On the evening of Thanksgiving Thursday, American families will gather around the dinner table, indulging in the warmth of the holiday spirit, savoring the traditional “must-have” turkey dishes while expressing gratitude to their loved ones. But why is turkey the centerpiece of Thanksgiving feasts?
Renowned American writer Sarah Josepha Hale portrayed the traditional Thanksgiving feast, including roast turkey, in her bestselling book “Mary Had A Little Lamb.”
In 1621, the first Thanksgiving was held in what is now Plymouth, Massachusetts, with 50 Pilgrims and 90 Wampanoag Native Americans in attendance. To celebrate the bountiful harvest of that year, they enjoyed a three-day grand feast, creating cherished memories together.
During this feast, the local Native Americans offered turkeys to the Puritans. With the Plymouth area abundant in wild turkeys known for their plump meat and delicious flavor, the turkey became the ideal choice for the Thanksgiving table.
Troy Bickham, a history professor at Texas A&M University, explained to CBS that turkeys have remained a mainstay of Thanksgiving for practical reasons as well. They are considered the “ideal choice for celebrations” due to their large size, feeding more people and serving as an impressive centerpiece for grand feasts.
“With their size surpassing that of chickens or geese, turkeys can satiate more guests and provide an impressive main dish for large celebrations. For these reasons, turkeys were introduced by the British for breeding and domestication in the 16th century,” he said. “When the Pilgrims arrived in America, turkeys were not unfamiliar to them.”
CBS reported that there were about 10 million wild turkeys in the colonial American Americas at that time. Bickham noted that in the 19th century, wild turkeys were still active in most areas from Texas to Maine on the eastern half of the United States.
“They were relatively easy to domesticate, leading to their abundance,” he said.
President Abraham Lincoln proclaimed Thanksgiving as a national holiday on October 3, 1863. Sarah Josepha Hale, the author of “Mary Had A Little Lamb,” played a significant role in this achievement. She continuously lobbied Lincoln through letters for years until he declared Thanksgiving as a national holiday 17 years later. Today, Americans celebrate Thanksgiving on the fourth Thursday of November each year.
Apart from turkey, it is said that the first Thanksgiving menu likely included venison, duck, goose, oysters, lobster, eel, and other fish, along with pumpkins and cranberries (but not in the form of pumpkin pie or cranberry sauce).
Bickham mentioned that besides venison, it remains speculative what exactly people ate during the first Thanksgiving. “The rest is essentially guesswork,” he said.
“Shellfish and game birds were staples for the colonizers, along with corn, beans, and pumpkins taught to them by their indigenous neighbors. In fact, the success of these crops was key to the ‘thanks’ part of Thanksgiving.”
Senior scientist Bruce Smith of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History stated that most of the foods consumed on Thanksgiving today originated from Mexico and South America. For example, corn was domesticated in Mexico over 8,000 years ago.
“This crucial crop arrived in the Southwest of the United States around 4,000 years ago and reached the eastern part of North America around 200 BC,” he wrote in a post on the Smithsonian’s website.
As for cranberry sauce and pumpkin pie, their appearance on the Thanksgiving table is more recent.
“Canned cranberry sauce first appeared in 1912 but did not see nationwide distribution until 1941,” Bickham said.
Troy Smith, a history professor at Tennessee Tech University, shared in an article on the university’s website that pumpkin pie’s prominence on Thanksgiving is owed to “Libby’s production of canned pumpkin starting in 1929, simplifying the process of making pumpkin pie.”