Come Thursday, if you want to eat what the Pilgrims and the Wampanoag Indians feasted on at the first Thanksgiving in 1621, it’s time to stock up on venison, mussels, corn and squash.
Venison was a prominent feature of the original Thanksgiving dinner. In a letter to a friend in London, Pilgrim Edward Winslow wrote that Wampanoag chief Massasoit and his warriors contributed five deer to the festivities. That amount of venison would have fed the 53 Pilgrims and 90 Indian warriors for several days.
Seafood, which was readily available in the waters near Plymouth, also was on the menu. In his journal, Governor William Bradford writes about fishing for cod and bass. Winslow describes how Plymouth Bay was “full of lobsters” and a “variety of other fish.” Eels were easy to catch, and mussels were “at our door.” Oysters weren’t readily available in Plymouth Bay but could be obtained from local Indians, Winslow says.
But what about turkey, the bird that, according to a recent poll, is eaten by 88 percent of Americans on Thanksgiving Day? The woods of New England were full of wild turkey in the 17th century, and it makes sense to presume that the Pilgrims and Indians ate it at the first Thanksgiving in addition to other fowl, including swan and even eagle. As for stuffing, cooks in England roasted fowl with herbs and onions inside the cavity, and it is probable the Pilgrims did, too.
Several now-traditional foods were not available in New England in the 1620s, among them cranberry sauce, white potatoes, sweet potatoes and apples.
Cranberries would have grown wild near Plymouth, but if a curious Pilgrim had picked and eaten one berry, he would not have wanted to eat a second. Cranberries are extremely tart and need sweetening to be palatable. Since sugar was very expensive in England, the Pilgrims were unlikely to have brought any with them on the Mayflower. It would be half a century before an English traveler called John Josselyn would mention boiling cranberries with sugar as a sauce accompaniment to meat.
White potatoes, which originated in South America, did not grow in New England, and the Wampanoag were not familiar with them. Sweet potatoes came from the Caribbean and the Spanish had adopted them, but they were rare in England.
Apples also were unknown in the New World in 1621. It wouldn’t be long before colonists planted imported apple seeds, but the fruit itself wasn’t available until the end of the 17th century. Despite the saying “as American as apple pie,” there is nothing indigenous about the dessert.
Melanie Kirkpatrick, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, is the author of “Thanksgiving: The Holiday at the Heart of the American Experience” (Encounter Books), out now.