Thanksgiving is a holiday taking place on the fourth Thursday of November that the majority of Americans and Canadians spend with family and friends eating traditional Thanksgiving foods. These foods include but are not limited to, turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes, cranberry sauce, assorted casseroles, assorted pies, assorted fruit “salads”, etcetera; but, what if we were to tell you that these weren’t the traditional Thanksgiving foods at all? At least not the original.

Though disputed by some people, the majority of people base the first Thanksgiving and its origins on a 1621 harvest feast shared between the Pilgrims and the Wompanoag people in Plymouth. This was a rare occurrence of a non-violent interaction between the new colonists and the native Americans. 

However at this feast they didn’t have some of what we’d list as our favorite Thanksgiving foods. Historians studying William Bradford’s journal Of Plymouth Plantation say the first Thanksgiving menu would have been more or less composed of: venison (deer), wild fowl (including turkey), Cod, Bass, Flint, Shellfish, American Eel, Sofkey (corn mush), the three sisters (corn, beans, and squash), and even groundhog. Not a Thanksgiving dinner a majority of the American and Canadian people can say they have every year. 

This is not to say that the foods of which we may look forward to every year don’t hold a deeper tradition, after all, Thanksgiving being a national holiday goes all the way back to 1863 when Abraham Lincoln declared it so. Each food had its unique starting in the Thanksgiving feast, where it might be the pumpkin pie, that originated more or less as a custard baked in a pumpkin, or mashed potatoes first appearing in 1747, they all have roots in American culture.