What Was on the Menu at the First Thanksgiving? (2024)
Today, the traditional Thanksgiving dinner includes any number of dishes: turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes, candied yams, cranberry sauce and pumpkin pie. But if one were to create a historically accurate feast, consisting of only those foods that historians are certain were served at the so-called “first Thanksgiving,” there would be slimmer pickings. “Wildfowl was there. Corn, in grain form for bread or for porridge, was there. Venison was there,” says Kathleen Wall. “These are absolutes.”
Two primary sources—the only surviving documents that reference the meal—confirm that these staples were part of the harvest celebration shared by the Pilgrims and Wampanoag at Plymouth Colony in 1621. Edward Winslow, an English leader who attended, wrote home to a friend:
“Our harvest being gotten in, our governor sent four men on fowling, that so we might after a special manner rejoice together after we had gathered the fruit of our labors. They four in one day killed as much fowl as, with a little help beside, served the company almost a week. At which time, amongst other recreations, we exercised our arms, many of the Indians coming amongst us, and among the rest their greatest king Massasoit, with some ninety men, whom for three days we entertained and feasted, and they went out and killed five deer, which they brought to the plantation and bestowed on our governor, and upon the captain and others.”
William Bradford, the governor Winslow mentions, also described the autumn of 1621, adding, “And besides waterfowl there was great store of wild turkeys, of which they took many, besides venison, etc. Besides, they had about a peck a meal a week to a person, or now since harvest, Indian corn to that proportion.”
But determining what else the colonists and Wampanoag might have eaten at the 17th-century feast takes some digging. To form educated guesses, Wall, a foodways culinarian at Plimoth Plantation, a living history museum in Plymouth, Massachusetts, studies cookbooks and descriptions of gardens from the period, archaeological remains such as pollen samples that might clue her in to what the colonists were growing.
Our discussion begins with the bird. Turkey was not the centerpiece of the meal, as it is today, explains Wall. Though it is possible the colonists and American Indians cooked wild turkey, she suspects that goose or duck was the wildfowl of choice. In her research, she has found that swan and passenger pigeons would have been available as well. “Passenger pigeons—extinct in the wild for over a century now—were so thick in the 1620s, they said you could hear them a quarter-hour before you saw them,” says Wall. “They say a man could shoot at the birds in flight and bring down 200.”
Small birds were often spit-roasted, while larger birds were boiled. “I also think some birds—in a lot of recipes you see this—were boiled first, then roasted to finish them off. Or things are roasted first and then boiled,” says Wall. “The early roasting gives them nicer flavor, sort of caramelizes them on the outside and makes the broth darker.”
It is possible that the birds were stuffed, though probably not with bread. (Bread, made from maize not wheat, was likely a part of the meal, but exactly how it was made is unknown.) The Pilgrims instead stuffed birds with chunks of onion and herbs. “There is a wonderful stuffing for goose in the 17th-century that is just shelled chestnuts,” says Wall. “I am thinking of that right now, and it is sounding very nice.” Since the first Thanksgiving was a three-day celebration, she adds, “I have no doubt whatsoever that birds that are roasted one day, the remains of them are all thrown in a pot and boiled up to make broth the next day. That broth thickened with grain to make a pottage.”
In addition to wildfowl and deer, the colonists and Wampanoag probably ate eels and shellfish, such as lobster, clams and mussels. “They were drying shellfish and smoking other sorts of fish,” says Wall.
According to the culinarian, the Wampanoag, like most eastern woodlands people, had a “varied and extremely good diet.” The forest provided chestnuts, walnuts and beechnuts. “They grew flint corn (multicolored Indian corn), and that was their staple. They grew beans, which they used from when they were small and green until when they were mature,” says Wall. “They also had different sorts of pumpkins or squashes.”
As we are taught in school, the Indians showed the colonists how to plant native crops. “The English colonists plant gardens in March of 1620 and 1621,” says Wall. “We don’t know exactly what’s in those gardens. But in later sources, they talk about turnips, carrots, onions, garlic and pumpkins as the sorts of things that they were growing.”
Of course, to some extent, the exercise of reimagining the spread of food at the 1621 celebration becomes a process of elimination. “You look at what an English celebration in England is at this time. What are the things on the table? You see lots of pies in the first course and in the second course, meat and fish pies. To cook a turkey in a pie was not terribly uncommon,” says Wall. “But it is like, no, the pastry isn’t there.” The colonists did not have butter and wheat flour to make crusts for pies and tarts. (That’s right: No pumpkin pie!) “That is a blank in the table, for an English eye. So what are they putting on instead? I think meat, meat and more meat,” says Wall.
Meat without potatoes, that is. White potatoes, originating in South America, and sweet potatoes, from the Caribbean, had yet to infiltrate North America. Also, there would have been no cranberry sauce. It would be another 50 years before an Englishman wrote about boiling cranberries and sugar into a “Sauce to eat with. . . .Meat.” Says Wall: “If there was beer, there were only a couple of gallons for 150 people for three days.” She thinks that to wash it all down the English and Wampanoag drank water.
