Traditions Change

Monday night I taped a couple of Thanksgiving specials, one from the regular series on Food Network, Unwrapped, and the other The Secret Life of Thanksgiving. Both, but especially the first, talked about traditional Thanksgiving foods and what (and what not) would have been eaten by the Pilgrims in 1621 in Plymouth, Massachusetts. (For instance, they wouldn't have had applesauce—no apple trees yet—or traditional bread—no wheat (although they might have had corn pone, a recipe learned from the Native people)—nor many other crop foods that had not been planted yet.)

As they went through the list of "traditional foods," however, you noticed, especially if you were a reader of older books, even as recent as the 1940s, that there are traditional foods for Thanksgiving that are no longer being eaten.

For instance, in every older story about Thanksgiving, you can usually find mashed/creamed turnips. They, and other root vegetables, were a staple of many a fall and winter meal in New England and the Midwest. It wasn't until people started canning vegetables that people were able to have greens in the wintertime and only very recently that there were green vegetables all year round thanks to refrigeration and faster shipping methods. Produce you would have found in a grocery store at Thanksgiving time even post World War II is very different from what you find in the supermarket today.

Another very popular Thanksgiving food that doesn't seem to show up on the "traditional list" any longer are creamed onions. These also show up in meal menus from stories more than fifty years old. Gladys Taber mentions them, or the little pearl onions, in her Stillmeadow books and it is one of the vegetables served in Gail Rock's 1947-set The Thanksgiving Treasure.

Neither of the specials even mentioned butternut squash, although it still comes with Thanksgiving dinner at most New England restaurants. I wasn't surprised, given the disappearance of squash pie from the supermarkets up there last November, although mashed butternut squash does show up on many of the cooking specials in the winter with a new twist, as a soup.

The one Thanksgiving food tradition that has apparently been around for years but which I had never seen until I moved south was something called "green bean casserole." I'd read about such an animal, but had never seen them in evidence on a New England table. If you saw "string beans" on the Thanksgiving menu they were served straight.

Creamed Onion Recipe

Mashed Turnips

Here's a squash pie recipe; it has a little milder flavor than pumpkin.