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Thanksgiving Food Facts and Myths

  • Susan
  • November 5, 2009
Traditional Thanksgiving meal in New England
How Many of These Dishes Were at The First Thanksgiving?

The first Thanksgiving on record dates back to the fall of 1621, when 52 English colonists and 90 Wampanoag came together in Plymouth, Massachusetts for a three-day feast celebrating the bountiful harvest.  The Native Americans contributed five deer to the celebration, with the colonists supplying everything else.  In addition to celebrating their crop’s abundance, they were entertained with singing, dancing and gaming.

So what did the Pilgrims eat back in the 1600s?   No one can be 100 percent sure about the specific menu items, but historians have been able to pinpoint with some accuracy the types of foods that were brought to the table, thanks to a letter written by Edward Winslow of the original colonists. An excerpt of Winslow’s letter speaks about the various crops.

“We set last spring some twenty acres of Indian corn, and sowed some six acres of barley and peas ..Our corn did prove well; and, God be praised, we had a good increase of Indian corn, and our barley indifferent good .. 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, among other recreations, we exercised our arms, many of the Indians coming among 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…”

For fish and fowl, we have great abundance. Fresh cod in the summer is but coarse meat with us. Our bay is full of lobsters all the summer, and affords a variety of other fish. In September, we can take a hogshead of eels in a night, with small labor, and can dig them out of their beds all the winter. We have mussels and others at our doors. Oysters we have none near, but we can have them brought by the Indians when we will. All the springtime the earth sends forth naturally very good salad herbs. Here are grapes, white and red, and very sweet and strong also; strawberries, gooseberries, raspberries, etc.; plums of three sorts, white, black, and red, being almost as good as a damson..

Based on Winslow’s letter and the findings of other historians, it can be determined that the original Thanksgiving dinner contained:

Wild fowl ” duck and geese

Seafood – including lobsters, eel, mussels and oysters

Corn, parsnips and turnips

Collards and spinach

Onions

Berries

Grapes

Nuts

Although turkeys roamed wild in the Massachusetts colony, they Winslow did not specifically mention them and therefore the thinking is that turkey was not part of the original Thanksgiving celebration.  Other items not included in the first feast were:

Potatoes (both white and sweet) ” neither variety were yet available in America.  The British had to import sweet potatoes from Spain and were used by the extremely wealthy as aphrodisiacs.

Cranberry sauce ” Cranberries were used by the Pilgrims and Indians to add zing and tartness to recipes, but sauce (made with expensive sugar) was not produced until 50 years later.

Pumpkin pie” pumpkin and squash were available but were served as vegetables.  There were no readily available ingredients to make piecrust.

Apples ” apples were not available to the Plymouth settlers.

Popcorn ” corn was grown, but not popped.

It wasn’t until 1863 that President Abraham Lincoln proclaimed the fourth Thursday of November as Thanksgiving, America’s way of saying “thanks”for their good food and fortune.  Today’s Thanksgiving celebration is only one day, although judging from the amount of dishes prepared for America’s feast of food, the leftovers can last for days beyond the holiday.  As in the 1600s, the festivities revolve around eating (what else), but the games, dancing and entertainment that were popular in colonial times have been replaced with watching parades and football .. before stuffing ourselves with ..more food.

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