What Did the Pilgrims and Native Americans Eat at the First Thanksgiving? • FamilySearch (2024)

Every year in November, many people in the United States gather with family for a giant feast. The traditional meal includes turkey, mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes with marshmallows, glazed carrots, green bean casserole, macaroni and cheese, rolls—you name it. All the things the first Pilgrims and the native Wampanoag ate back in the year 1621, right?

Of course, we know that isn’t exactly accurate. For one thing, macaroni and cheese is definitely not a traditional Thanksgiving food, nor did the Pilgrims and Wampanoag have oven-safe dishes for baking green-bean casseroles. Or marshmallows. So, what did the Pilgrims eat during that very first Thanksgiving? Let’s take a deeper dive. The answers might surprise you.

1. Turkey

What Did the Pilgrims and Native Americans Eat at the First Thanksgiving? • FamilySearch (1)

There’s a good chance the Pilgrims and Wampanoag did in fact eat turkey as part of that very first Thanksgiving. Wild turkey was a common food source for people who settled Plymouth. In the days prior to the celebration, the colony’s governor sent four men to go “fowling”—that is, to hunt for birds. Did they come back with any turkey? We don’t know for sure, but probably. At the very least, we know there was a lot of meat, since the native Wampanoag people who celebrated with the Pilgrims added five deer to the menu.

2. Mashed Potatoes

What Did the Pilgrims and Native Americans Eat at the First Thanksgiving? • FamilySearch (2)

Keep dreaming. At the time the Pilgrims celebrated their first Thanksgiving, most Europeans had never even seen a potato, let alone learned to mash them and drown them in gravy. Same goes for the Wampanoag. The history of the potato is as long as it is glorious and deserves its own article, to be sure. But to make a long story short, potatoes come from the high Andes of South America and weren’t really cultivated in North America until the 1700s. So, no, cross it off your list—mashed potatoes are not an original Thanksgiving side dish.

3. Cranberry Sauce

What Did the Pilgrims and Native Americans Eat at the First Thanksgiving? • FamilySearch (3)

By fall 1621, the Pilgrims were essentially out of sugar. Translation—no cranberry sauce. Even with sugar, the Pilgrims still wouldn’t have used it to sauce cranberries. That’s because the tart little berry was new to them. Native Americans made dyes out of cranberries. But the day when the first man or woman would combine sweetened cranberries with a mouthful of stuffing, gravy, mashed potatoes, and white turkey breast in one satisfying, jaw-stretching bite was somewhere in the future.

4. Corn

It’s very, very likely the Pilgrims and Wampanoag ate corn for the first Thanksgiving—but not the frozen kind that you heat up in the microwave (obviously). Nor was it the boiled kind, the cobbed kind, the pudding kind, or the cornbread kind with little bits of sausage in it that only your great-aunt Suzie knows how to make. The corn the Pilgrims and Wampanoag most likely ate for dinner that day was the mushy, turned-into-a-thick-porridge kind that you slurp down with a spoon—or a finger, if that’s all you’ve got. From our perspective, nearly half a millennium later, corn porridge doesn’t sound especially good. But apparently if you mix in some molasses, it isn’t that bad.

5. Pumpkin Pie

What Did the Pilgrims and Native Americans Eat at the First Thanksgiving? • FamilySearch (5)

Pilgrims liked pumpkins. According to accounts, they used to hollow them out, fill them with milk and honey to make a custard, and then roast the orange orbs in hot ashes. But when it came to making pies, the Pilgrims were essentially out of luck. You need butter and wheat flour to make a crust, and in 1621, the Pilgrims didn’t have much of either.

6. Lobster

What Did the Pilgrims and Native Americans Eat at the First Thanksgiving? • FamilySearch (6)

You probably don’t eat lobster for Thanksgiving—but the Pilgrims and Wampanoag might have. In fact, food historians speculate that much of the meal must have consisted of seafood. One of the colonists, a man named Edward Winslow, described the setting around his Plymouth home in this way: “Our bay is full of lobsters all the summer and affordeth variety of other fish; in September we can take a hogshead of eels in a night with a small labor, and can dig them out of their beds all the winter. We have mussels . . . at our doors. Oysters we have none near, but we can have them brought by the Indians when we will.”

