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We'd like to wish a very happy Thanksgiving Day to all our American friends!
In light of this, we offer a little Thanksgiving dinner background through an excerpt of the award winning What's to Eat? edited by Nathalie Cooke. This passage is taken from the chapter "Talking Turkey: Thanksgiving in Canada and the United States" by Andrew Smith and Shelley Boyd.
By the turn of the twentieth century, cookery magazines and cookbooks had enshrined the Thanksgiving dinner, publishing menus for proper Thanksgiving meals and offering recipes that taught the uninitiated how to prepare the traditional dishes. Fannie Farmer, the principal of the Boston Cooking School, offered a Thanksgiving menu with twenty-three dishes in her Boston Cooking School Cook Book (1896). Other menus were even more elaborate. “The Thanksgiving Dinner,” for instance, in The Picayune’s Creole Cook Book (1900), a New Orleans culinary bible, features thirty-three dishes, among them “Baked Red
Snapper à la Creole” and “Turkey Stuffed with Chestnuts.” This book includes a menu for “A More Economical Thanksgiving Dinner” with only twenty-eight dishes. The cookbook also offers suggestions for Thanksgiving decorations that would emphasize the “wild luxuriance and freedom of growth, the spirit of American liberty which gave birth to this day.”
Postcard, “Good Wishes for Thanksgiving Day.” Courtesy of Mary F. Williamson.
Most American Thanksgiving dinners featured a turkey. In early nineteenth century dinners, the bird was served with other meats, such as venison and other types of game. But as the nineteenth century progressed, game largely disappeared from the American table, particularly in urban areas, and by the end of the century, it was no long on Thanksgiving menus. The domesticated goose, which had been the main course for the traditional English Christmas, was another important meat served at Thanksgiving during the nineteenth century. However, since goose were smaller and more expensive than turkeys, serving goose at Thanksgiving slowly went out of fashion. Beef was occasionally mentioned in accounts of Thanksgiving dinners (it was an important meat source in New England and generally cheaper per pound than poultry), but the chicken pie, a traditional English savoury dish, was by far the closest rival to the turkey as the centrepiece of the meal. Yet even this alternative to the turkey had disappeared from the Thanksgiving menu by the end of the nineteenth century. By the 1880s, Thanksgiving had become known euphemistically as “Turkey Day.”
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