All this, naturally, begs a follow-up question. So how did the Thanksgiving menu evolve into what it is today?
Wall explains that the Thanksgiving holiday, as we know it, took root in the mid-19th century. At this time, Edward Winslow’s letter, printed in a pamphlet called Mourt’s Relation, and Governor Bradford’s manuscript, titled Of Plimoth Plantation, were rediscovered and published. Boston clergyman Alexander Young printed Winslow’s letter in his Chronicles of the Pilgrim Fathers, and in the footnotes to the resurrected letter, he somewhat arbitrarily declared the feast the first Thanksgiving. (Wall and others at Plimoth Plantation prefer to call it “the harvest celebration in 1621.”) There was nostalgia for colonial times, and by the 1850s, most states and territories were celebrating Thanksgiving.
Sarah Josepha Hale, editor of the popular women’s magazine Godey’s Lady’s Book, , a real trendsetter for running a household, was a leading voice in establishing Thanksgiving as an annual event. Beginning in 1827, Hale petitioned 13 presidents, the last of whom was Abraham Lincoln. She pitched her idea to President Lincoln as a way to unite the country in the midst of the Civil War, and, in 1863, he made Thanksgiving a national holiday.
Throughout her campaign, Hale printed Thanksgiving recipes and menus in Godey’s Lady’s Book. She also published close to a dozen cookbooks. “She is really planting this idea in the heads of lots of women that this is something they should want to do,” says Wall. “So when there finally is a national day of Thanksgiving, there is a whole body of women who are ready for it, who know what to do because she told them. A lot of the food that we think of—roast turkey with sage dressing, creamed onions, mashed turnips, even some of the mashed potato dishes, which were kind of exotic then—are there.”
There are only two surviving documents that reference the original Thanksgiving harvest meal. They describe a feast of freshly killed deer, assorted wildfowl, a bounty of cod and bass, and flint, a native variety of corn harvested by the Native Americans, which was eaten as corn bread and porridge.
Although turkeys were indigenous, there's no record of a big, roasted bird at the feast. The Wampanoag brought deer and there would have been lots of local seafood (mussels, lobster, bass) plus the fruits of the first pilgrim harvest, including pumpkin.
Pumpkin pie wasn't served for dessert at the first Thanksgiving—nor was any pie, for that matter. The Pilgrims probably didn't have access to many of the things needed to make pie crust, including butter, flour, and ovens. But that doesn't mean pumpkin was left out of the meal entirely.
In 1621, the Plymouth colonists feasted and gave thanks with members of the Wampanoag tribe at what is considered the first Thanksgiving. The first Thanksgiving lasted three days. The colonists probably ate fowl, deer, mussels, ducks, lobster, beans and vegetables, but nobody knows for sure.
Did they eat turkey? We don't think so. The Wampanoag guests brought five deer with them, so venison was on the menu. The English brought fowl, "probably migrating waterfowl like ducks and geese, which were plentiful in autumn," says Beahrs.
“What the pilgrims drank was fermented apple juice, or what we call hard cider. And that's because it was something they were used to drinking back in England. Cider was very, very popular in Europe and they were lucky – several varieties of apples are native to America,” said Pearce.
Potatoes—white or sweet—would not have been featured on the 1621 table, and neither would sweet corn. Bread-based stuffing was also not made, though the Pilgrims may have used herbs or nuts to stuff birds.
A lot of Thanksgiving Day foods have changed since the first Thanksgiving, but some have remained an integral part of the meal. Along with turkey and desserts made from pumpkins, beer is credited with having been at the table since the beginning.
They most likely had dried meat and fish, cheese, dried fruit, biscuits, grains, flour, and dried beans and peas. When their water supply became unfit to drink, the Pilgrims drank beer.
Just like us today, the Pilgrims usually ate three meals a day. But how they ate these meals is a little different. Many people would “break fast” in the morning with a little bread and butter, or cheese, or something left from the day before.
But it's pretty clear they did not have pumpkin pie or any pie for that matter. The colonists lacked wheat flour and butter necessary for making pie crust.
In fact, the Pilgrims of the Plymouth Colony in today's Massachusetts did share a meal with the Wampanoag Indians in the autumn of 1621, but the rest of the details are uncertain.
That's because the sacks of sugar that the Pilgrims had brought with them across the Atlantic on the Mayflower were probably gone by the fall of 1621. The other fruits that were common in the area and probably on the table included blueberries, plums, grapes, gooseberries and raspberries.
The pilgrims likely had vegetables like corn, onions, beans, lettuce, spinach, cabbage, carrots, and peas. Corn, while plentiful, would have been served as a porridge. Fruits they could have eaten were blueberries, plums, grapes, gooseberries, raspberries, and cranberries.
