Feast mode: Our food writer serves up a complicated holiday’s history and hits

Episode transcript

Kendra Nordin Beato: Gratitude is really the best ingredient at the Thanksgiving table, I think.

Clay Collins: That’s Monitor writer and editor Kendra Nordin Beato. Kendra often pursues stories that explore gender, sports, food, and crossovers among those realms. A nominee for a James Beard Foundation Media Award in 2011 for a story on an American culinary renaissance, Kendra made food history a focus of study for her master’s degree in American Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Boston.

She recently wrote an explainer for the Monitor about U.S. Thanksgiving history. Who better, right? Welcome to “Why We Wrote This.” I’m Clay Collins, and Kendra joins me today.

Hey, Kendra, welcome back to the show.

Nordin Beato: Hi Clay, great to be back.

Collins: So whatever version of this holiday’s origin story you prefer and however you like to spend it and with whom, whether it’s a big intergenerational family in the Norman Rockwell style or with a small chosen family of friends, Thanksgiving often – not always, but often – involves genuine gratitude, a little time off from work ... and food.

So, Kendra, my own menu-option hill to die on is a hill of fresh cranberry relish, versus the gelatinous stuff that takes the shape of a can. What is your hardline Thanksgiving stand, if you have one?

Nordin Beato: Oh, Clay, I’ve had to learn to not have a hardline stand, but I’m definitely team fresh cranberry relish with an orange peel grated in with walnuts. That’s a tribute to my Midwestern upbringing –

Collins: Maple syrup?

Nordin Beato: Maybe a little bit of maple syrup for a hint of New England, that’s right. Yeah.

Collins: Get that sugar out of there.

Nordin Beato: Yeah. My husband is team canned cranberry sauce with the ridges. They just like to have it in a big blob and so often I’m the, you know, lonely person eating the cranberry relish all to myself around the Thanksgiving table, but still, we have both. We have to have both.

Collins: I’ve been [to] Thanksgiving dinners like that. Let’s go to turkey. Turkey’s OK, right? People brine it, they deep fry it, they stuff it, you know, they dry it out sometimes.

You can get farm fresh ones if you can afford it, get past the factory farming piece, but turkey is so ingrained, and I wonder why. Also, did Ben Franklin want to make the turkey a national bird, or was that just an early dad joke?

Nordin Beato: Let’s just get that myth abolished. People always bring that up. “Oh, did you know that Ben Franklin thought the turkey should be the national bird?”

Collins: In which case we’d be eating eagle.

Nordin Beato: And right, that’s, you know, not good. Not good. Actually, Ben Franklin wrote that sentiment in a private letter that he sent to his daughter that was rediscovered by historians, then published, and then edited. And, you know, discovered as what Ben Franklin really thought the national bird should be.

But he was making fun, actually, of the Society of the Cincinnati, which was a heritage society that had this bald eagle, probably riffing on the national seal at the time, but it was badly drawn. It looked like a turkey. So he was poking fun at it, as the satirist that he is. So yes. Yes, [it was a] dad joke. Early dad joke for Thanksgiving.

Collins: That’s excellent. And of course you have team spiral ham, too. Vegetarianism can kind of soar on Thanksgiving though, too. All those sides, and a meatless Three Sisters Thanksgiving would be corn, beans, and squash – that’d be appropriate. You’ve written about Wampanoag autumn stew. You told me on the way in here that actually included venison, but that’s game, not, you know, store meat.

So make the case, if you would, for a meatless Thanksgiving.

Nordin Beato: Well, let’s just take a look first at history.

The early settlers that first year in Plymouth had been through a very difficult year; none but four of the original 22 English housewives had survived in a colony of about 50 men. And that autumn, there was an abundant harvest. And so that thus begins the myth when members of the Wampanoag tribe had some diplomatic feasts. We don’t know if there’s actually turkey there. There was only one eyewitness account written in 1621 that referenced waterfowl. And so that has come to mean turkey, because turkey is a native bird to North America.

Meat was a special ingredient, especially for those early settlers, and you didn’t always have meat, which is why the Wampanoag were teaching the English settlers about the “three sisters,” and for the listeners who don’t know what that is, that is planting corn, bean, and squash all in the same mound of dirt, and the corn supports the bean stalk and the squash spreads out to eliminate weeds and other sort of invading pests. So, put together in the pot, they create this very nutritious dish of both protein and carbohydrates and even sugar.

So vegetarianism or veganism is no longer synonymous with a difficult dinner guest. It’s something that more people are adapting, and there are a lot of dietary niches these days that people no longer hide. They talk quite openly about them, but meatless Thanksgiving, you can do a lot.

I have quite a few friends who are vegetarians who either just have delicious roasted autumn squashes and macaroni and cheese – always an appeasing side – and mashed potatoes, stuffing, of course. I mean, really, nobody should be thinking too much about calories at Thanksgiving because they’re just loaded up with all those carbs and, and you don’t need to have a meat. Some people have had Tofurky. Personally I’ve never had Tofurky, but I hear it’s a decent stand-in for people who want to reduce their meat consumption.

