Why Do We Associate Turkey With Thanksgiving?

Originally published on Medium

When we think of the modern American Thanksgiving, we often think of football and pre-Christmas consumerism. But nothing defines the holiday’s tradition like family gatherings around stuffed turkey.

Side dishes vary from region to region, but this stuffed fowl unites us Americans on the fourth Thursday of November like nothing else. During Thanksgiving 2017, Americans ate a whopping 45 million turkeys.

But what ties this meat so strongly to Thanksgiving, and has it always been associated with the holiday as if it owns it? People eat turkey at Christmas, but the turkey doesn’t enjoy the exclusive claim to that holiday.

Many point to the Pilgrims’ first Thanksgiving in 1621 as the origin of the holiday. But this is only slightly better than crediting Abner Doubleday with the invention of baseball.

When the Pilgrims settled New England, the people of the British Isles celebrated Harvest Home in late September — a harvest festival accompanied by a feast, dancing, and decorations. It was this celebration that the Pilgrims would have celebrated in the fall of 1621, and to which they introduced the Wampanoags.

But the Pilgrims and their native friends may or may not have eaten turkey at this “first Thanksgiving.” Edward Winslow records that Governor William Bradford sent four men “fowling.” Wild turkeys may have been one of the fowls they brought back…but unless some pilgrim’s long-lost diary is one day discovered we’ll never know.

The Food Timeline has documented a chronological list of Thanksgiving mentions, giving us a sense of how people viewed the holiday and what they ate.

During the colonial period, Thanksgiving remained strictly a New England tradition. For instance, as late as 1779, Juliana Smith wrote to her cousin that members of a Livingston family “had never seen a Thanksgiving dinner before, having been used to keep Christmas Day instead,” as was the custom in New York.

Until late in the 19th century, it appears turkey remained no more prominent than at Christmas — just one of several types of meat on the menu. For instance, the scrumptious menu Smith described mentions turkey as one of several types of meat served. In 1817, a bill of fare for a Connecticut Thanksgiving included 50,000 geese, 65,000 chickens, 5,500 turkeys, and 2,000 ducks.

In 1836, the New-Bedford Mercury described the holiday as “the crisis of a turkey’s life.” But the same could have also been said of many other animals during Thanksgiving. Before the Civil War — while the holiday remained largely limited to New Englanders and their diaspora in the Midwest — turkey appeared along with duck, goose, chicken, pork, venison, and a plethora of other meats.

Sarah Josepha Hale, author of the children’s poem “Mary Had A Little Lamb,” lobbied state governors to make Thanksgiving a state holiday, hoping desperately that it would unite a nation tearing itself apart between the north and south. In 1863, she wrote both President Abraham Lincoln and Secretary of State William Seward, asking them to make the holiday “permanently, an American custom and institution.”

Although many non-New Englanders had started celebrating some form of Thanksgiving before Lincoln obliged, according to The Food Timeline, turkey did not become the staple meat of the holiday meal until after the war.

Finally, in 1886, The Kansas Home Cook-Book’s “Thanksgiving Dinner” describes the turkey as “the central theme, the point of clustering interests.”

Other meats do not disappear, but their variety sharply decreases in the late 19th century. Baked ham and chicken remain, but they appear more as side meats to the main course of roast turkey.

The commercialization of the holiday — coupled with the increase in chain grocery stores in the 20th century — solidified turkey as the meat to buy on the eve of Thanksgiving.

What started as a regional holiday in the New England colonies spread to the Midwest as New Englanders fanned out across those states in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Although it would be another hundred years before every region of the nation accepted the holiday as its own, the unifying coming-home celebration had by then narrowed down the meal’s main course to one fowl, making the meal nationally unique.

Although each region has added its own dishes to the national feast, the turkey unifies a nation of 320 million like no other on Thanksgiving Day. This culinary unity, though, like the national character of the holiday itself, has existed less than half of Thanksgiving’s history.