The First Thanksgiving Menu: Venison, Lobster, and... Passenger Pigeons?

As families gather on Thanksgiving for our annual celebration of feasting and football, a roast turkey will likely occupy a place of honor in the feast. For those of us with classic American tastes, the gobbler will be surrounded by mashed potatoes, stuffing, gravy, candied yams, cranberry sauce, pumpkin pie, and so much more. 

But let’s pause for a short history lesson that answers a question historians have been arguing about for decades: just what did the Pilgrims eat on that first Thanksgiving back in 1621? The answer might surprise you.

Remember, the first Thanksgiving marked two things, the anniversary of ragtag Pilgrims surviving their first year in the foreign New World landscape of eastern Massachusetts and a celebration of their first harvest. And over three very long days, the Wampanoag Indians graciously shared the feast with them.

First, what they didn’t eat on that day: neither mashed potatoes, candied yams, pumpkin pie, nor cranberry sauce made the menu. Since white potatoes originated in South America and their close cousin the sweet potato is Caribbean in origin, neither had yet spread to North America, and both would have been absent in 1621. While pumpkins are an American fruit and the Wampanoag likely taught Pilgrims how to roast them over the open fire, there was no pumpkin pie, as the Pilgrims lacked flour and butter. The pumpkins were, however, likely stuffed with vegetables and herbs.

While cranberries are a key crop in Massachusetts even today and the Pilgrims were surrounded by them, the recipe for cranberry sauce is more than 50 years in the future, as the Pilgrims lacked a key ingredient here too: sugar was incredibly scarce. They ate dried or raw cranberries. 

Without cranberry sauce, yams, and mashed potatoes, Kathleen Wall, historian and food culinarian at the Plimoth Plantation, told Smithsonian magazine in 2011, “That is a blank in the table, for an English eye. So what are they putting on instead? I think meat, meat, and more meat.”

You’d guess turkeys, right? While wild turkeys are, despite their name, a distinctly American bird—Ben Franklin famously thought it would be a better national symbol than the eagle—and while turkeys certainly inhabited the area where Pilgrims dined with their Wampanoag guests, turkeys were likely not on the table that first Thanksgiving, as there are reliable diaries and eyewitness accounts of the event at the time, with mention of lots of different foods but no mention of turkey.

We know venison was one huge component of the first Thanksgiving. In fact, records indicate Wampanoag hunters brought five deer to the feast, their contribution to the celebration. 

“Wildfowl was there,” continued Wall, and she suspects goose or duck were at the center of the table—though she also discovered in her research that swan and passenger pigeons would have been available too. “Passenger pigeons—extinct in the wild for over a century now—were so thick in the 1620s, they said you could hear them a quarter-hour before you saw them,” she told the magazine. “They say a man could shoot at the birds in flight and bring down 200.”

And some of the birds were boiled first, then finished in the fire. Boiled passenger pigeon, anyone? In addition to wildfowl and deer, the group probably feasted on eels and shellfish like lobster, clams, and mussels, all staples of the coastal Wampanoag. “They were drying shellfish and smoking other sorts of fish,” says Wall.

So lobster may have been present at the first Thanksgiving. Perhaps we begin a new tradition…

Wall thinks it is possible the birds were stuffed, just not with the same bread as today. Instead, the Pilgrims stuffed the geese with onion and herbs, and “there is a wonderful stuffing for goose in the 17th-century that is just shelled chestnuts,” says Wall. There was bread present, but made from maize and not wheat. Multi-colored Indian corn was a staple, ground not only for bread but for porridge too. 

Like all eastern woodlands people, the Wampanoag, had a “varied and extremely good diet,” says Wall. The forest provided chestnuts, walnuts and beechnuts, and those would have been incorporated into that 1621 feast.

Of course, the modern Thanksgiving feast features too many desserts—I’m looking forward to our friend’s annual pecan-and-chocolate Derby pie. But the 1621 feast featured fruits like melons and grapes for dessert. 

And to wash it down? Wall thinks they simply drank water; beer and wine were not yet available. 

The turkey-centric meal is more a product of the 19th than the 17th century, but the first event did feature two very different people speaking very different languages who likely had a complicated, even fraught, relationship sharing food and creating community-- not a bad model for the day. 

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone.