Traditional Tom Turkey

Wild Turkey in Ottawa, Michigan

During the first Thanksgiving, Pilgrim's cooking methods and menus were crude as compared to what most of us have experienced in our lifetime. There were no electric or gas ovens. In fact, no electricity period. Colonial utensils and hardware consisted of frying pans, kettles, iron pots, wooden spoons, and a mortar and pestle. 

On the menu, as uncovered in Two Sides of Thanksgiving, one would more than likely NOT find turkey to be the main meat that filled the Pilgrim's bellies. Nor would fancy dressing or giblet gravy grace the table and any signs of sweet potatoes or pumpkin pie nowhere would be found!

A sneak peak into a Pilgrim kitchen might disclose the following...

Each house had a prominent fire pit and chimney, where the cooking was normally done by the women and girls. Several "recipe books" from the period exist, and provide some interesting insights into cooking at the time. Perhaps the most famous of these is Gervase Markham's The English Housewife, first published in 1615. A recipe for cooking a young turkey or chicken reads: 

If you will boil chickens, young turkeys, peahens, or any house fowl daintily, you shall, after you have trimmed them, drawn them, trussed them, and washed them, fill their bellies as full of parsley as they can hold; then boil them with salt and water only till they be enough: then take a dish and put into it verjuice [the juice of sour crab-apples] and butter, and salt, and when the butter is melted, take the parsley out of the chicken's bellies, and mince it very small, and put it to the verjuice and butter, and stir it well together; then lay in the chickens, and trim the dish with sippets [fried or toasted slices of bread], and so serve it forth. [Source: MayflowerHistory.com]

Modern Day Preparation for Traditional Tom Turkey...

Cooking in a kitchen during colonial times...

 

...as compared to Julia Child in the kitchen!

 

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