text: When Americans sit down with their families for Thanksgiving dinner, most of us will probably gorge ourselves on the same traditional Thanksgiving menu, with turkey, cranberry sauce, stuffing, and pumpkin pie taking up the most real estate on our plates. How did these dishes become the national "what you eat on Thanksgiving" options, though? 
   
   The pilgrims may not have had turkey 
   
   Turkey may not have been on the menu at the 1621 celebration by the pilgrims of Plymouth that is considered the first Thanksgiving (though historians and fans of Virginia's Berkeley Plantation might quibble with the "First" part). There were definitely wild turkeys in the Plymouth area, as colonist William Bradford noted in his journal. However, the best existing account of the pilgrims' harvest feast comes from colonist Edward Winslow, author of Mourt's Relation: A Journal of the Pilgrims at Plymouth. Winslow's first-hand account of the first Thanksgiving included no explicit mention of turkey. He does, however, mention the pilgrims gathering "wild fowl" for the meal, although that could just as likely have meant ducks or geese. 
   
   So why do we chow down on turkey, then? 
   
   It helps to know a bit about the history of Thanksgiving. While the idea of giving thanks and celebrating the harvest was popular in certain parts of the country, it was by no means an annual national holiday. Presidents would occasionally declare a Thanksgiving Day celebration, but the holiday hadn't completely caught on nationwide. Many of these early celebrations included turkey; Alexander Hamilton once remarked that, "No citizen of the U.S. shall refrain from turkey on Thanksgiving Day." 
   
   When Bradford's journals were reprinted in 1856 after being lost for a century, they found a receptive audience with advocates who wanted Thanksgiving turned into a national holiday. Since Bradford wrote of how the colonists had hunted wild turkeys during the autumn of 1621 and since turkey is a uniquely American (and scrumptious) bird, it gained traction as the Thanksgiving meal of choice for Americans after Lincoln declared Thanksgiving a national holiday in 1863. 
   
   Moreover, there were pragmatic reasons for eating turkey rather than, say, chicken at a feast like Thanksgiving. The birds are large enough that they can feed a table full of hungry family members, and unlike chickens or cows, they didn't serve much utilitarian purpose like laying eggs or making milk. Unlike pork, turkey wasn't so common that it didn't seem like a suitable choice for a special occasion, either. An interesting 2007 piece in Slate discussed these reasons for turkey's prominence, but also made another intriguing point. The publication of A Christmas Carol in 1843 may have helped force along the turkey's cause as a holiday delicacy when Scrooge magnanimously sends the Cratchit family a Christmas turkey. 
   
   There was no cranberry sauce, either 
   
   While the cranberries the pilgrims needed were probably easy to come by, making cranberry sauce requires sugar. Sugar was a rare luxury at the time of the first Thanksgiving, so while revelers may have eaten cranberries, it's unlikely that the feast featured the tasty sauce. What's more, it's not even entirely clear that cranberry sauce had been invented yet. It's not until 1663 that visitors to the area started commenting on a sweet sauce made of boiled cranberries that accompanied meat. There's the same problem with potatoes. Neither sweet potatoes nor white potatoes were available to the colonists in 1621, so the pilgrims definitely didn't feast on everyone's favorite tubers. 
   
   They did have plenty of venison, though 
   
   Winslow mentions in his writings that the governor sent out a party of four men to do some fowling for the feast, but the pilgrims and Wampanoag also enjoyed five deer as part of their feasting. The meat supposedly arrived at the celebration as a gift from the Wampanoag king Massasoit. On top of the venison, other meats probably included lots of fish and shellfish, which were staples of the pilgrims' diets. So if you want to wolf down a lobster or some oysters in lieu of turkey on Thursday, nobody can fault you for being historically inaccurate. 
   
   And pumpkin pie didn't cap things off 
   
   It may be the flagship dessert at modern Thanksgiving dinners, but pumpkin pie didn't make an appearance at the first Thanksgiving. The pilgrims probably lacked the butter and flour needed to make a pie crust, and it's not clear that they even had an oven in which they could have baked a pumpkin pie. That doesn't mean pumpkins weren't available for the meal, though; they were probably served after being baked in the coals of a fire or stewed. Pumpkin pie became a popular dish on 17th-century American tables, though, and it might have shown up for Thanksgiving as early as the 1623 celebration of the holiday. 
   
