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Delicious ideas from America's Thanksgiving
No rational person ever turned down an excuse to celebrate. Chinese New Year, Diwali, Ramadan, Hanukkah, Greek Easter – if you feel in the mood for a party, there’s always someone else’s good reason to raise the roof.
American Thanksgiving is probably the most all-embracing festivity. British wiseguys would say it was a thoroughly British bacchanal. After all, until the war of Independence the original settlers were British subjects. Anyway, there’s never a shortage of things to give thanks for - no overdraft this month, an amazing bargain with a Versace label, and the man/woman of your dreams you met only last night.
Ingredients for the commemoration feast are almost the same as Christmas dinner: turkey, stuffing, potatoes. American additions come in the cranberry sauce, corn pudding, and – the dish that has non-Americans shooting their eyebrows into their scalps – sweet potato casserole with melted marshmallow topping. Who can explain? The food is the same, year in year out, because no change is what tradition is all about. Though food historian Jan Longone says it is not certain that turkey was part of the First Feast. ‘We know wild ducks were, we think lobster was because it was so ubiquitous at the time.’
Tradition has it that as the pilgrims of Plymouth, Massachusetts, brought in their first harvest, neighbourly Indians emerged from the forest bearing gifts of their own traditional foods to celebrate: the wild turkey (or duck, or lobster), ears of corn and pumpkin. There is no historical record to back this up, but it doesn’t stop tiny tots at primary schools all over the country from dressing up in Indian costumes and black paper Puritan hats with big buckles and, in front of gulping parents, re-enacting the occasion.
Though Thanksgiving falls on the fourth Thursday of November, with Friday another day off, this date was only set by President Franklin D Roosevelt in 1939. The first pioneers did not celebrate their good harvests for several years and then probably some time in early October. In 1827, Mrs Sarah Josepha Hale started lobbying for a national Thanksgiving holiday – an observance which was finally established with his 1863 Thanksgiving Proclamation by Abraham Lincoln.
Thanksgiving is a significant feast in the American calendar. If the harvest had not been successful, it is debatable whether the first settlers could have survived. Many of them, in different colonies along the eastern seaboard,
did not.
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