(HOST) Commentator Tom Slayton has been thinking about what we consider the traditional Thanksgiving meal – and how it came to be.
(SLAYTON) How about a nice dish of eels for Thanksgiving dinner? Or maybe a slice of eagle?
If you were to somehow transport yourself back to 1621 and the first Thanksgiving dinner, those dishes might very well be among your choices. (Eagle, by the way, was said to taste somewhat like mutton.)
There might be some turkey on the table. But more likely there would be a variety of waterfowl – ducks, geese, swans, and maybe a heron or crane. But there would be no potatoes, mashed, sweet or otherwise. And no cranberry sauce or pumpkin pie. The Pilgrims had no sugar, hence no cranberry sauce. They probably had run out of flour during their first year in Plymouth and definitely had no recipe for pumpkin pie – that delicacy was the creation of a later kitchen. Potatoes, a native of South America, simply hadn’t shown up on the North American menu in 1621.
Actually, much of the Thanksgiving feast that we now enjoy each November is a romantic concoction dreamed up and promoted by a woman who might best be described as the Martha Stewart of the 19th century, one Sarah Josepha Hale. She was editor of Godey’s Ladies’ Book, a lifestyle magazine of the day.
She published dozens of articles and recipes based on her reading of the two paragraphs Edward Winslow had written about the first Thanksgiving back in 1621. There wasn’t a lot of detail in Winslow’s account – he simply said he’d sent a party out "fowling" and that they’d had good luck. So Sarah filled in the blanks and dreamed up many of the details herself. The feast we sit down to today, is largely the result of Hale’s vivid imagination. The original Thanksgiving was probably held in late September or early October. It was a harvest festival, much like those held in England for years..
There was definitely plenty of venison. The Pilgrims’ Wampanoag neighbors had come to the dinner, bringing with them five freshly killed deer. Winslow notes that there were 90 Wampanoags there. And if we remember that there were only 52 Pilgrims still alive at that point – most of them women and children – it becomes evident that the Indians outnumbered the settlers at the dinner nearly two-to-one.
Because so little was written down about the first Thanksgiving dinner, there are conflicting versions of what sort of table manners might have been used – or even whether there were tables!
But the nature of the day in some respects was much the same as our Thanksgiving today. The Pilgrims were simply thankful to God for the good harvest they had enjoyed, and they invited their Indian neighbors to feast and give thanks with them. Edward Winslow says as much.
Winslow adds: "And although it be not alwayes so plentifull, as it was at this time with vs, yet by the goodness of God, we are so farre from want, that we often wish you partakers of our plenty."
In other words: We have enough and more than enough; we’d like to share it with you.
A good thought to remember this Thanksgiving, whether we dine on turkey or eels!
Tom Slayton is editor-emeritus of Vermont Life magazine.