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. Was it good? Most experts agree that it must have been delicious; otherwise, it wouldn’t have become one of the most famous traditions of all time.

What about You?

What Did the Pilgrims and Native Americans Eat at the First Thanksgiving? • FamilySearch (7)

Are you surprised to learn that the Pilgrims and their Wampanoag neighbors ate seafood and venison for Thanksgiving? Don’t be. This is the Big Feast we’re talking about—and adding your own personal twist to the traditional meal is, well, part of the tradition!

What are your family’s favorite Thanksgiving dishes? Have you ever taken a picture or recorded the recipe and uploaded it to FamilySearch.org? If so, you’re doing family history, which, by definition, is an awesome thing to do.

Go to Memories to get started.

Record Your Thanksgiving Memories

What Did the Pilgrims and Native Americans Eat at the First Thanksgiving? • FamilySearch (2024)

FAQs

What Did the Pilgrims and Native Americans Eat at the First Thanksgiving? • FamilySearch? ›

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.

What did the Pilgrims and natives eat during the first Thanksgiving? ›

There are only two surviving documents that reference the original Thanksgiving harvest meal. They describe a feast of freshly killed deer, assorted wildfowl, a bounty of cod and bass, and flint, a native variety of corn harvested by the Native Americans, which was eaten as corn bread and porridge.

What do Native Americans eat on Thanksgiving? ›

In addition to wild fowl (including wild turkey, though not explicitly on the menu in 1621), venison, and corn, there are references to lobster, fish, clams, oysters, eel, corn, squash, and maple syrup.

What was the most plentiful food at the first Thanksgiving? ›

Culinary historians believe that much of the Thanksgiving meal consisted of seafood, which is often absent from today's menus. Mussels in particular were abundant in New England and could be easily harvested because they clung to rocks along the shoreline.

What food did Pilgrims eat? ›

Cooking and Food

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.

What was not served at the Pilgrims Thanksgiving meal? ›

Potatoes—white or sweet—would not have been featured on the 1621 table, and neither would sweet corn. Bread-based stuffing was also not made, though the Pilgrims may have used herbs or nuts to stuff birds.

What was the first Thanksgiving feast in 1621? ›

A Harvest Celebration

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.

What were 2 types of food at the first Thanksgiving? ›

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.

What was the original Thanksgiving meal? ›

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.

What food was missing from the first Thanksgiving? ›

Lasting three days with no turkey or pie, and very few women, the first Thanksgiving was a political gathering focused on cementing an Indian-Pilgrim military alliance, and nothing like what we celebrate today.

What were traditional Pilgrim foods? ›

Indian corn was part of almost every meal in Plymouth Colony. Along with Indian corn, the Pilgrims also grew some beans, pumpkins, wheat, barley, oats and peas in their fields. In the gardens near their houses, women grew many different kinds of herbs and vegetables, like parsley, lettuce, spinach, carrots and turnips.

What did Pilgrims drink? ›

Suggesting that the Pilgrims might have had a tipple at their first Thanksgiving, Mancall says that the Pilgrims came from more urban places in England, where beer or cider was always preferred over water because it was more sanitary.

What was the Pilgrims' biggest meal of the day? ›

In the middle of the day, everyone ate dinner, which was a largest meal of the day made up of several foods. There was probably a thick porridge or bread made from Indian corn and some kind of meat, fowl or fish. Supper was a smaller meal, often just leftovers from dinner.

Did they eat lobster at the first Thanksgiving? ›

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.

Was there apple pie and potatoes on the first Thanksgiving? ›

The idea of a huge breast-forward turkey and apple pie on those original tables is also a myth. There are two primary-source historical records that give us a clue as to what was part of the 1621 feast. They suggest that the feast likely consisted of wild turkey and other fowl, venison, cod, bass, and corn.

What foods did they eat on Thanksgiving? ›

Most Traditional Thanksgiving Foods. A traditional Thanksgiving meal consists of roast turkey and many sides including stuffing, mashed potatoes and gravy, corn, green beans and cranberry sauce, with pumpkin pie as dessert.

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