Massasoit sent some of his own men to hunt deer for the feast and for three days, the English and native men, women, and children ate together. The meal consisted of deer, corn, shellfish, and roasted meat, different from today's traditional Thanksgiving feast. They played ball games, sang, and danced.
Mashed potatoes were not around in 1621, but corn was the staple starch of the time and corn bread, called "maizium," was likely a favorite at the first Thanksgiving meal.
Although the Pilgrims may have been aware of the wild cranberries growing in the Massachusetts Bay area, it is unlikely that cranberry sauce would have been among the dishes served at the First Thanksgiving meal. Cranberries are not mentioned by any primary sources for the First Thanksgiving meal.
Fowl. Items such as waterfowl, wildfowl (yes, there were turkeys, but they were wild, not domestic), venison, chestnuts, shellfish, possibly porridge made from corn (sometimes sweetened with molasses, if available), and wild fruits graced that first table, where pilgrims and Wampanoag broke proverbial bread.
There was no pumpkin pie—they didn't have a baking oven in Plimoth Plantation—but there might have been pumpkin served other ways, since both the Pilgrims and the Wampanoag ate pumpkin and other indigenous squashes.
Also known as Drinksgiving, Blackout Wednesday or Black Wednesday has become the first drinking weekend of the holiday season. In many ways, it rivals New Year's Eve and St.
Kathy Rudder, an expert in the foodways and culinary history of the Pilgrims at the Plimoth Patuxet Museums, says the answer isn't terribly exciting: It was water, she claims. “The Pilgrims drank water,” she says. “They drank it at the first Thanksgiving, they drank it every day.”
So, to the question “What did the Pilgrims eat for Thanksgiving,” the answer is both surprising and expected. Turkey (probably), venison, seafood, and all of the vegetables that they had planted and harvested that year—onions, carrots, beans, spinach, lettuce, and other greens.
Does it include baking a pumpkin, pecan, or apple pie? While that's quite the tradition today, the Pilgrims didn't have sweeteners like sugar, molasses, or even honey. It turns out that the desserts on the big day were more likely sweetened by something else entirely: Dried grapes and raisins!
The Pilgrims and Native Americans didn't feast on turkey, but instead the fruits of their first harvest.This included lobster, mussels and venison meat.
The biggest drinking day of the year Thanksgiving eve aka the Wednesday before Thanksgiving. Unfortunately, the drinking and driving that occurs on Thanksgiving Eve is part of the reason why 25% of all fatal crashes over the holiday weekend are alcohol-related. Drunk driving crashes and deaths are 100% preventable.
The night before Thanksgiving is simply a time to get together. “It's a pervasive social expectation,” Nelson said. “These bars may be offering specials and they serve as a place to get together. Especially for folks returning from college who have recently come of age, it's just a logical thing to do.”
They literally drank beer like water. Therefore, beer was crucial to their survival on the long journey across the Atlantic, and it continued to play a role in the colonists' survival as they set off on a new journey, much more ambitious and daunting than their last – the journey to building America.
The First Thanksgiving meal eaten by pilgrims in November 1621 included lobster. They also ate fruits and vegetables brought by Native Americans, mussels, bass, clams, and oysters. Back in 1621, lobsters were so plentiful that you could grab them by the hand straight out of the ocean at low tide.
Farmed foods such as corn and beans made up about 70% of the Wampanoag diet. Although the Wampanoag favored meat, meat made up less than 20% of their diet. Roots, berries and other gathered plant materials, as well as eggs, fish, and shellfish (both fresh and dried) made up the rest.
In fact, the Pilgrims of the Plymouth Colony in today's Massachusetts did share a meal with the Wampanoag Indians in the autumn of 1621, but the rest of the details are uncertain.
Pilgrims didn't have access to sugar and potatoes in those days, and corn would have been as grain, made into bread or porridge. Among the dishes they could have eaten are Dutch cheese, wild grapes, lobster, cod and stewed pumpkin. The side dishes probably didn't matter much to the Pilgrims, though.
Just like us today, the Pilgrims usually ate three meals a day. But how they ate these meals is a little different. Many people would “break fast” in the morning with a little bread and butter, or cheese, or something left from the day before.
What Wasn't Served at the First Thanksgiving. It is also worth noting what was not present at the first Thanksgiving feast. There were no cloudlike heaps of mashed potatoes, since white potatoes had not yet crossed over from South America.
Along with potatoes, many other foods—including corn, beans, squash, pumpkins, peppers, tomatoes, yams, peanuts, wild rice, chocolate, pineapples, avocados, papayas, pecans, strawberries, cranberries, and blueberries, to name a few, are indigenous to the Americas.
Nasaump is a traditional Wampanoag dish that is made from dried corn, local berries, and nuts such as acorns and chesnuts and sometimes sweetened with maple syrup. It is boiled in water until it thickens, and is similar to a porridge or oatmeal. Note: The Pilgrims called this "Samp" which is an abbreviation of Nasaump.
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