Turkey: The Lore, The Legend, The Lunch

Turkey: The Lore, The Legend, The Lunch

Written by FRANCES KIDD

If you have the image in your head of Native Americans and early American settlers smiling at each other across a long table with platters of turkey, you’ve probably been watching too many holiday movies.

As the New York Times put it in a November 21, 2017 article, “Everything You Learned About Thanksgiving Is Wrong.” Not only was there no mention of turkey on the menu at the 1621 feast, but, heavens forbid, there was no pie.

Turns out there are as many origin stories about the first Thanksgiving as there are tweaks in recipes for Southern cornbread dressing. (But of course, all good Southern cooks know theirs is the best – recipe, not Thanksgiving story.)

According to most historians, November 1621 marked the Pilgrims’ first autumn harvest, and it’s likely that the colonists feasted on the crops they had reaped with the help of their Native American “neighbors.”

Local chef Tina Cannon roasts a turkey for Thanksgiving each year.

Squanto

One man, a member of the Wampanoag tribe, is credited for bringing the two groups together and, in fact, for keeping the Plymouth Colony alive. Tisquantum (also known as Squanto) was kidnapped by a British ship and taken to Spain to be sold at a slave market. From there, the story goes, he escaped to London, where he lived with a member of the company which had colonized Cuper’s Cove in Newfoundland in 1610. This connection was likely what eventually brought Tisquantum home to North America. Since Tisquantum returned speaking English, he served as translator for the colonists.

Early diary entries say that the guest list for the first Thanksgiving ended up with more Wampanoag tribe members than Pilgrims since the population of colonists had been cut in half by a harsh winter. The reported deaths of 78% of the women that first winter likely didn’t leave many skilled people to prepare the meal, leading historians to speculate that – in addition to the four women who remained – children, servants and unmarried men helped cook the first Thanksgiving meal. But these early settlers didn’t invent Thanksgiving. Throughout history, cultures around the world have marked the end of a successful harvest with celebrations of a particular crop or geographic region. These festivals typically featured huge amounts of regional and seasonal food. In addition to celebrating the successful harvest, participants also celebrated their free time from the hard work in the fields.

Diaries of some of the Pilgrims give us an idea of the menu for that first Thanksgiving. Plymouth colony governor William Bradford remarked in “On Plymouth Plantation,” his account of the founding of Plymouth Colony, that in the fall harvest that year: “There was great store of wild turkeys, of which they took many, besides venison, etc.”

Though wild turkey was plentiful in the region and a common food source for both English settlers and Native Americans, many historians today think it’s just as likely that the hunting party came back with other birds like ducks and geese. Venison was another likely protein choice. And some culinary historians believe that much of that meal may have consisted of seafood, often absent from today’s menus. Among the bounty of seafood easily available near Plymouth were mussels, lobster, bass, clams and oysters. Some familiar fruits and vegetables were on the table in 1621, but there were also many differences. For example, instead of bread-based stuffing, herbs, onions or nuts might have been added to the birds for extra flavor. And cornmeal, boiled and pounded into a thick corn mush or porridge sometimes sweetened with molasses, might have been served.

Thanksgiving becomes official

More organized large Thanksgiving celebrations started in 1863, when President Lincoln declared a national holiday for giving thanks. Lincoln set his Thanksgiving on the last Thursday in November, and that date endured until 1933 when November happened to contain five Thursdays. That’s when the date became less historical and more commercial.

Statistics showed that most people waited until after Thanksgiving to start Christmas shopping. Business leaders were worried, especially during the Depression; because there were only 24 shopping days between Thanksgiving and Christmas, they asked President Franklin Roosevelt to make Thanksgiving one week earlier. The President ignoredtheir requests in 1933 (his first year in office), but in 1939, when Thanksgiving once again threatened to fall on the last day of November, President Roosevelt relented and changed the date. That decision sparked outrage and controversy and divided the country.

Benji Whitley appreciates the sport of turkey hunting even though wild turkey is typically not as tasty as the storebought frozen version.

Thousands of letters poured into the White House. Some retailers were pleased with the extra week of Christmas shopping, while other companies that depended on Thanksgiving as the last Thursday of November lost money. Calendar makers’ calendars were out of date for the next two years; school academic and sports schedules were disrupted; and many Americans were just plain mad that Roosevelt tried to alter such a long-standing tradition just to help businesses make more money. In some places, the division led to a time of two Thanksgivings.

After two years of this public anger, Congress passed a law on December 26, 1941, ensuring that all Americans would reunify and celebrate Thanksgiving on the fourth Thursday of November every year.

Turkey, the mainstay

As the date of the Thanksgiving celebration evolved, so did the menu. Ken Albala, a professor of history who studies cultural cuisine at the University of the Pacific, lays out his theory of how turkey became the most common centerpiece of the meal: “There was a tradition of serving large wildfowl in medieval Europe, especially peacock, which was skinned, cooked, and resewn into its feathers for presentation.”

Who can argue that a big roasted turkey doesn’t make the perfect centerpiece?

Turkey may remain a Thanksgiving mainstay for the foreseeable future, but what Americans serve as sides has become as varied as the country’s current multicultural makeup.

“Although the traditional parts are often there, people add dishes from their own background,” says Albala.

Award-winning local chef Tina Cannon is a regular in barbecue competitions across the Southeast. Closer to home, she has single-handedly cooked more than 50,000 meals for Meals on Wheels Coweta. As she puts it, “You have to give back to your community, and there is no better way for me than to feed people in need.”

