomicks,” said the good woman as she gave a vigorous stir to the great kettle of cider apple-sauce, and cast a glance of housewifely pride at the fine array of pies set forth on the buttery shelves.

An even earlier book about rural New England life was Harriet Beecher Stowe’s 1869 Oldtown Folks. Stowe describes celebrations from her childhood, including “the king and high priest of all festivals,” Thanksgiving. She explains that preparations took a whole week, because at those times even the conveniences of her adulthood, such as pre-ground spices, were not yet available. In one passage she muses about something that remains a staple of the Thanksgiving table, pie:

The pie is an English institution, which, planted on American soil, forthwith ran rampant and burst forth into an untold variety of genera and species. Not merely the old traditional mince pie, but a thousand strictly American seedlings from that main stock, evinced the power of American housewives to adapt old institutions to new uses. Pumpkin pies, cranberry pies, huckleberry pies, cherry pies, green-currant pies, peach, pear, and plum pies, custard pies, apple pies, Marlborough-pudding pies,—pies with top crusts, and pies without,—pies adorned with all sorts of fanciful flutings and architectural strips laid across and around, and otherwise varied, attested to the bounty of the feminine mind, when once let loose in a given direction.

Another giant of American literature, Mark Twain, included a quote about Thanksgiving in Pudd’nhead Wilson, his 1894 novel. Each chapter begins with an aphorism from Pudd’nhead’s calendar, including this witticism:

Thanksgiving Day. Let all give humble, hearty, and sincere thanks, now, but the turkeys. In the island of Fiji they do not use turkeys; they use plumbers. It does not become you and me to sneer at Fiji.

A century later, Philip Roth found meaning in the Thanksgiving bird as the great equalizer of American society in his Pulitzer Prize–winning American Pastoral:

And it was never but once a year that they were brought together anyway, and that was on the neutral, dereligionized ground of Thanksgiving, when everybody gets to eat the same thing, nobody sneaking off to eat funny stuff—no kugel, no gefilte fish, no bitter herbs, just one colossal turkey for two hundred and fifty million people—one colossal turkey feeds all. A moratorium on funny foods and funny ways and religious exclusivity, a moratorium on the three-thousand-year-old nostalgia of the Jews, a moratorium on Christ and the crucifixion for the Christians, when everyone in New Jersey and elsewhere can be more irrational about their irrationalities than they are the rest of the year. A moratorium on all the grievances and resentments, and not only for the Dwyers and the Levovs but for everyone in America who is suspicious of everyone else. It is the American pastoral par excellence and it lasts twenty-four hours.

Finally, a number of contemporary novels use Thanksgiving as the backdrop for family dysfunction—perhaps none so disastrous as in Rick Moody’s 1994 The Ice Storm, about two suburban families during the 1970s. For example:

Thanksgiving dinner at the O’Malleys, as Benjamin had often pointed out, was like waiting for the end of a ceasefire. Billy and her father would assume a guarded silence until the first drinks had been consumed. Then Billy would launch into his list of dissatisfactions beginning with, say, her father’s preposterous support for the House Un-American Activities Committee. Open disgust was not far away.

Here’s wishing all of you a safe, happy and relatively dysfunction-free Thanksgiving!

More poetry at...

Thanksgiving Poetry


Previous Thanksgiving posts...

Thanksgiving lithograph postcards from the past

Thanksgiving films

Thanksgiving films

Here is a potpourri of Thanksgiving theme films.

Remember those high school days of endless educational films that allowed an afternoon nap or moments of reverie of the girl sitting across from you?

Here is one such film.

The Pilgrims

1955

Encyclopedia Britannica Films American History

WAKE UP! 

The Three Stooges will put a zip in your step. A classic from 1937 has pretty girls, Indians, Pilgrims, and good ole slapstick humor and one-liners.

Back to the Woods

Part 1

Back to the Woods

Part 2

Patrice Wilson will rap you trough Thanksgiving. [Video is by Nicole Westbrook.] [2012].

Since I am being "goofy" or rather "daffy", here is Daffy Duck in Holiday for Drumsticks [1949].

And finally, somber thoughts from William Burroughs [1986].

Previous Thanksgiving posts...
 
Thanksgiving lithograph postcards from the past

Thanksgiving lithograph postcards from the past