Thanksgiving dinner
The centerpiece of contemporary Thanksgiving in the United States and Canada is Thanksgiving dinner, a large meal generally centered on a large roasted turkey. Thanksgiving is the largest eating event in the United States as measured by retail sales of food and beverages and by estimates of individual food intake. In a 2015 Harris Poll, Thanksgiving was the second most popular holiday in the United States, and turkey was the most popular holiday food, regardless of region, generation, gender, or race.
Along with attending church services, Thanksgiving dinner remained a central part of celebrations from the holiday's early establishment in North America. Given that days of thanksgiving revolve around giving thanks, the saying of grace before Thanksgiving dinner is a traditional feature of the feast. At Thanksgiving dinner, turkey is served with a variety of side dishes that can vary from traditional to ones that reflect regional or cultural heritage.
Many of the dishes in a traditional Thanksgiving dinner are made from ingredients native to the Americas, including the turkey bird, potato, sweet potato, corn, squash, green bean, and cranberry. The Pilgrims may have learned about some of these foods from Native Americans, but others were not available to the early settlers. The tradition of eating them at Thanksgiving likely reflects their affordability for later Americans. Early North American settlers did eat wild turkey, but the lavish feasts that are frequently ascribed to Thanksgiving in the 17th century were a creation of nineteenth-century writers who sought to popularize a unifying holiday in which all Americans could share.
Thanksgiving Day was made a national holiday in the mid-19th century, and the importance of the day and its centerpiece family meal has become a widely observed American and Canadian tradition, with the meal consisting of roast turkey and many sides being central part of the holiday. It has seen adoption in other English speaking realms such as the United Kingdom, where a broader repertoire of American cuisine is often served. The first frozen TV dinner was a Thanksgiving dinner triggered by a glut of turkeys in the year 1953.
Plymouth Colony and Thanksgiving dinner
The tradition of Thanksgiving dinner has often been associated in popular culture with New England. New England Puritans proclaimed days of thanksgiving to commemorate many specific events. Such days were marked by religious observances, prayer, and sometimes fasting. Church records of the time do not mention food or feasting as being part of such events. A single exception records that following church services in 1636, there was "then making merry to the creatures, the poorer sort being invited of the richer."On December 11, 1621, Governor Edward Winslow of the Plymouth Colony wrote a letter in hopes of attracting more colonists. In it, he described a three-day feast shared by the Plymouth settlers and the local Wampanoag tribe. Winslow sent out four men who provided a variety of fowls, sufficient to feed the colony for a week, while Massasoit's hunters killed five deer. In the 19th century, this event became associated with the idea of a Thanksgiving feast. In a footnote in 1841, Alexander Young claimed that this event "was the first thanksgiving, the harvest festival of New England". Jamestown, Virginia, and other locations have also been suggested as sites of the "First Thanksgiving".
Most of what was served, however, according to some historians, as referenced in a letter from Edward Winslow written on 11 December 1621, would have been seafood, including lobster, fish, eels, mussels and oysters. Mussels in particular were abundant in New England and could be easily harvested because they clung to rocks along the shoreline.
One of the most persistent advocates for Thanksgiving as a national holiday was writer Sarah Josepha Hale. Although she advocated for Thanksgiving in editorials in Godey's Lady's Book from 1837 onwards, Hale did not associate the Pilgrims with Thanksgiving until a brief mention in 1865. In "America's Thanksgiving Hymn", published in 1872, she credited the Pilgrims as being "free to do and pray, And keep in sober gladness Their first Thanksgiving Day". Hale did not suggest that the Pilgrim thanksgiving included feasting.
Other writers were less discerning. Jane G. Austin published a fictional account of the Pilgrims, Standish of Standish, in 1889. Austin described the Pilgrims a year after their arrival as feasting on turkey stuffed with beechnuts, other types of fowl, venison, boiled beef and other roasts, oysters, clam chowder, plum-porridge, hasty pudding, sea biscuit, manchet bread, butter, treacle, mustard, turnips, salad, grapes, plums, popcorn, ale, and root beer. Austin's lavish description disregarded the historical record and the deaths due to starvation and malnutrition that occurred in the Plymouth Colony that winter. Nonetheless, her account was extremely popular. It was repeated by other writers, adapted for plays and public events, and adopted by school curricula. The writings of Austin and others helped to establish the inaccurate image of the Pilgrim Thanksgiving feast in popular culture and make it a part of the national identity of the United States.
Historical menus
The use of roasted turkey in the United States for Thanksgiving precedes Abraham Lincoln's nationalization of the holiday in 1863. In her 1827 novel Northwood; or, a Tale of New England, Sarah Josepha Hale devoted an entire chapter to Thanksgiving dinner, emphasizing many of the foods that are now considered traditional. Although many other meats are mentioned, "the roasted turkey took precedence on this occasion, being placed at the head of the table; and well did it become its lordly stations, sending forth the rich odour of its savoury stuffing". The tradition of eating Turkey on Thanksgiving dates back to its role as an easily accessible and practical food source during early harvest celebrations. For dessert, "the celebrated pumpkin pie...occupied the most distinguished niche" and was described as "an indispensable part of a good and true Yankee Thanksgiving".The White House Cook Book, published in 1887 by Fanny Lemira Gillette, had the following menu: oysters on half shell, cream of chicken soup, fried smelts, sauce tartare, roast turkey, cranberry sauce, mashed potatoes, baked squash, boiled onions, parsnip fritters, olives, chicken salad, venison pastry, pumpkin pie, mince pie, charlotte russe, almond ice cream, lemon jelly, hickory nut cake, cheese, fruits, and coffee.
