First and most importantly, my favorite Thanksgiving playlist. I pick tunes that I would enjoy while cooking, driving or eating. There are so many songs named after food, guys.
We’ve discussed what historians think was and was not served at The First ThanksgivingTM, but it’s a markedly different menu than most American households roll out.
Turkey is Thee meat of Thanksgiving. We’ve discussed whether turkey was served at that mythical (three-day) feast; while it’s possible turkey was served, it certainly wouldn’t have been the centerpiece that it has become. So how did we get here?
Turkeys are plentiful in North America, so it wasn’t hard for families to locate one. They’re not used for their eggs and they don’t provide milk or wool, so they can be offed at any time. (If you’re getting rid of any chickens, you do so at the end of their egg-laying life, which means they tend to be used for stewed dishes. Not the showy centerpiece we were looking for.) By late fall, turkeys tend to be on the move and are generally larger, having tacked on mass for the coming winter. That means one bird could easily feed a crowd, unlike other poultry.
Beef and pork were pretty common meats, so having them at a holiday feast wouldn’t feel particularly fancy. Most people prefer lamb to grown-ass sheep, so that makes it more of an Easter dish. Shellfish was well and good for the Pilgrims, but for people further inland, the big day called for something a little less likely to give us all the heaves. By process of elimination, turkey was a sure winner.
But when did having turkey become such a part of our Thanksgiving traditions? We’re not quite sure, but George Washington held a few celebratory Thanksgivings during the American Revolution. It was after the first official one (November 26, 1789) that Alexander Hamilton was said to have remarked:
"No person should abstain from having turkey on Thanksgiving Day."
It was up to each president thereafter to decide whether or not to declare a Thanksgiving holiday, and the date changed a few times. (Thomas Jefferson was the only asshole that said, “no thanks.”)
Around 1855, William Bradford’s journals (we talked about those) were published widely, and it sparked this weird Pilgrim nostalgia thing for many… including Sara Josepha Hale, who famously penned the absolute banger “Mary Had a Little Lamb.”
She led the charge for Thanksgiving, pressuring President Abraham Lincoln to officially declare Thanksgiving a national holiday. In the midst of the Civil War, he finally made it so. Bradford’s writings mentioned fowl – including the turkey – and Sara’s mind ran with it. She pushed the turkey narrative, publishing a book that devoted a whole chapter to mythologizing the New England ThanksgingTM, noting that a roasted turkey was always “placed at the head of the table.”
And it was lucky, because turkeys were (and remain) fairly inexpensive, yet the size of it made them a bit of a rare bird (ba-dum-tssssh) on family tables. With railroads criss-crossing the United States, refrigerated shipping cars meant meat could be taken to areas where turkeys weren’t as common. (Fun probably fact: TV dinners were invented in 1953 to make use of 250+ tons of leftover frozen turkey that was sitting in ten train cars.)
The post WWII-era gave rise to many innovations in manufacturing and processing. A little meat processing company in Chicago purchased a trademark from a woman in Ohio, who had owned it since 1940. The owner of the company wasn’t sure right away what he was doing to do with it, but in 1954, he slapped the word onto hist fast-frozen turkeys, and “Butterball” was born. The pre-basted birds became synonymous with “turkey,” probably because of that quaint little trademark.
Modern turkeys are very different from what the Pilgrims (maybe?) ate. They’re bred for large breasts and quick growth, totally factoring flavor out of the equation (all my Midwesterners say “ooooope!”) The pre-basting process plumps the meat up even more with what is essentially salt water, which evacuates quickly in the roaster, leaving behind dry, spongy meat. Hurray!
If you like vintage documentaries, this one is a humdinger ( albeit a little long ):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Cg0TjoEkt0
In it you will learn that the way we currently see turkeys in the grocery store is called "table dressed" and was a "new fangled" thing in the 50s! Previously you could only get your turkey "New York dressed" which I would describe as ... lightly killed and plucked.
The Marie Gifford kitchen and the turkey industry as a whole must be sorely disappointed that as a society we never adopted the "turkey year round" lifestyle they're advocating in this video.