Picture the ideal American Thanksgiving dinner. For many, it's a juicy, plump turkey, stuffing, potatoes, cranberry sauce and pumpkin pie. However, the 1621 feast shared by Pilgrims and Native Americans, often referred to as the first Thanksgiving, likely had none of these items.

The following University of North Texas faculty members are available to discuss what the Pilgrims may or may not have prepared for the meal.

Jeff Johnson, associate professor in the UNT Department of Biological Sciences, can discuss the heath hen, which some historians believe is the "wild fowl" that Plymouth Colony leader Edward Winslow referred to in his firsthand account of the meal. The bird was a popular entrée on dinner tables in New England. It went extinct in Martha's Vineyard during the 1930s.

Johnson is leading a project to bring back the heath hen. He is available to discuss the history of the heath hen and the effort to de-extinct the species.

E-mail: Jeff.Johnson@unt.edu
Phone: 940-369-8071

Jennifer Jensen Wallach, associate professor in the UNT Department of History, is the author of How America Eats: A Social History of U.S. Food and Culture. She is also the editor of American Appetites: A Documentary Reader and Dethroning the Deceitful Pork Chop: Rethinking African American Foodways from Slavery to Obama, and co-editor of The Routledge History of American Foodways, which will be published in February.

She says that Winslow's account mentions members of the native Wampanoag tribe bringing five deer, so venison was plentiful at the feast. Pumpkins and cranberries were easily available near Plymouth Colony, but if they were served at the feast, they weren't in the form of pumpkin pie and a sugary cranberry sauce, Wallach says.

Maize, or native American corn, may have been another dish for the feast. The Pilgrims learned to plant it from Tisquantum, a member of the Patuxet tribe, but they weren't exactly happy to eat it or anything else they associated with the native population, Wallach says, and publications in England poked fun of the colonists for eating foods widely grown by Native Americans.

She notes that today's traditional Thanksgiving meal with turkey as the main course was probably influenced by Norman Rockwall's painting "Freedom from Want," or "The Thanksgiving Picture." The iconic painting was published in The Saturday Evening Post in March 1943, less than two years after Congress set the fourth Thursday in November as Thanksgiving.

While Thanksgiving today is a significant holiday to many Americans, the actual 1621 feast may have not very significant to those who ate it, Wallach says.

"It was intended to be a one-time harvest festival. The first Thanksgiving as we know it is largely based on myth," she says.

E-mail: Jennifer.wallach@unt.edu
Phone: 940-565-3395