While Cannon admits she prefers chicken to turkey, she’s developed her own brine product and roasts her family’s main turkey, as well as smoking a turkey breast. But she doesn’t stray far from the standard holiday menu. She learned her lesson a few years ago.

“After we eat at Thanksgiving, we start talking about Christmas,” she says. “We don’t do anything new, pretty much always same thing. I remember one year we all went to Dad’s house and I showed up with oyster dressing and cranberry-walnut dressing. I thought my mom and my aunt would have a hissy fit. They started cooking cornbread as soon as I walked into the house.”

Cannon’s family, like many others, will occasionally make limited changes or additions to their menu.

“We try to find dishes that speak to a new person; in my husband’s case it’s mashed rutabagas,” says Cannon. “We must have at least 20 items on our menu. We make things in memory of folks we’ve lost, too.”

Most families, at least in the South, can trace the history of the dishes on their Thanksgiving tables. There’s your aunt’s frozen fruit salad, the cake from Rich’s that Dad loved, and Granny’s pumpkin pie.

According to Time magazine, the first TV dinner consisted of Thanksgiving leftovers. In 1953, someone at Swanson seriously overestimated the amount of turkey Americans would eat that year. Determined not to waste the food (and lose money), a company salesman named Gerry Thomas ordered 5,000 aluminum trays, put together an assembly line of women with ice-cream scoops and created the first TV dinner with turkey, cornbread dressing, peas and sweet potatoes.

Turkey dinners have been to the moon, too. The Apollo 8 crew found a surprise in their food locker when they arrived around the moon on Christmas Eve in 1968. Wrapped in foil and tied with red and green ribbons was a wet-pack meal of real turkey with stuffing and cranberry sauce developed by the military.

In the state of Georgia, it isn’t easy to have a wild turkey at the place of honor on the Thanksgiving menu. Turkey hunting is popular in the state, but the season only runs from about April 1 to the middle of May. As local outdoorsman Benji Whitley puts it, “Some folks may keep the breast, but most turkey hunting is done for the sport. Turkey hunting is challenging because turkeys have great eyesight and great hearing.”

Maybe no wild turkey on the table isn’t such a Thanksgiving loss. Cannon said that once she cooked a wild turkey, but hardly anyone ate it.

Pardon the turkey

Every year, the U.S. president grants a pardon to two birds (a presidential turkey and a vice-presidential turkey) just before Thanksgiving, and the lucky birds live the rest of their lives on farms.

It’s no surprise that the story behind the presidential pardon is a bit murky, but it’s another good story of turkey getting political. According to the White House Historical Association, gifts of turkeys to American presidents can be traced to the 1870s, when Rhode Island poultry dealer Horace Vose began sending his well-fed birds to the White House. While the First Families didn’t always eat the turkeys, the yearly offering gained Vose’s farm widespread publicity and was an institution at the White House until Vose’s death in 1913.

By 1914, the opportunity to give a turkey to a president had become an established national symbol of good cheer open to everyone. The poultry gifts were frequently touched with patriotism and partisanship, evidenced by the 1921 gift of a turkey outfitted as a flying ace, complete with goggles, from the Harding Girls Club in Chicago.

President Harry S. Truman was the first president to receive a turkey as a gift from the Poultry and Egg National Board and the National Turkey Federation. As part of the U.S. homefront war effort, the government encouraged “poultry-less Thursdays” (and “meatless Tuesdays”) in the fall of 1947.

There was outrage, and the turkey became political again when the poultry industry pointed out that the upcoming big turkey holidays – Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year’s Day – all fell on Thursday that year. The movement was stopped before Thanksgiving but not before poultry growers had sent crates of live chickens— “Hens for Harry”— to the White House in protest.

The turkey pardon remained a sporadic tradition until President Ronald Reagan’s administration officially established the practice of sending the presentation turkey to a farm, now a seasonal feature on the national news.

Considering that around 46 million turkeys are killed each year for Thanksgiving, the odds of being given a presidential pardon are 1 in 23 million.

Turkeys, don’t get your hopes up.

TURKEY TRIVIA

BUTTERBALL TURKEY TALK-LINE

From the first of November through the end of December, you can talk turkey with the folks at Butterball Turkey. In 1982, six home economists worked the phones during the holiday season to answer about 11,000 turkey cooking questions. Since then, the Turkey Talk-Line has grown, both in number of calls answered and experts responding. In recent years, more than 50 experts answer more than 100,000 questions from households across the United States and Canada. Call 1-800-BUTTERBALL or text 844-877-3456 to chat with the turkey experts. Butterball also offers online information on topics like “How to Thaw a Frozen Turkey” and “How to Insert a Meat Thermometer.”

TURKEY FOR THE HOLIDAYS

The National Turkey Federation reports that in 2022, more than 210 million turkeys were raised on about 2,500 farms across the United States, with the majority being family farms; 88% of Americans surveyed by the National Turkey Federation eat turkey on Thanksgiving. According to the University of Illinois Extension Program, 46 million turkeys are eaten each Thanksgiving, 22 million on Christmas and 19 million turkeys on Easter.

HUNTING TURKEY

Georgia hunters should remember that the daily and season bag limits changed last year and remains the same in 2023: Only one gobbler may be taken per hunter per day with a season total of two gobblers. On Wildlife Management Areas and National Forest land, the bag limit is one gobbler per area. According to the Georgia Department of Natural Resources, there were 37,568 turkey hunters in Georgia in 2022. Of these, 6% harvested two gobblers (the limit), 17% harvested one gobbler, and 77% went home empty-handed. A third of the turkey hunters were from our Piedmont region of the state. NCM