   
   
   More from Mental Floss... ||||| Every schoolchild learns that the Pilgrims couldn't have survived life in the New World without the help of the Indians. The tribes taught them which crops to plant. They introduced them to corn and other nutritional mainstays. One of these, the American cranberry, is still part of the classic Thanksgiving feast. (See more photos of cranberries.) 
   
   What you probably don't know, though, is that the cranberry was a key ingredient in the original energy bar, 400 years before anyone knew what a superfood was. 
   
   The Algonquin, Chippewa, and Cree, among others, gathered wild cranberries where they could find them in what is now Maine, Massachusetts, New Jersey, and Wisconsin, all the way west to Oregon and Washington, and north to areas of British Columbia and Quebec, according to Devon Mihesuah, a professor at the University of Kansas and an enrolled citizen of the Choctaw Nation. The berry was called sassamenesh (by the Algonquin) and ibimi (by the Wampanoag and Lenni-Lenape), which translates literally as "bitter" or "sour berries." Cranberries were used for everything from cooking to dyes for textiles to medicines. 
   
   According to Mihesuah, who also runs the American Indian Health and Diet Project, the Native Americans ate cranberries as fresh fruit, dried the fruit and formed them into cakes to store, and made tea out of the leaves. The Inuktitut of eastern Canada used the cranberry leaves as a tobacco substitute. There were also a range of nonculinary uses for the berry, says Mihesuah. Cree boiled the fruit and used it to dye porcupine quills for clothing and jewelry. Chippewa used cranberries as bait to trap the snowshoe hare. 
   
   And harnessing the nutritional power of the fruit—cranberries are extremely high in antioxidants and are thought to help prevent heart disease—Iroquois and Chippewa used cranberries for an assortment of medicinal purposes: as "blood purifiers," as a laxative, and for treating fever, stomach cramps, and a slew of childbirth-related injuries. 
   
   Pemmican—the Original Energy Bar 
   
   One of the more intriguing ways the Indians prepared cranberries was in a mixture called pemmican—sort of like a modern-day energy bar. They would pound cranberries into a mixture of equal parts ground dried deer meat and fat tallow, then store the mixture in animal skin pouches. "The fat preserves it, as does the acidity in the fruit, which lowers the pH and helps resist bacteria," says food historian Ken Albala, of University of the Pacific. The pemmican would last for months and could be eaten on long journeys as a reliable source of protein and fat. 
   
   Pemmican was essential to the Indians and Europeans engaged in the fur trade. For the traders, pemmican was a chief source of calories on the winter trade routes; for the Métis Indians, pemmican was a source of commerce. 
   
   "So vital was pemmican to the survival of fur traders and early settlers in Canada," writes food historian and cookbook author Jennifer McLagan, "that its supply sparked unrest between the Native Americans and the Europeans." Responding to a food shortage in 1814, the governor of the Red River colony, Miles Macdonell, attempted to prohibit the export of pemmican by the Métis. The Métis reacted by banding together with fur traders and, in 1816, they attacked the Red River settlement, in a clash known today as the Battle of Seven Oaks. 
   
   Cranberries and the Colonists 
   
   In all likelihood, the American cranberry was completely new to the European settlers, who came mostly from southern England. "Certainly there are cranberries in Great Britain, so the colonists may have had a frame of reference for it," says Stephen Cole, author of The Cranberry: Hard Work and Holiday Sauce. "The cranberry that became the cultivated cranberry that's harvested and eaten today is distinctive to North America, though." 
   
   The colonists had a few names for the cranberry: Craneberries, for the way the flower, produced in early June before the fruit grows, resembles the head and bill of a sandhill crane; fenberries, for the fens—an antiquated word for bogs—where cranberries grow; and bearberries, for the bears that were, apparently, often seen snacking on them. 
   
   But the colonists were indifferent to the Indians' wide range of uses for the cranberry. In fact, they were mostly adapting the fruit to fit the recipes and uses they knew from the Old World. "They were using cranberries in a medieval culinary tradition," says Cole. "Colonists never ate anything like pemmican within the tradition they had, which was mostly stuffings and puddings." Food historian Albala agrees: "The Europeans used cranberries the way they would have used similar fruits ... as a sour fruit sauce with wild fowl." 
   
