United States lore has it that the first Thanksgiving was in 1621, when Plymouth colonists and the Wampanoag Indians shared a harvest feast. Several American presidents since then had called for days of thanks, but it was President Abraham Lincoln who made Thanksgiving a national holiday in 1863, during the height of the Civil War.
No one truly knows what was served at that first Thanksgiving dinner, but most Americans are familiar with what fills the plate today. Turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes, cranberry sauce, and pumpkin pie are staples on nearly everyone’s menu—which prompts the question: why?
Writer Leslie Friday sat down with Merry “Corky” White, professor of anthropology at Boston University and author of Coffee Life in Japan and Cooking for Crowds, to talk about the origins of the Thanksgiving menu, the evils of deviation, and why we eat so much food.
Why Did President Lincoln Name Thanksgiving a National Holiday?
Abraham Lincoln needed to unify the country during the Civil War. He needed a healing holiday to bring us all together. To do that he had to reach back pretty far in American history to a moment of some kind of establishing ourselves.
Of course, for the Pilgrims, it wasn’t about establishing ourselves. It was about survival. Those people had made it through, but so many had died, so many had suffered, and they were really thinking about how they were going to survive here.
Do We Have Any Idea What Was on the Menu that First Thanksgiving in 1621?
The Colombian exchange in 1492 hadn’t fully taken hold, when foods from the Old World and the New World crossed. Potatoes, corn, and squashes are New World foods. Things like pigs and domesticated animals come from the Old World. The foods the Indians would have eaten had to have been indigenous New World foods. One assumes fish and squashes. There probably was maize ground into flour to make bread. They hadn’t had time to start growing wheat. That’s definitely an Old World item.
Only elites had sugar and there was none here. They might have had fructose-containing vegetables, like squashes, but sugar at that time was an elite commodity in the Old World. The idea of a dessert? It didn’t figure. There was no conceptual place on the menu for ordinary people for something called dessert.
Why Did Americans Gravitate Toward What Are Now Thanksgiving Staples, Like Turkey, Sweet Potatoes, and Pumpkin Pie?
It’s an interesting holiday because it’s a festival. Yet, unlike some festivals, you don’t turn the world upside down. You reinforce something rather than upsetting it. Carnival, like New Orleans’ Mardi Gras, is the lord of misrule. Everything is turned on its head. All the rules are out—they’re broken on purpose. Thanksgiving is different. It’s reinforcing what is normal and ordinary. What we as a family or an ethnic group or as Americans eat gets framed.
