Every fourth Thursday of November, Thanksgiving is celebrated. The usual thing to do to celebrate this holiday is to indulge ourselves in food, but the traditional food there is now wasn’t what they had then.
History of the first Thanksgiving meal
The first Thanksgiving was held in 1621. It lasted three days and it had about 50 pilgrims and 90 Wampanoag Indians. It was mostly likely held outdoors and not inside around a big table, as the English houses were too small to get everyone inside all at once.
The Pilgrims spent the day by simply giving thanks for the bountiful harvest. They took a day off to enjoy their plentiful harvest, to relax, to have fun, and to share some of their success with the Indians. The Indians, who also took part with the Pilgrims on this day, even helped with some of the preparations. They also helped kill some of the meat that they would have for the dinner. The one thing that is known is that the first Thanksgiving was a day of happiness and rejoicing for the Pilgrims. To learn more about the first Thanksgiving meal go check out history.com.
Turkey, stuffing, and potatoes
Considering that the first Thanksgiving was held in the autumn of 1621, they probably didn’t have all the food that is available today, but a lot of the differences might surprise some people. For example, today the main dish for most houses on Thanksgiving Day is the famous turkey. At the first Thanksgiving, there surprisingly wasn’t any turkey at all. Instead they had duck, goose, rabbit, chicken, and also deer (five deer were killed and brought back as a gift from the Wampanoag Indians) as their main meat dishes.
There were also no potatoes, stuffing, or cranberry sauce (though they did just have plain cranberries) at the meal. As a substitute for the stuffing, they most likely used herbs, onions, or nuts to enhance the flavor of the birds they ate. Instead of potatoes they most likely used Indian turnips and groundnuts as a replacement.
Seafood
On the first Thanksgiving, the majority of the food was seafood. They had foods such as lobsters, bass, clams, oysters, eel, cod and mussels. The colonists occasionally served mussels with curds, a dairy product much like cottage cheese. At the time there was large quantities of mussels in New England and could be easily harvested because they clung to rocks along the shoreline. Now we rarely even have any seafood, if at all on our dinner plates for our Thanksgiving meal.
Pies
There was no pumpkin pie or pie at all for that matter, the most popular dessert we have now, at the first Thanksgiving either. They of course ate pumpkins, but the starting colony had lacked the butter and wheat flour that was necessary for making the pie crust for the pie. Not to mention that the settlers had not yet constructed an oven for baking food.
Supposedly the early English settlers improvised a way to somewhat create a different version of the pumpkin pie. They would first hollow out the pumpkin, and then they would fill the shells of the pumpkin with milk adding honey and spices along the way to make custard. After that they would then roast the gourds whole in hot ashes.
Fruits and vegetables
At the first Thanksgiving there were many different kinds of fruits and vegetables, most of which we still eat today. Some vegetables would have included onions, beans, lettuce, spinach, cabbage, carrots, peas, and corn. Corn was plentiful at the time, but it wasn’t served in the way we enjoy it today. Back then, corn would have been removed from the cob and turned into a cornmeal. It was then boiled and pounded into mush or porridge. Occasionally it was sweetened with molasses. Now-a-days we have corn on the cob, sweet potatoes, green bean casserole, and salad.
Some fruits that were present at the first Thanksgiving included blueberries, plums, grapes, gooseberries (a round edible yellowish-green or reddish berry with a thin translucent hairy skin), raspberries, and cranberries. They wouldn’t have had cranberry sauce at that time because cooks didn’t begin boiling cranberries with sugar as an accompaniment for meat until nearly fifty years later. A lot of the fruit that was eaten then is still eaten today too. The one main difference with the fruit is that the Pilgrims used mostly just fruit as a dessert, as that was all they really had, while now we have pies and cookies.
Utensils and organization of the meal
The pilgrims didn’t use forks to eat because they weren’t invented yet and they didn’t have plates to use either. Instead they used spoons and knives and mostly their handy fingers to eat. Large brass pots were used constantly for cooking corn, meat and meat stews and to boil vegetables. They had large cloth napkins which they also used to pick up food that was too hot to pick up with their fingers. Not like today where there’s have all different kinds of pots and pans and silverware to help us cook and eat the food we serve.
The pilgrims didn’t tend to sample every kind of food there was. They basically just ate what was near them or what food they liked to eat, unlike today where everyone tries everything that there is on the table. Pilgrims didn’t eat in courses either. All different types of food were placed on the table at the same time and people ate in any order they chose. They did this for all three days.
Back then a person’s social standpoint determined what he or she ate. With this being said, the best food was placed next to the most important people. Unlike today where it doesn’t matter where anyone sits and people can eat anything they please.