   Sweetening the Deal 
   
   In 1622, the British brought honeybees to North America, changing the ways the colonists could use the fruit. "Once there was a consistent form of sweetening," says Cole, "the cranberry takes off. It gets used as a slightly tart side dish and ends up in pies and tarts." Soon, it's featured on the tables of high society. William Tudor, a satirist and well-known figure among Boston society in the early 19th century, wrote mockingly of cranberry sauce that it "is eaten with almost every species of roasted meat, particularly the white meats, turkies, &c. Some even eat it with boiled fish, and I knew one person, otherwise a very worthy man, who eats it with lobsters, for supper!" 
   
   By the mid-19th century, when the European settlers began formally cultivating the cranberry for commercial use, the Indians were gone. "Tribes were pretty well wiped out within a hundred years of contact in New England," says Mihesuah. "They had a heck of time just surviving, and if they did manage to cultivate cranberries to any extent, it did not last long." 
   
   The cranberry industry that began over 250 years ago has thrived, and today is worth over $300 million. (Watch "Cranberry Harvest" at Wisconsin's oldest cranberry marsh.) 
   
   There are independently owned cranberry farms across the northern United States and southern Canada—and some Indian tribes have kept their connection to the berry. An organic cranberry farm in Oregon, Coquille Cranberries, is owned and operated by members of the Coquille tribe. And each year, on the second Tuesday in October, the Wampanoag celebrate Cranberry Day on Martha's Vineyard. ||||| “It is indeed bad to eat apples. It is better to make them all into cider” 
   
   —Benjamin Franklin, in Remarks Concerning the Savages of North America, reporting an American Indian’s response to hearing the story of Adam and Eve. 
   
   No one knows exactly what the Pilgrims drank at the first Thanksgiving back in 1621. No known televised documentaries have survived to date, and little written documentation chronicling the meal exists. However, all evidence points to the fact that the Pilgrims toasted survival and that first harvest in America with mugs of hard apple cider. 
   
   Cider became a staple in England during the 16th and 17th centuries, dubbed the beverage’s “Golden Age.” While the drink had existed in initial forms for centuries, cider’s influence remained relatively contained to England’s upper crust (they had ample time and money to cultivate orchards) until the end of the 16th century, when it became a more democratic tipple. 
   
   Cider’s history, like the apple’s is long, curious, and celebrated. The cultivated apple we know today is the Malus pumila or M. Domestica and most likely originated in the Tien Shah Mountains, along the border between northwest China and Kazakhstan. (Kazakh capital’s name, “Alma-Ata,” means “father of apples.”) That apple probably derived from the M. Sieversii, which grows wild in a number of places, making the apple’s origin especially hard to pin down. In his book Cider: Hard and Sweet, Ben Watson notes that wild apples are depicted on Paleolithic cave art that dates back as far as 30,000 BCE. Around 8,000 years ago, apples began to surface in trade routes and began to pass through Central Asia. Homer writes of them in The Odyssey, and apples were Alexander the Great’s favorite dessert. 
   
   Cider’s birthplace is nearly as hard to identify, though the first record of cider production dates back to Rome. Julius Caesar and his soldiers drank cider made from crabapples in 55 BC. Throughout their conquests, Romans brought apple cuttings and horticultural knowledge across Europe (including to England), and by the 2nd Century CE, Romans were making cider (they called it “apple wine”), which we can read all about thanks to Pliny the Elder. 
   
   In 1066, after a long lull in cider production, the Norman Conquest (led by William II of Normandy, who became William the Conqueror) sparked a renewed cider interest in England. William’s army brought cuttings of several varieties including the Pearmain (a pear) among others. Cider soon became the most popular drink after ale and gained new ground again in the early 16th century, when Richard Harris (“fruiterer” to Henry VIII) procured several additional apple grafts from France, including Pippins, a desert apple that made sweet and delicious ciders. 
   
   England’s growing shipping trade during the 16th and 17th Centuries also contributed to cider’s increasing demand. Ted Bruning notes in Golden Fire: The Story of Cider, that the English soon realized “a sealed cask of cider…will not only keep but will go on improving for months or even years.” Sea captains observed that fewer passengers contracted scurvy on ships stocked with casks of cider aboard. Bruning also records that cider’s acclaim grew after several brutally cold winters wiped out vineyards in England and along France’s west coasts. Two additional factors spurred cider’s growing popularity at the time: trade restrictions on ale (which did not exist on cider) and England’s shortage of burnable wood (which impeded ale production). 
   
