One letter, a paragraph long — and three centuries of culinary mythology. The story of how a sparse colonial report acquired turkey, cranberry sauce, and pumpkin pie until it became America’s defining feast.
In 1622, a London printing press produced a small book with no bestseller ambitions. It was called “Mourt's Relation” — a collection of letters and notes from Plymouth Colony, compiled chiefly by Edward Winslow, with the opening section written by William Bradford. The texts covered the period from November 1620 to November 1621, and among them was a letter from Winslow dated December 11, 1621. It is there — in literally just a few lines — that the three-day autumn feast is described, the one that more than two hundred years later would be called “the first Thanksgiving.”
So what does it say? In spring, the colonists sowed about twenty acres of Indian corn and six acres of barley and peas. They brought in the harvest. Governor William Bradford sent four men hunting — “on fowling,” after birds. In a single day, they shot enough to supply the colony for nearly a week. Then Massasoit, the great sachem, arrived with around ninety men, and for three days they feasted and made merry together. The guests brought and bestowed upon the governor and captain five deer.
That is, essentially, all. Not a word about what kind of birds were taken. No mention of turkey. No cranberries, no potatoes, no pumpkin in any form. Winslow’s letter is a colonist’s report to prospective investors and fellow countrymen. Its purpose was to show that one could live and feed oneself in the New World. And that brevity left an empty space that later generations filled with astonishing ingenuity.
This is where the most delicate part of the story begins, and its honest uncertainty is what wins me over. Winslow wrote “fowling” — hunting birds. Which ones? Ducks? Geese? Turkey? Pigeons? He did not say. And it would be a crude mistake to conclude from that silence that there definitely was no turkey on the table.
In his later journal, “Of Plymouth Plantation,” Bradford described the abundance of the place: fishing yielded cod and bass, while among the game he noted waterfowl and — there it is — “great store of wild turkeys.” But Bradford was describing the colony’s overall condition; he did not connect turkeys to the specific feast of 1621. Those are different statements, and fusing them into one means doing work for the author that he never did himself.
There is another piece of evidence. William Hilton, a passenger aboard the “Fortune,” which arrived in Plymouth in November 1621 — that is, essentially right after, or at the tail end of, that very celebration — mentioned “great flocks of turkey” in the area. And William Wood, in “New Englands Prospect,” published in London in 1634, likewise described turkeys as part of the local fauna. Wild turkey in early-17th-century New England was an ordinary bird. The four hunters could easily have shot several alongside ducks and geese. Or they might not have. The documents allow for both possibilities, but confirm neither for certain — and in that gap between “perhaps” and “definitely” lives all the mythology that followed.
The three-day feast of 1621 was, in essence, a harvest feast. A secular and diplomatic occasion: the colonists had gathered their first proper crop, survived, and had Wampanoag allies nearby whose goodwill was worth maintaining. Massasoit’s ninety warriors made for a serious delegation, and a shared meal lasting three days was a gesture of mutual recognition. The venison brought by the guests was their contribution to the common table — standard practice in the region.
Religious thanksgiving days in colonial New England were an entirely different matter. They were days of prayer and fasting — or, conversely, prayers of thanks after a fast — proclaimed for particular reasons: rain after drought, victory in a conflict, the arrival of supply ships. Plymouth Colony held such a religious thanksgiving day in 1623 — after a long-awaited rain saved the crops. It was a day of prayer, not a three-day feast with venison and bird-shooting.
The conflation of these two events — the secular feast of 1621 and the religious thanksgiving of 1623 — happened much later and became one of the key mechanisms of mythmaking. When Americans in the 19th century needed a “founding moment” for a national holiday, the two episodes merged into one: the feast took on a religious hue, and the prayer acquired a festive table. The result was a hybrid that had never existed in colonial reality but was perfectly suited to school textbooks.
Between the colonial feast and the national holiday lies a gap of two centuries. And the bridge across it was Sarah Josepha Hale, editor of Godey's Lady's Book and, roughly speaking, one of the most persistent lobbyists in American history.
In 1827, she published the novel “Northwood,” which described a Thanksgiving dinner — with turkey at the center of the table. It was a literary gesture: neither Winslow nor Plymouth is mentioned in the novel. Hale was constructing an image of what, in her view, the holiday ought to be. In 1839, her book “The Good Housekeeper” appeared, offering practical advice on arranging the holiday table. By then, turkey had already firmly claimed the central place on the menu — but this was a 19th-century menu, not a 17th-century one.
Hale did not stop at cooking. For decades, she wrote letters to presidents — one after another — asking them to establish a nationwide Thanksgiving. Four presidents ignored or rejected her initiative before, in 1863, Abraham Lincoln signed a proclamation setting national Thanksgiving on the last Thursday of November. The Civil War was underway, and Lincoln needed a unifying symbol — Hale had one ready-made.
What astonishes me is the scale of this transformation. One woman, working through novels, cookbooks, and bureaucratic correspondence, effectively designed a ritual for a nation of more than thirty million people. Turkey on the Thanksgiving table is not an echo of the Plymouth feast. It is Sarah Hale’s authored project, brought to life with a presidential signature.
After Lincoln’s proclamation, the holiday had official status, but it still had no origin myth. That myth was built up brick by brick: through school textbooks, lithographs, children’s plays, and magazine illustrations of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
The mechanism was simple. A textbook needed a specific scene — “the first Thanksgiving.” So it took Winslow’s paragraph, added turkeys — Bradford had mentioned them in another context, after all, so why not move them over? — slipped in a religious prayer of thanks — from the event of 1623 or from Puritan tradition in general — and produced a picture: Pilgrims in black buckled hats sit at a long table with Native Americans, a golden turkey in the center, ears of corn and pumpkins in the background. The black buckled hats, incidentally, are an anachronism too — fashion from a later era.
Cranberry sauce, mashed potatoes, pumpkin pie — all of these are dishes that became available and popular in the 18th and 19th centuries. Potatoes were not cultivated in Plymouth in 1621 at all. Cranberries grew in New England bogs, and the Wampanoag used them, but turning the berry into a sauce was culinary technology developed by later generations. Pumpkin pie requires flour, sugar, spices, and an oven — none of which the colonists had in sufficient quantity in the autumn of their first harvest.
Every element of the canonical menu was born in an American kitchen that took centuries after Plymouth to form. The holiday became a display window onto which every generation laid out what it considered its finest — and attributed it to the founders.
A national ritual works like a palimpsest: a new layer settles over the old one, and after a while no one remembers what was written first. Four unnamed hunters, sent by Governor Bradford after birds, returned with enough game for a week. Ninety of Massasoit’s people arrived with five deer. For three days they ate, shot, and, in Winslow’s words, “recreated themselves.” That is all we know for certain.
Everything else — the turkey at the center of the table, the prayer before the meal, cranberries and pumpkin, gratitude as the day’s defining emotion — was added later. By a novel from 1827, a cookbook from 1839, a presidential proclamation from 1863, school plays of the early 20th century, advertising posters, and television shows. Each layer seemed a natural continuation of the one before it, and by the middle of the 20th century the whole construction looked monolithic, as though it had always been that way.
It seems important to me that an honest look at this story does not destroy the holiday; it makes it more interesting. The real feast of 1621 — diplomatic, pragmatic, without pies or sauces — tells of people who survived their first year on an unfamiliar shore and sat down at the table with those without whose help they would not have survived. The canonical menu tells a different story: of how a nation, assembling itself out of different eras and regions, chose this particular meal as the mirror in which it wants to see itself. Winslow’s paragraph still lies at the foundation — short, dry, without a single recipe.