The centerpiece of contemporary Thanksgiving in the United States and Canada is Thanksgiving dinner, a large meal generally centered on a large roasted turkey. Thanksgiving is the largest eating event in the United States as measured by retail sales of food and beverages and by estimates of individual food intake. In a 2015 Harris Poll, Thanksgiving was the second most popular holiday in the United States (after Christmas), and turkey was the most popular holiday food, regardless of region, generation, gender, or race. Along with attending church services, Thanksgiving dinner remained a central part of celebrations from the holiday's early establishment in North America. Given that days of thanksgiving revolve around giving thanks, the saying of grace before Thanksgiving dinner is a traditional feature of the feast. At Thanksgiving dinner, turkey is served with a variety of side dishes that can vary from traditional to ones that reflect regional or cultural heritage. Many of the dishes in a traditional Thanksgiving dinner are made from ingredients native to the Americas, including the turkey bird, potato, sweet potato, corn (maize), squash (including pumpkin), green bean, and cranberry. The Pilgrims may have learned about some of these foods from Native Americans, but others were not available to the early settlers. The tradition of eating them at Thanksgiving likely reflects their affordability for later Americans. Early North American settlers did eat wild turkey, but the lavish feasts that are frequently ascribed to Thanksgiving in the 17th century were a creation of nineteenth-century writers who sought to popularize a unifying holiday in which all Americans could share. Thanksgiving Day was made a national holiday in the mid-19th century, and the importance of the day and its centerpiece family meal has become a widely observed American and Canadian tradition, with the meal consisting of roast turkey (or substitute) and many sides being central part of the holiday. It has seen adoption in other English speaking realms such as the United Kingdom, where a broader repertoire of American cuisine is often served. The first frozen TV dinner was a Thanksgiving dinner triggered by a glut of turkeys in the year 1953.
Plymouth Colony and Thanksgiving dinner
The tradition of Thanksgiving dinner has often been associated in popular culture with New England. New England Puritans proclaimed days of thanksgiving to commemorate many specific events. Such days were marked by religious observances, prayer, and sometimes fasting. Church records of the time do not mention food or feasting as being part of such events. A single exception records that following church services in 1636, there was "then making merry to the creatures, the poorer sort being invited of the richer." On December 11, 1621, Governor Edward Winslow of the Plymouth Colony wrote a letter in hopes of attracting more colonists. In it, he described a three-day feast shared by the Plymouth settlers and the local Wampanoag tribe. Winslow sent out four men who provided a variety of fowls, sufficient to feed the colony for a week, while Massasoit's hunters killed five deer. In the 19th century, this event became associated with the idea of a Thanksgiving feast. In a footnote in 1841, Alexander Young claimed that this event "was the first thanksgiving, the harvest festival of New England". Jamestown, Virginia, and other locations have also been suggested as sites of the "First Thanksgiving". Most of what was served, however, according to some historians, as referenced in a letter from Edward Winslow written on 11 December 1621, would have been seafood, including lobster, fish, eels, mussels and oysters. Mussels in particular were abundant in New England and could be easily harvested because they clung to rocks along the shoreline. One of the most persistent advocates for Thanksgiving as a national holiday was writer Sarah Josepha Hale. Although she advocated for Thanksgiving in editorials in Godey's Lady's Book from 1837 onwards, Hale did not associate the Pilgrims with Thanksgiving until a brief mention in 1865. In "America's Thanksgiving Hymn", published in 1872, she credited the Pilgrims as being "free to do and pray, And keep in sober gladness Their first Thanksgiving Day". Hale did not suggest that the Pilgrim thanksgiving included feasting. Other writers were less discerning. Jane G. Austin published a fictional account of the Pilgrims, Standish of Standish, in 1889. Austin described the Pilgrims a year after their arrival as feasting on turkey stuffed with beechnuts, other types of fowl, venison, boiled beef and other roasts, oysters, clam chowder, plum-porridge, hasty pudding, sea biscuit, manchet bread, butter, treacle, mustard, turnips, salad, grapes, plums, popcorn, ale, and root beer. Austin's lavish description disregarded the historical record and the deaths due to starvation and malnutrition that occurred in the Plymouth Colony that winter. Nonetheless, her account was extremely popular. It was repeated by other writers, adapted for plays and public events, and adopted by school curricula. The writings of Austin and others helped to establish the inaccurate image of the Pilgrim Thanksgiving feast in popular culture and make it a part of the national identity of the United States.
Historical menus
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