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The first feast / Inaugural Thanksgiving featured meat, meat -- and more meat
By NANCY VAN VALKENBURGIf you could bring pilgrim Edward Winslow 387 years into his future, from his first Thanksgiving to our current feast, he would have a few pressing questions.
"Why do your women dress like that? How do ye light your rooms with no candles? What form of beast yields this wall-to-wall pelt called 'carpet'? What be that quivering green mass, embedded with carrots, walnuts and marshmallows, on your food table?"
But eventually, he'd get down to a more basic question:
"Is this all ye have to eat?"
Yes, a real pilgrim would be as sorely disappointed with our single-meat meals and our abundance of vegetable dishes, and wouldn't know what to make of our sugar-laden desserts, with cider, soda or fruit punch to drink.
... Just as we might be left cold by his somewhat more healthful spread of multiple game meats, lean fowl and fish, vegetables as meat enhancements only, and marginally sweet dishes like corn pudding, with water to drink.
"Without a doubt, hunted meat, and lots of it, took center stage," said Kathleen Curtain, who for 21 years has served as food historian at Plimouth Plantation, a pilgrim museum in Plymouth, Mass. "Someone from that time would be disappointed to come to a feast and find turkey as the only meat dish."
The two surviving 1621 accounts of life in Plymouth offer a glimpse of the first Thanksgiving, and of life at harvest time.
A Thanksgiving description by Edward Winslow mentions only two foods: venison, hunted by the Wampanoag Indians, and fowl, which could mean ducks, geese, swans, turkeys, partridges or other wild birds.
A general harvest description, by William Bradford, listed items including cod, bass and other fish; water fowl and wild turkeys; and meal from Indian corn.
Also possible
Other foods known to be available on the Eastern seaboard of that era include eel, lobsters, clams, oysters, berries, pumpkins and other squash, and maybe some wild nuts, plums and grapes, Curtain said.
And the pilgrims would have planted herbs and vegetables likely to include onions, parsnips, cabbage and peas, although the pea crop failed, according to historical accounts.
And the pilgrims would have brought plenty of vinegar, Curtain said, because they liked their meat sauces a little more piquant and tangy than we favor today. They may have had a small amount of milk from goats, and some eggs, she added.
Items unavailable to the pilgrims would have included potatoes, yams, wheat and flour. Sugar would have been absent or in very low supply, being a luxury item that would have been brought from Europe. Apples and honey were not native to North America. Cranberries were available, but tart. The custom of sweetening cranberries for sauce had not yet developed, Curtain said.
As for cooking fat, Curtain said their were a few choices.
"Olive oil was a common import and they very likely brought it with them but why go there when you had an ample supply of delicious duck and goose fat?"
Animal fat was a flavorful treat, Curtain said, and would have been consumed with gusto.
Healthiest choice
So do we low-fat-gravy sippers enjoy a more healthful Thanksgiving than the group of about 50 pilgrims and 90 Wampanoags that unknowingly launched the holiday?
Uh, no.
First of all, their turkeys were not the butterballs, no commercial endorsement intended, of today.
"Turkeys have radically changed through genetic selection," Curtain said. "Turkeys now are very breast-heavy, and have more fat, and really can't fly. Wild turkeys are leaner and tougher, and have a gamier taste."
The first Thanksgiving was organic, and free of added hormones. Sour cream and heavy cream were not on the menu. Butter would arrive by ship shortly after the holiday, according to historical accounts.
Then there's sugar.
"We re-created the meal, as best we could with ingredients they would have had, and with historical recipes," Curtain said. "We fed 100 people, and we used one cup of sugar. A common sugar ration then was about a pound of sugar a year, and the last statistic I saw was that Americans eat a pound of sugar every three days, with corn syrup and all."
The biggest difference of all was not one of ingredients, but one of habit.
"For the pilgrims, this was one feast," Curtain said. "They would have a feast, then go back to their regular life. The next day, they would go back to work and savor the memory of that feast, and when Christmas came, they might get another. I really doubt there were any fat pilgrims.
"With us, we eat until our bellies twang, then we go out to a restaurant the next day. For them, a feast was a break from their regular lives. For us, feasting is regular life."
RE-ENACTING THE ORIGINAL
For four years running, the folks at Thanksgiving Point have re-enacted the feast.
Using information from the experts at Plimouth Plantation to make the feast authentic, those at the Lehi attraction use pewter cups and plates -- and no forks, since spoons and serving knives were the utensils of the day, said Erica Brown, spokeswoman for Thanksgiving Point.
As for the menu: "We tried to strike a balance between authenticity and things people would actually eat," Brown said. "We served turkey and chicken, and a variety of different meats, squash, and a low-sugar cobbler based on berries they would have had. We didn't have as many fish items as the Pilgrims would have had."
The lone fish offering tends to be the variable each year, Brown said. In the 2007 season, the fish dish was raw oysters in warm goat's milk. How did guests react?
"About how you'd expect," Brown said. "It was more funny than anything."
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