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were systematically cultivated for the first time; the fruit and the holiday were a perfect match. In 1820 Hall shipped thirty barrels from his “cranberry yards” to New York; a decade later, cultivated berries were being shipped as far off as New Orleans and even to Europe. Wild berries did remain common for decades, and city markets often mixed them with farmed fruit; in 1830 Bostonian Lydia Child wrote in The Frugal Housewife that it was better for children to “pick cranberries from the meadow, to be carried to market” than to “romp away their existence” (other approved anti-romping measures included making patchwork, braiding straw, and knitting garters, suspenders, and stockings). But the trend was all toward cultivated fruit, and thus toward more widespread use. Cranberries were a genuine New England food, one that Victorians liked to think had been eaten by the earliest English settlers, but they also shipped well, especially when packed into straw or brine. The fruit and the holiday would be partnered for centuries.

Then, as now, the ideal Thanksgiving dinner was immense. In her 1827 novel Northwood, Sarah Josepha Hale described a mind-blowing feast:

The roasted turkey took precedence on this occasion, being placed at the head of the table; and well did it become its lordly station, sending forth the rich odor of its savory stuffing, and finely covered with the froth of its basting. At the foot of the board, a sirloin of beef, flanked on either side by a leg of pork and loin of mutton, seemed placed as a bastion to defend the innumerable bowls of gravy and plates of vegetables disposed in that quarter. A goose and pair of ducklings occupied side stations on the table; the middle being graced, as it always is on such occasions, by the rich burgomaster of the provisions, called a chicken pie. This pie, which is wholly formed of the choicest parts of fowls, enriched and seasoned with a profusion of butter and pepper, and covered with an excellent puff paste, is, like the celebrated pumpkin pie, an indispensable part of a good and true Yankee Thanksgiving; the size of the pie usually denoting the gratitude of the party who prepares the feast. The one now displayed could never have had many peers. . . .

There were also pickles, preserves, plum pudding, custards, cakes, sweetmeats, and more pies—pumpkin occupied “the most distinguished niche”—as well as cider, currant wine, and ginger beer. By 1827 the grand Thanksgiving dinner was coming into shape. The only thing missing was the Pilgrims.

Because, amazingly, there’s no evidence that anyone called the Plymouth harvest celebration the first Thanksgiving until 1841, when the Unitarian reverend Alexander Young published Chronicles of the Pilgrim Forefathers. Winslow’s description of the celebration had been left out of previous editions of Mourt’s Relation; after it was rediscovered in an old pamphlet in Philadelphia, Young reprinted it, adding the footnote that “this was the first Thanksgiving, the harvest festival of New England.” It was terrific timing—as the holiday changed from a religious observance to an annual family feast, calling the Plymouth celebration the first Thanksgiving made intuitive sense. But it was many years before most people assumed the connection; the first image Baker has found connecting Plymouth to Thanksgiving is an 1870 Harper’s woodcut. Thanksgiving dinner wasn’t the continuation of an old Pilgrim tradition, or even modeled after it; instead the Pilgrim story was used to explain a holiday dinner that more and more people were eating anyway.

Hale, who was also the editor of Godey’s Lady’s Book, had a lot to do with making the meal a national, rather than regional New England, custom. Starting in 1837, she wrote a letter to every governor, every member of Congress, and the president; she editorialized tirelessly in her magazine. In 1863 her campaign finally succeeded; Lincoln, having decided that a national Thanksgiving could be a unifying event, declared it the last Thursday in November.16

It was, it turned out, only partially unifying;