   During the middle of this Golden Age, in 1620, the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock. Several species of apples grew native in the area (garland, sweet crab, prairie crab, and southern crab), making it likely that the Pilgrims brewed their own cider, and American-bound English ships would have provided a steady supply as well. Early settlers used the apple cider for a variety of other products including applejack (initially produced by settlers who left buckets of fermenting cider out in the cold, then removed the layer of accumulated ice), apple brandy, and cider vinegar. Apple trees spread as settlers did, and by 1775, one in every ten farms in New England operated a cider mill. (Water was either unpalatable or, near towns, polluted, ale grew increasingly expensive and early attempts at growing barley and hops failed miserably.) According to Watson, by 1767 cider consumption per-capita had reached 1.14 barrels—more than 35 gallons per person. 
   
   Then beer became America’s favorite beverage, a position it still holds today. But cider production and consumption is on the rise after a long fallow period. In the United States, demand for cider has increased 65 percent in the past two years alone, far outpacing craft beer and wine. 
   
   In the spirit of historical tradition, cider would make an excellent addition to any Thanksgiving meal. Cider boasts acidity and (generally) effervescence, both of which cleanse the palate and add brightness and lift to rich dishes. In addition, cider is lower in alcohol than wine or beer, and it usually hovers at around five percent alcohol by volume. This makes it an excellent beverage to sip while you’re preparing Thanksgiving dinner, too. 
   
   In case you are not all that familiar with cider, here are a few rules of note – in extremely generalized terms that will probably get me in trouble. Ciders from France taste like apples (or pears). Ciders from Spain taste like feet. Ciders from America are a little bit boring (but getting better). 
   
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   What does that mean? In Normandy, French cider makers – especially top producers like Eric Bordelet, Etienne Dupont, and Cyril Zangs, are making ciders that are sweet, fragrant, and taste of fruit. Bordelet worked for years as a sommelier at l’Arpege, in Paris, and his ciders in particular behave like refined wines. They are nuanced and pure. Dupont's are slightly more rustic but equally magical. Zangs’ are lively and pure, and slightly spicy and herbaceous. 
   
   In Asturias, the cider apples are more bitter and tannic than in other regions. The style they produce resembles sour ale more than fruit. Isastegi Cider is one of the region’s most classic and elegant. In Asturias, more cider is consumed per capita than anywhere else in the world. 
   
   In America, we are finally rediscovering our cider-loving roots. Unfortunately, most heirloom apple trees have long since been ripped out of the ground. Trees have been replanted, but we will have to wait a few years until those trees mature. Foggy Ridge Cider, in Virginia, is making clean and bright ciders. Aaron Burr Cidery in Wurtsboro, New York, makes tiny quantities of funky, interesting cider from heirloom varieties, fermented with indigenous yeasts. 
   
   With a history that includes the Pilgrims, Julius Caesar, William the Conqueror (not to mention Charlemagne, who planted orchards in 800 CE), among others, cider’s renaissance is a welcome return to American roots. In the name of history and deliciousness, it is especially welcome this year at my Thanksgiving table.
target: – The pilgrims may not have eaten any turkey at the "First Thanksgiving" in 1621—no mention of turkey is specifically mentioned in Edward Winslow's account of the feast, but he does mention that a lot of venison was eaten, and they probably ate fish and shellfish as well—so why is it the traditionally accepted main course for Thanksgiving today? Well, the Week explains, William Bradford's journals were rediscovered and reprinted in 1856, and he wrote about the wild turkey hunts the colonists engaged in in 1621. Plus, turkey is a very American bird, and a large enough one to feed a table full of people, so when Abraham Lincoln officially made Thanksgiving a national holiday in 1863, that's what was on the menu. The pilgrims didn't eat cranberry sauce, either, considering sugar was a luxury at the time and it's kind of an integral ingredient in the sauce. (They may have eaten plain cranberries, though; National Geographic notes that the fruit was a sort of Native American "superfood.") And neither sweet potatoes nor white potatoes were around in America quite yet, so those weren't on the menu either, nor was pumpkin pie—since the pilgrims probably didn't have the butter or flour they would have needed to make the crust. If you'd like to be historically accurate at least when it comes to the beverages, the pilgrims probably drank hard apple cider, the Daily Beast reports.