These Thanksgiving Recipe Ideas Will Get the Whole Family Excited (2024)

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What was on the menu at the first Thanksgiving answer key? ›

So, to the question “What did the Pilgrims eat for Thanksgiving,” the answer is both surprising and expected. Turkey (probably), venison, seafood, and all of the vegetables that they had planted and harvested that year—onions, carrots, beans, spinach, lettuce, and other greens.

First Thanksgiving Meal

Those delicious mashed potatoes and cranberry sauce weren't even invented yet. The dinner was most likely duck, venison, or seafood for the meat, and cabbage, onions, corn and squash for the sides. The only thing that might be the same now is eating pumpkins, however not pumpkin pie.

Add it all up and the typical American consumes about 3,000 calories and 150 grams of fat in a Thanksgiving meal, according to the Calorie Control Council. And that doesn't count going back for a second wave of turkey, stuffing, potatoes and gravy, which can tack on perhaps another 1,000 calories.

Although turkeys were indigenous, there's no record of a big, roasted bird at the feast. The Wampanoag brought deer and there would have been lots of local seafood (mussels, lobster, bass) plus the fruits of the first pilgrim harvest, including pumpkin. No mashed potatoes, though.

But according to the two only remaining historical records of the first Thanksgiving menu, that meal consisted of freshly killed deer, assorted wildfowl, cod, bass, and flint, and a native variety of corn harvested by the Native Americans, which was eaten as corn bread and porridge.

It is also worth noting what was not present at the first Thanksgiving feast. There were no cloudlike heaps of mashed potatoes, since white potatoes had not yet crossed over from South America. There was no gravy either, since the colonists didn't yet have mills to produce flour.

Oddly enough, a few contemporary Thanksgiving powerhouses didn't make an appearance at the original holiday table. Neither white potatoes nor sweet potatoes had yet been brought to North America from South and Central America, respectively.

Can you guess how many calories most Americans consume per day? According to some reports, the number is as high as 3,600. This figure has been on the rise for nearly half a century.

For Thanksgiving this year, analysts are predicting that 88% of Americans will eat turkey and they will consume about 46 million of the birds at a cost of over $900 million.

What is the most common food to eat on Thanksgiving? ›

At Thanksgiving dinner, turkey is served with a variety of side dishes which can vary from traditional, such as mashed potatoes, stuffing, and cranberry sauce, to ones that reflect regional or cultural heritage.

On June 28, 1870, President Ulysses S. Grant signed into law the Holidays Act that made Thanksgiving a yearly appointed federal holiday in Washington, D.C. On January 6, 1885, an act by Congress made Thanksgiving, and other federal holidays, a paid holiday for all federal workers throughout the United States.

During the autumn of 1621, at least 90 Wampanoag joined 52 English people at what is now Plymouth, Massachusetts, to mark a successful harvest. It is remembered today as the “First Thanksgiving,” although no one back then used that term.

The first Thanksgiving banquet consisted of foods like venison, bean stew and hard biscuits. And while corn and pumpkin had their place on the table, they hardly resembled the cornbread stuffing and pumpkin pie we feast on today.

Massasoit sent some of his own men to hunt deer for the feast and for three days, the English and native men, women, and children ate together. The meal consisted of deer, corn, shellfish, and roasted meat, different from today's traditional Thanksgiving feast. They played ball games, sang, and danced.

The eels were probably a slimy side course at the 17th-century version of the Thanksgiving feast. We're not sure how the eels were prepared, but they were plentiful. Another possible side dish was seal. But the most likely centerpiece of the first Thanksgiving meals was deer.

While turkey is the staple for Thanksgiving today, it may not have been on the menu during what is considered the First Thanksgiving. The First Thanksgiving meal eaten by pilgrims in November 1621 included lobster. They also ate fruits and vegetables brought by Native Americans, mussels, bass, clams, and oysters.

During the Mayflower's voyage, the Pilgrims' main diet would have consisted primarily of a cracker-like biscuit ("hard tack"), salt pork, dried meats including cow tongue, various pickled foods, oatmeal and other cereal grains, and fish. The primary beverage for everyone, including children, was beer.