Thanksgiving Traditions
In 1621 the Plymouth colonists and the Wampanoag Indians shared an autumn harvest feast which is now known as the first Thanksgiving. While cooking methods and table etiquette have changed as the holiday has evolved, the meal is still consumed today with the same spirit of celebration and overindulgence.
Historians aren’t completely certain about the full bounty, but it’s safe to say the pilgrims weren’t gobbling up pumpkin pie or playing with their mashed potatoes. Following is a list of the foods available to the colonists at the time of the 1621 feast. However, the only two items historians know for sure were on the menu are venison and wild fowl, which are mentioned in primary sources. The most detailed description of the “First Thanksgiving” comes from Edward Winslow.
The pilgrims didn’t use forks; they ate with spoons, knives, and their fingers. They wiped their hands on large cloth napkins which they also used to pick up hot morsels of food.
Salt would have been on the table at the harvest feast, and people would have sprinkled it on their food. Pepper, however, was something they used for cooking but wasn’t available on the table.
In the seventeenth century, a person’s social standing determined what he or she ate. The best food was placed next to the most important people. People didn’t tend to sample everything that was on the table they just ate what was closest to them.
Serving in the seventeenth century was very different from serving today. People weren’t served their meals individually. Foods were served onto the table and then people took the food from the table and ate it. All the servers had to do was move the food from the place where it was cooked onto the table.
Pilgrims didn’t eat in courses as we do today. All the different types of foods were placed on the table at the same time and people ate in any order they chose. Sometimes there were two courses, but each of them would contain both meat dishes, puddings, and sweets.
Our modern Thanksgiving repast is centered around the turkey, but that certainly wasn’t the case at the pilgrims’ feasts. Their meals included many different meats. Vegetable dishes, one of the main components of our modern celebration, didn’t really play a large part in the feast mentality of the seventeenth century. Depending on the time of year, many vegetables weren’t available to the colonists.
The pilgrims probably didn’t have pies or anything sweet at the harvest feast. They had brought some sugar with them on the Mayflower but by the time of the feast, the supply had dwindled. Also, they didn’t have an oven so pies, cakes and breads were not possible at all.
The food that was eaten at the harvest feast would have seemed fatty by 1990’s standards, but was probably more healthy for the pilgrims than it would be for people today. The colonists were more active and needed more protein. Heart attack was the least of their worries. They were more concerned about the plague and pox.
People tend to think of English food at bland; however, the pilgrims used many spices, including cinnamon, ginger, nutmeg, pepper, and dried fruit, in sauces for meats.
In the seventeenth century, cooks did not use proportions or talk about teaspoons and tablespoons. Instead, they just improvised.
The best way to cook things in the seventeenth century was to roast them. Among the pilgrims, someone was assigned to sit for hours at a time and turn the spit to make sure the meat was evenly done.
Since the pilgrims and Wampanoag Indians had no refrigeration in the seventeenth century, they tended to dry their foods to preserve them. They dried Indian corn, hams, fish, and many herbs.
The biggest meal of the day was eaten at noon and called noonmeat or dinner. The housewives would spend part of their morning cooking that meal. Supper was a smaller meal they had at the end of the day. Breakfast tended to be leftovers from the previous day’s noonmeat.
In a pilgrim household, the adults sat down to eat and the children and servants waited on them.
The foods that colonists and Wampanoag Indians ate were very similar, but their eating patterns were different. While the colonists had set eating patterns, (breakfast, dinner, and supper) the Wampanoags tended to eat when they were hungry and to have pots cooking throughout the day.
Source: Kathleen Curtin, Food Historian at Plimoth Plantation
Myths of the Seventeenth Century
“The reason we have so many myths associated with Thanksgiving is that it is an invented tradition. It doesn’t originate in any one event. It is based on the New England puritan Thanksgiving, which is a religious Thanksgiving, and the traditional harvest celebrations of England and New England and maybe other ideas like commemorating the pilgrims. All of these have been gathered together and transformed into something different from the original parts.”
James W. Baker,
Senior Historian at Plimoth Plantation
MYTH: The first Thanksgiving was in 1621 and the pilgrims celebrated it every year thereafter.
FACT: The first feast wasn’t repeated, so it wasn’t the beginning of a tradition. In fact, the colonists didn’t even call the day Thanksgiving. To them, a thanksgiving was a religious holiday in which they would go to church and thank God for a specific event, such as the winning of a battle. On such a religious day, the types of recreational activities the pilgrims and Wampanoag Indians participated in during the 1621 harvest feast such as dancing, singing secular songs, playing games wouldn’t have been allowed. The feast was a secular celebration, so it never would have been considered a thanksgiving in the pilgrims minds.
MYTH: The original Thanksgiving feast took place on the fourth Thursday of November.
FACT: The original feast in 1621 occurred sometime between September 21 and November 11. Unlike our modern holiday, it was three days long. The event was based on English harvest festivals, which traditionally occurred around the 29th of September. President Franklin D. Roosevelt set the date for Thanksgiving to the fourth Thursday of November in 1939 (approved by Congress in 1941). Abraham Lincoln had previously designated it as the last Thursday in November, which may have correlated it with the November 21, 1621, anchoring of the Mayflower at Cape Cod.
MYTH: Pilgrims wore only black and white clothing, and had buckles on their hats, garments, and shoes.
FACT: Buckles did not come into fashion until later in the seventeenth century and black and white were commonly worn only on Sunday and formal occasions. Women typically dressed in red, earthy green, brown, blue, violet, and gray, while men wore clothing in white, beige, black, earthy green, and brown.
MYTH: Pilgrims brought furniture with them on the Mayflower.
FACT: The only furniture that the pilgrims brought on the Mayflower was chests and boxes. They constructed wooden furniture once they settled in Plymouth.
MYTH: The Mayflower was headed for Virginia, but due to a navigational mistake it ended up in Cape Cod Massachusetts.
FACT: The Pilgrims were in fact planning to settle in Virginia, but not the modern day state of Virginia. They were part of the Virginia Company, which had the rights to most of the eastern seaboard of the U.S. The pilgrims had intended to go to the Hudson River region in New York State, which would have been considered “Northern Virginia,” but they landed in Cape Cod instead. Treacherous seas prevented them from venturing further south.
www.historychannel.com
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