Twain's Feast - Andrew Beahrs [105]
Then there were holidays. “Thanksgiving,” Leary remembered, “was most as wonderful as Christmas.” That was saying something—Christmases on Nook Farm were epic, with Livy beginning to prepare weeks or even months in advance. She’d assemble fifty baskets in the billiards room, filling each with “a big turkey and cans of peas and tomatoes and vegetables,” along with nuts, raisins, a bottle of wine, and a box of candy. If there was snow on Christmas morning, Twain would put on a white-collared fur coat that made him “look just like Santa Claus,” and load the baskets into the family sleigh. Then he and the girls would ride around town giving their gifts before returning home for their own celebration.
On Nook Farm, Leary said, the family celebrated Thanksgiving with a “great dinner” for “people that wasn’t very well off, poor people—not [Livy’s] own friends specially.” Later the family gathered at the Twichell house for yet another great dinner, before returning for a massive game of charades (Livy always made sure the children could easily reach ten quickly emptied bowls of candy).
The Thanksgiving dinners themselves were probably much like what most Americans eat today: Twain’s 1879 menu lists “Roast turkey, Thanksgiving style,” cranberry sauce, and celery before moving on to roast wild turkey. Twain was right to list wild birds separately; they’d been mostly hunted out of New England’s forests by 1850. Still, Victorian families saw them as deeply rooted in the region’s colonial history, and they were becoming the holiday’s standard centerpiece—though now driven to the slaughterhouse in domesticated flocks or shot on Thanksgiving morning in organized “hunts” of farmed birds. Cranberries, meanwhile, had been paired with turkey for centuries (one of the very first mentions of them by name, in 1689, said that “an excellent sauce is made of them for venison, turkeys and other great fowl”) and, as a wild plant, could also be plausibly linked to early colonists. Celery didn’t have the same historical pedigree. Still, being best when left in the ground well into the cold winter, it enjoyed a central place as the season’s single fresh green vegetable, often kept crisp in ice water, then set out in special celery glasses. Twain’s Thanksgiving dinner was a meal that New Englanders could easily believe was rooted in their cherished history—with the addition of some elegant, if less storied, foods.
But the meal actually had little in common with the gathering usually called the first Thanksgiving. In fact, if you want your next Thanksgiving dinner to rigorously reflect what we know, for absolute certain, was served at the 1621 Plymouth harvest celebration, here’s your menu:
Venison.
Birds (various).
Missing from the list, of course, is everything we now associate with Thanksgiving, from cranberries and turkey to mashed potatoes and pumpkin pie. And the first time the 1621 celebration was actually described as the first Thanksgiving seems to have been in 1841. In a footnote. The Thanksgiving holiday didn’t spring into being all at once. Thanksgiving—the story of its origins, the ways we celebrate it, and of course its menu—had to be invented.
CRANBERRY SAUCE
Wash a quart of ripe cranberries, and put them into a pan with about a wine-glass of water. Stew them slowly, and stir them frequently, particularly after they begin to burst. They require a great deal of stewing, and should be like a marmalade when done. Just before you take them from the fire, stir in a pound of brown sugar.
When they are thoroughly done, put them into a deep dish, and set them away to get cold.
You may strain the pulp through a cullender or sieve into a mould, and when it is in a firm shape send it to table on a glass dish. Taste it when it is cold, and if not sweet enough, add more sugar. Cranberries require more sugar than any other fruit, except plums.
Cranberry sauce is eaten with roast turkey, roast fowls, and roast ducks.
—ELIZA LESLIE, Directions for Cookery,