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Thanksgiving Early On was a Very Different Meal...
Although the earliest presidents did declare days of Thanksgiving and gratitude, Thanksgiving as we now it is more recent. At the urging of Sarah Josepha Hale, Abraham Lincoln declared a day of Thanksgiving halfway through the Civil War, and it has reoccurred as a theme ever since, finally being named into law (first the fourth Thursday, then the last Thursday). But what did they eat at those early Thanksgivings?
Some things on the menu don't even exist anymore, like Passenger Pigeon. Venison would have been there, and corn--real corn, not "corn" in the European sense covering all commonly used grains. (Though we probably would not recognize the varies of corn present. They would have been flint corn, multicolored and tasting quite different.) Wildfowl, too. Stuffing was probably diced onions, herbs, and shelled chestnuts. Being close to the shores, the first European settlers undoubtedly ate shellfish.
Beans, squashes, root veggies--the Wampanoag ate well, and taught the colonists a lot. I'm guessing that Allie would have had a mixture of old and new on her family's table, the remnants of those great early foods as well as the precious addition of wheat, sugar, dried berries, and so on. No shellfish in her part of the country, though. Too much travel time even from Lake Michigan, and at the time of Kindred Rites, she didn't know about the advantage practitioners had in this regard.
But the foods we often think of as staples at Thanksgiving are mostly from the mid-nineteenth century. Read on.
Some things on the menu don't even exist anymore, like Passenger Pigeon. Venison would have been there, and corn--real corn, not "corn" in the European sense covering all commonly used grains. (Though we probably would not recognize the varies of corn present. They would have been flint corn, multicolored and tasting quite different.) Wildfowl, too. Stuffing was probably diced onions, herbs, and shelled chestnuts. Being close to the shores, the first European settlers undoubtedly ate shellfish.
Beans, squashes, root veggies--the Wampanoag ate well, and taught the colonists a lot. I'm guessing that Allie would have had a mixture of old and new on her family's table, the remnants of those great early foods as well as the precious addition of wheat, sugar, dried berries, and so on. No shellfish in her part of the country, though. Too much travel time even from Lake Michigan, and at the time of Kindred Rites, she didn't know about the advantage practitioners had in this regard.
But the foods we often think of as staples at Thanksgiving are mostly from the mid-nineteenth century. Read on.
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Today, the traditional Thanksgiving dinner includes any number of dishes: turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes, candied yams, cranberry sauce and pumpkin pie.
I've posted about some foods either mentioned in primary sources or in artlcles like the one above. Except for the potatoes, there's support for all those foods being available in the area at that time. (The Indians stuffed their fowls with herbs, and may have brought cranberries to the feast.)
Even if the the pumpkin could not have been in a crust of wheat flour, and the cranberries could not have been sweetened with sugar -- the basic foods grew there and were part of the local diets.
(My quotes and references are at houseboatonstyx.livejournal.com/227227.html and houseboatonstyx.livejournal.com/226178.html
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I love the reoccurring battle over which pumpkin makes the best pie, and whether a sugar pumpkin is too watery. Do you think they always made pumpkin leather first, thus removing the water problem? I've been making pumpkin souffle/pudding for years, or creating a pecan crust, so lack of wheat isn't a problem for me. The settlers came from a pie culture--they probably missed wheat, and tried to figure out other ways to make meat pies, etc.
Thank you for the links, I will look later!