Thanksgiving Turkey

On Thursday, American families will celebrate Thanksgiving by taking the day off work, eating a turkey together and watching sport and the Macy's Holiday Parade on TV. In fact they will eat 46 million turkeys and another 22 million at Christmas. They will also eat many tons of pumpkins, cranberries and sweet potatoes.

So, what is "Thanksgiving" all about? Why turkeys? And, while we are at it: Why are they even called turkeys?

As a nation, the USA does not officially celebrate religious holidays and employers do not have to recognise the holidays (literally holy-days) such as Christmas or Easter that we mark in the UK. I found this surprising as all that I seem to see on TV at this time of year is American B-movies about Christmas. The "Festive Season" certainly makes a lot of money for some American corporations.

Thanksgiving is very like Christmas but with no presents, which, in my view, makes it a much better holiday. But what are we celebrating?

In 1621 the colonists at Plymouth, in what is now in the state of Massachusetts, celebrated their survival in the New World with a feast to which they invited their Wampanoag neighbours, but it was not until 1863 that the feast became official.

Given that the American Civil War was at it's height, one can only imagine that this was an attempt by Abraham Lincoln to find some common ground for a new nation, but it probably came across as a Yankee event for many southerners. It only became a national holiday in 1941.

What did those first colonists really eat in 1621?

I have read that the turkeys eaten on that first Thanksgiving Day had been carried out on the Mayflower with the settlers as livestock. They would have been easy to keep on the ship and would have thrived in captivity in Massachusetts, so it is entirely possible that their were no wild turkeys on the menu. If they had domestic turkeys, it seems likely that they also had poultry and pigs.

We know that native corn and wild game, including birds and deer were consumed, but not pastries or pies. The last supplies from the Mayflower had run out, so most of the food was truly American. My guess is that over the three day feast they also had shellfish, fish and perhaps lobsters, all cooked over a fire or in an ash heap.

Turkeys are relatively easy to hunt and would have been plentiful in the woods of New England, so we suppose that the team of fowlers sent out from the settlement would have shot at least some of them, but there could just as easily have been ducks and geese in the bag at that time of year. And let us not forget that the sky could turn black with migrating doves in those times. Those passenger pigeons are extinct now because they were such an easy target. Similarly the autumn rivers of the East Coast were full of salmon and sturgeon that are mostly a memory now.

Why was a bird that was only found in the New World called a "turkey"? Perhaps the natives used a word that sounded like "Turkey" to European ears? Not at all. The Abenaki word is Nahama and other Algonquin tribes used similar names.

Given that the first Native American to talk to the settlers spoke English, you can assume that these were not the first Englishmen to set foot on that shore. Fishermen from Bristol, Devon and Cornwall had been coming to the coast for decades to exploit the rich cod fisheries. They had come ashore for timber (particularly masts for ships), water and ice to preserve their catch. They probably hunted game in the woods and collected eggs. Meanwhile, further south, the Spanish had already colonised areas that held turkeys, potatoes, squashes and tomatoes so that these commodities were already available in Europe. It is perfectly possible that the Pilgrims had already eaten turkeys in England where they were called Turkey coqs. Constantinople was probably the centre of transatlantic trade at the time so, for the English, this bird did indeed come from Turkey.

Before the 17th century another bird bore the name of turkey. It too was traded through the Mediterranean but it really came from Africa. Now we call it a Guinea Fowl. We still farm them in East Anglia today so it is possible that the Pilgrims knew these birds too, but called them turkeys. On seeing another big game bird in the New World, they called it a turkey too, just as they called the red-breasted thrush a robin and every brown bird a sparrow, after the birds they knew back home.

Back in England; having celebrated Thanksgiving early, I am being creative with my use of leftovers. Last night we had turkey enchiladas, which seems fairly traditional compared with the turkey rogan josh (curry) that I made tonight. Turkey fish-cakes anyone? Probably not.