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| A Texas Thanksgiving |
The celebration of the 1621 Plymouth feast is commemorated, via Abraham Lincoln's proclamation, as the U.S.A.'s National Day of Thanksgiving. Naturally, much of the mythos surrounding such a symbolic event is bunkum, but the outline is accurate. The Pilgrims had migrated to Massachusetts seeking greater religious freedom. When there, they allied with the Wampanoag Indians who used the Pilgrims as trading partners and muscle to counter the Narragansett people who they were in conflict with.
The Pilgrims had endured a very hard year so, before the winter set in, they held an autumnal harvest feast to celebrate surviving their struggles. It is unclear why, but numbers of the Wampanoag joined in with the celebration and thus the outline of Thanksgiving was laid out: religious freedom, the difficulty settlers faced, complex relationships with the Indians, and the wild nature of the American wilderness.
Harvest feasts were common in the more aquarian older times. They marked bringing in the harvest and enjoying the last few days before the long, brutal winter arrived. As a result, harvest fests were held in many areas and, Americans being Americans, many of them have claimed the title of the 'first' Thanksgiving. Well, Lincoln put an end to that trivia, but any excuse for a fall festival, I guess.
By the way, the above picture is the Spanish/Texan entry into the First Thanksgiving derby. However, it is not a harvest festival. Instead, a number of Spanish colonists moved north from Mexico intending to settle near present day El Paso. They had a very difficult crossing of the Chihuahuan Desert and were greatly relieved when they finally got to the waters of the Rio Grande. After recovering from their ordeal, they held a feast. It was also attended by the local Manso people. What would they have eaten at that Thanksgiving meal? From the above linked article:
Waterfowl were plentiful in the area; an earlier explorer had noted that the Manso ate cranes, ducks and geese. Primarily foragers, the Manso ate “whatever was available,” Ortega says. “I mean anything. Turtles, cactus, deer, rabbit and probably snakes.” But they also cultivated corn, beans and squash in tiny fields along the river, she adds. It’s also possible that our favorite Thanksgiving poultry made an appearance. “The Manso would have been raising turkeys, and [the Europeans] would have taken them.”
Around the table today we were musing on the menu at these early Thanksgivings. "Well now, brethren, what Bounty of this New World do we have?" "Turkey - excellent. Potatoes - also blessedly good, but how did they get here from the Andes?" "Possum - zero stars, don't recommend".
ReplyDeleteYea, they must have missed the foods of their homelands, but gradually new world foods replaced them. Still, old world dishes did eventually work their way onto the menu.
ReplyDeleteI once worked with an India-Indian subcontractor who was fresh off the airplane into the sleeziest motel in a very sketchy neighborhood. I helped him acclimate a lot, driving him around to get what papers he needed from government offices, to find Indian grocery stores and the like (and why the Indians at our workplace didn't help him more baffled me).
Anyway, when Thanksgiving came around, I invited him to our house. We figured he wouldn't like slabs of meat on the table, so I bought an Indian cookbook and tried to cook some Indian dishes. I'm sure they were pretty crappy by the standards of real Indian food, but he greatly appreciated the effort and actually chowed down on some sort of green bean casserole I made. Ever since then our Thanksgiving meals have always included an Indian side dish as a result.