A Thanksgiving Day dinner served to the Civilian Conservation Corps in 1935 included pickles, green olives, celery, roast turkey, oyster stew, cranberry sauce, giblet gravy, dressing, creamed asparagus tips, snowflake potatoes, baked carrots, hot rolls, fruit salad, mince pie, fruitcake, candies, grapes, apples, clams, fish, and many other foods, along with French drip coffee, cigars, and cigarettes.
Sugar, among other food commodities, was rationed from 1942 to 1946. In 1947, as part of a voluntary rationing campaign, the Truman administration attempted to promote "Poultryless Thursdays", discouraging Americans from eating poultry or egg products on Thursdays. Because Thanksgiving is always on a Thursday, this meant that turkey and pumpkin pie, two Thanksgiving staples, would be discouraged. The National Poultry and Egg Board furiously lobbied the President to cease promoting the plan, culminating in an agreement at the National Thanksgiving Turkey Presentation shortly before Thanksgiving in 1947. Turkey was no longer discouraged, but Eggless Thursdays remained for the rest of the year, meaning no pumpkin pie was served at the White House dinner that year.
Thanksgiving dinner is tied to the genesis of the first TV Dinner/Frozen dinner in the 1950s: In 1953, the company Swanson had hundreds of tons of turkey left over after thanksgiving due to an overestimation of demand. The solution came by harnessing a frozen meat technology that had been in development since the 1920s, and the proposal was to use the leftover turkeys in a pre-made frozen thanksgiving dinner. The meal was frozen with the food in a partitioned aluminum tray that could then be re-heated, and the meal would have Turkey with gravy, stuffing, mashed potatoes, and peas. The product skyrocketed in popularity and capitalized on the rise of television; fast preparation meant families could eat by the television more easily and this became a social trend in the United States. The dinners were not simply frozen, but used a flash freezing technology that prevents the formation of ice crystals that alter the texture of meat. Flash freezing was developed in the 1920s, inspired by observations of Inuit throwing fish on ice, and used in preservation of airline food before its use by Swanson.
Main dishes
Turkey
Turkey is the most common main dish of a Thanksgiving dinner, to the point that Thanksgiving is sometimes colloquially called "Turkey Day". In fact, $983 million has been spent on turkeys alone in 2024. Alexander Hamilton proclaimed that "no citizen of the United States should refrain from turkey on Thanksgiving Day", and Benjamin Franklin had high regard for the wild turkey as an American icon. As Thanksgiving Day rose in popularity during the 1800s, so too did the turkey. By 1857, turkey had become part of the traditional dinner in New England.The domestic turkey eaten now is very different from the wild turkey known to the Pilgrims, Hamilton, and Franklin. Wild turkeys are native to the Americas and evolved around 5 million years ago. At least five subspecies are still found in 48 states, Mexico, and Canada. Today, the southern Mexico subspecies Meleagris gallopavo gallopavo is almost extinct, but in the early 16th century it was taken to Europe from Mexico by the Spanish. Its descendants later returned to America. Twentieth century commercial varieties of turkey were bred from these European descendants.
The Beltsville Small White turkey was bred by the USDA at the Beltsville Agricultural Research Center in Maryland in response to consumer demand for a small turkey with more white meat and no dark feathers. It was introduced commercially in 1947 and dominated the market for nearly 20 years. The Small White was supplanted by the Broad Breasted White turkey, bred specifically for large feasts such as Thanksgiving. These turkeys can grow to over 40 pounds, but the breed must be artificially bred and suffers from health problems due to its size. It is estimated that more than 99% of the American turkeys eaten are Broad Breasted Whites. In 2006, American turkey growers were expected to raise 270 million turkeys, to be processed into five billion pounds of turkey meat valued at almost $8 billion, with one third of all turkey consumption occurring in the Thanksgiving-Christmas season, and a per capita consumption of almost.
Thanksgiving turkey is sometimes stuffed with a traditional savory bread pudding and roasted. Sage is the standard herb added to the stuffing, along with chopped onions and celery. Other ingredients, such as chopped chestnuts or other tree nuts, crumbled sausage or bacon, carrots, cranberries, raisins, and/or apples, may be added to stuffing. If the mixture is cooked outside the bird, a stock is generally added to prevent it from drying out. A number of cultural and regional factors affect whether this is referred to as "stuffing" or "dressing".
Turkeys prepared as the main course of a Thanksgiving meal are traditionally roasted, though certain cooks and regional preferences may feature a bird that has been grilled, smoked, or which has had its individual cuts braised, or sous vide. In recent years, the popularity of deep-fried turkey has grown substantially, owing to its shorter preparation time and production of a bird with moist interior meat and a crispy exterior skin. Despite its popularity, this method also carries higher safety risks than others.
The consumption of turkey on Thanksgiving is so ingrained in American culture that each year since 1947, the National Turkey Federation has presented a live turkey to the president of the United States prior to each Thanksgiving. These turkeys were initially slaughtered and eaten for the president's Thanksgiving dinner; since 1989, the presented turkeys have typically been given a mock pardon to great fanfare and sent to a park to live out the rest of their usually short natural lives. However the first "pardon" to a turkey was given by President Abraham Lincoln in 1863, and there is a monument in Hartford, Connecticut, to this one; this story may be aprocyphal, as it first appeared in print two years after it allegedly happened, after Lincoln had been assassinated.