Twain's Feast - Andrew Beahrs [112]
Though we only know about venison and fowl for certain, this was, after all, a harvest celebration, and the English may have cooked many things they’d been wanting since leaving Europe a year before. Along with the vital corn, squash, and beans, crops grown in the first year may have included pumpkins (pies wouldn’t appear for at least another generation), onions, turnips, greens from spinach to chard, and dozens more. Still, the harvest festival was built around deer, and birds, and very possibly clams, lobsters, cod, eels, and other fish and game. Twain’s Thanksgiving dinners were domestic meals with wild roots; this was a wild meal with some domestic foods.
If anyone at the gathering ate cranberries, it definitely wasn’t as a sweet sauce. The Wampanoag often ate the berries raw, or else in boiled or ash-roasted corn cakes (other tribes pounded the berries with dried meat or fish, making long-lasting pemmican, a preparation Linda says the Wampanoag didn’t share). The English would probably have used them the way they did barberries—as one element in a wine- or gravy-based sauce, which added an acidic, cleansing edge (an updated recipe for roasted duck with cranberries and wine in Curtin and Oliver’s Giving Thanks was enough to convince me that English cooking has been getting a bad rap for centuries). Sweet sauce would have to wait for a regular supply of cane or maple sugar; the first mention of such a thing comes from John Josselyn in 1672, who wrote that “the Indians and English use them much, boyling them with Sugar for Sauce to eat with their Meat.”
Josselyn suggested that the sauce was particularly good with mutton; it was also paired with game such as venison. But increasingly the meat seems to have been turkey. In the very first American cookbook, the 1796 American Cookery, Amelia Simmons suggested that roasted turkey should be accompanied by “cramberry-sauce,” along with boiled onions, pickles, mangoes, and celery. By the time the first actual sauce recipe appeared a few decades later, turkey was becoming the default meat for Thanksgiving dinner—and the dinner itself was becoming, for the first time, the heart of the holiday.
Throughout the colonial era, says historian and Thanksgiving author James Baker, the true New England Thanksgiving had been “an officially declared weekday event marked by a day of religious meetings and pious gratitude for God’s favorable providence.” Until the late 1700s, Thanksgiving remained a mostly regional celebration, a day of prayer declared annually by various state governors (the Continental Congress declared the first genuinely national Thanksgiving in 1777; George Washington followed in 1789 and ’95). Many families attended church twice; the meal was an afterthought, a break between services. For over a century, the holiday was more like the 1623 day of end-of-drought worship than the 1621 harvest celebration.
When dinner did become the day’s focal point, it was usually built around New England foods—or at least a particular idea of what New England foods had once been. For many New Englanders, the Thanksgiving feast was as much an aspirational meal as were the Victorian banquets at Nook Farm: a chance for families who normally ate salted beef, beans, peas, cornmeal mush, apples, and brown bread to enjoy a “gentry-style meal of roasted and boiled meat, vegetables, and pies.” Still, it took Americans a while to settle on a standard menu; the wildly popular 1877 Buckeye Cookery, for instance, suggested oyster soup, boiled cod, corned beef, and roasted goose as good Thanksgiving choices, accompanied by brown bread, pork and beans, “delicate cabbage,” doughnuts, “superior biscuit,” ginger cakes, and an array of fruits. Chicken pies were a particular favorite and seem to have been served nearly as often as turkey (usually as an additional dish rather than a substitute).
Just as Thanksgiving was becoming something we’d recognize today—a day with less church and substantially more food—cranberries