What Did the Pilgrims Eat at the First Thanksgiving?
If our current celebration is accurate, they ate giant turkeys, mashed potatoes, and yams covered with marshmallows. . . which you know can't be perfectly accurate.
As a contrarian, I've often maintained they ate salted cod. . . and I don't know that I am necessarily completely inaccurate, but as they were living in land with a low population density, unless they were inept or simply to scared to go beyond their villages, we all know that they likely were eating a fair amount of wild game. Indeed, the current European American trend for veganism and vegetarianism is something that could only come about in an industrialized society that actually kills a lot of animals just getting the tofu to the fair trade store, but that's another story.
Anyhow, this interesting article maintains that they ate the follows:
What They (Likely) Did Have at the First Thanksgiving
Sounds likely, and pretty darned good too.
The article goes on to note:
What They (Definitely) Did Not Have at the First Thanksgiving
Frankly, I don't think turkey is actually impossible. Wild turkeys lived in the area and wild turkey isn't much different from domestic turkey, except in plumpness.
Something I was wholly unaware of was that there is actually a surviving letter about that meal. It relates:
Our harvest being gotten in, our governor sent four men on fowling, that so we might after a special manner rejoice together after we had gathered the fruit of our labors. They four in one day killed as much fowl as, with a little help beside, served the company almost a week. At which time, amongst other recreations, we exercised our arms, many of the Indians coming amongst us, and among the rest their greatest king Massasoit, with some ninety men, whom for three days we entertained and feasted, and they went out and killed five deer, which they brought to the plantation and bestowed on our governor, and upon the captain and others.
So, that tells us for sure that they ate fowl, by which I think they meant waterfowl, and deer. Another surviving period letter, however, relates.
And besides waterfowl there was great store of wild turkeys, of which they took many, besides venison, etc. Besides, they had about a peck a meal a week to a person, or now since harvest, Indian corn to that proportion.
Hmmm. . . could have featured turkey and corn, which is what the author means by "Indian corn" (i.e., not wheat).
Why not potatoes? Well, the Columbian exchange hadn't't gotten around to them yet, so they were unknown to the Mayflower colonists. Later they'd start to spread, massively distrusted as a food at first. Cranberries would make their appearance about fifty years later, which is really quite early.
For what it's worth, they probably boiled a lot of the food they ate as well, although roasting was a common cooking technique of the period. Frying, however, would have been much less common.
They would have had fresh vegetables, at that time of year, including staples like cabbage and beans.
You know, all in all it sounds like pretty good fare, and food you'd recognize as appropriate for this holiday, if not necessarily completely identical.
What'd they drink? We apparently know less about that, but we do know that the Mayflower had contained a store of beer and that in fact the ship put in when it did as it had become exhausted. But beer is a somewhat complicated thing to make and it would have been unlikely that they had grown the constituents to make any of it in 1621. They may have fermented something by the fall, or not. None of the stuff they had brought with them to plant works well in that context. There are berries that are native to New England that can be fermented for wine, but if they did that, no record of it is left. They may very well have just had cold water.
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