Pilgrims, Houstonians and turkey at Thanksgiving
As we celebrate Thanksgiving, we can relate to the Pilgrims at Plymouth Rock. In November 1621, they held a weeklong feast — but not because Pilgrims ate turkey.
Rather, it’s because they had suffered a hard year. The winter had been brutal; only half of the roughly 100 members of the colony had survived. But the resilient Pilgrims, aided by Wampanoag Indians, learned to plant crops for an eventual autumn celebration.
Houstonians also have suffered a hard year, enduring the ravaging floods of Hurricane Harvey. Resilient citizens began rebuilding homes and celebrated “Houston Strong” while jumping with joy for the World Champion Astros.
We’ll enjoy a welldeserved Thanksgiving feast, as did the Pilgrims. But our feast, with perhaps a big, juicy turkey, will not quite resemble the historic feast of 1621. The Pilgrims harvested vegetables from hard-worked fields for their feast and went out to hunt ducks and geese for meat. The Indians added deer to the feast. There was no pumpkin pie — due to lack of butter and wheat flour to
make the crust.
And there’s no proof the Pilgrims ate turkey.
A pilgrim girl named Lizzy wrote about the feast. “Four men went hunting wild fowl and brought back enough geese, ducks and other birds to last nearly a week,” she said.
Those “other birds” could have included wild turkeys that were then common in New England. But the wary, secretive birds would have been difficult to hunt with the kind of guns Pilgrims owned — they still are with modern hunting rifles.
Some food scholars believe passenger pigeons, abundant at the time, could have been served at the first Thanksgiving. But those now extinct birds were migratory and would have arrived in Texas by November 1621.
Which brings us to a feast of thanksgiving held by Spanish colonists and Manso Indians in the autumn of 1598 near El Paso. Autumn feasts had been common among North American Indians long before Europeans arrived on the continent.
What makes the feast at El Paso intriguing is the relationship of Manso Indians to the Aztecs who had long since domesticated wild turkeys for food. Turkey meat was likely a staple at Indian autumn feasts.
Spaniards loved turkey meat enough to haul domesticated turkeys from the New World to the Old World where poultry farmers eventually bred barnyard turkeys that were later transported to American barnyards to wind up on dinner tables at Thanksgiving.
Not on our Thanksgiving table, though. My wife, Kathy, is a vegetarian.