Collins: Ideally, it’s the most browsable meal of the year, and you could get by on sides if you wanted to pretty easily.

Nordin Beato: Yeah, or the bread basket, or dessert, I mean you have to save room for dessert.

Collins: We hinted at the sort of contentiousness even of accounts of the first Thanksgiving and what that meant, for relations between Indigenous people and colonists. That’s its own conversation.

Politics in general is a notoriously problematic table topic, even in less chaotic times than these, but we can leave that aside for a moment, too. What about good natured debates over regional fare? Is the Mason-Dixon line, for instance, also the pumpkin [or] sweet potato pie line?

Nordin Beato: Right. So, a couple years ago, I interviewed Maia Harrell, who grew up in Georgia, and she’s a self-described pie nerd. She had started working in a pie shop in high school, studied the history of Black women in pie making in graduate school, and then launched her own business, Lord of the Pies. And she told me something unexpected.

It happened when she would go to her farmer’s markets and set out slices of pumpkin pie and sweet potato pie. And she told me she had never – growing up as a Black Southern woman in a Black family – had never had pumpkin pie until she started working in a pie shop and found it quite bland. But anyway, so she would set out her two pieces of orange pie, and she said that a lot of her Black customers would come up and say to her, “Well, I know my Black card’s going to be revoked, but I prefer pumpkin over sweet potato pie.” That’s what she told me. And then she said even more surprising would be her white customers who would come up and they’d never even seen sweet potato pie.

And they would wonder, “Is it sweet? Is it savory?” And she had to explain what sweet potato pie was, and she said, without fail, those customers were also from the North.

So, historically, pumpkins don’t grow well in southern heat, but that’s not the only reason for the absence of pumpkin pie. Thanksgiving was originally perceived as a holiday forced on the South by the victorious North after the Civil War.

And, you know, you could say the arrival of pumpkin is just another pie in the face, and sweet potatoes are central to Black Southern cuisine. They have a long history, in the slave trade, the yam and [the] plantation cook. So there is a bit of a regional identity, that happens and, certainly some, regions will say, well, it’s only going to be Thanksgiving if you have collard greens, or include macaroni and cheese, or you have to have, Jell-o, you know, in the form of a turkey. So food fights – or good-natured food fights – are gonna depend on where you grew up and your own family’s history.

Collins: Right. I wanna zoom out a little, because when we had a preconversation about this at one point, I think you said that in some ways, regional and even national food is becoming so much less of a thing. I mean, what it looks like now is, I think you said, “not even fusion,” but “chaos.”

So you have people sort of clinging to their respective traditions, but you also have a lot of seep-through and crossover going on.

Nordin Beato: I wrote a story that’s looking at a cookbook trend that is sort of debunking the idea that there’s authentic cuisine, because so many people have multicultural backgrounds. It’s always been the case as people are moving around the world. That’s always been true, and exchanging cultural knowledge and information through food and dishes. And so any dish that you look at as kind of layers and layers of influence. It may have different names, but it might have similar techniques.

The pumpkin was discovered by Spanish conquerors, one theory goes, who took them home to show them to Queen Isabella, who started thinking this was part of the riches from the New World.

And also, when you had some of the English settlers going back and forth between England and the New World, they were bringing back pumpkins, which then became incorporated into European cooking, and the French started writing about “pompions” in cookery books as early as the 1600s. So pumpkins and turkeys are both indigenous to North America. That’s why when you look at some dishes in Mexico, they may remind you of something that was happening also in the English colonies up north. So, it is fascinating to follow the history of ingredients as they move around in the global trade.

Collins: That’s really interesting. What else is changing about Thanksgiving? Old gender roles always seem to be in play. Talk about the piece you wrote on how to run interference on some of that.

Nordin Beato: Right. So, well, let me just say that, I have to give a shoutout to Sarah Josepha Hale, who is credited with the campaign that convinced Abraham Lincoln to declare a national day of Thanksgiving, during the Civil War, and this idea of a turkey on the table, feeding the crowd, is really a New England tradition. As we pointed out, it’s sort of murky how it all got started and why that became part of the nation’s founding myth.

But Sarah Josepha Hale was a writer, a magazine publisher, and she had authored a novel in 1827 where she’s romanticizing the role of the turkey and describes it as “the roasted turkey took precedence on this occasion being placed at the head of the table; and well did it become its lordly station.”

So she is promoting this ideal over and over and over and over again, writing to lawmakers, and finally, Abraham Lincoln makes one day – it didn’t become a national holiday until the next century. But, what I want to say about all that is, this idea of a woman cooking the turkey, feeding her children and her husband and relatives, is such a core part of nation-building in the United States.

It’s amazing that it has persevered over the centuries and we certainly embrace it as turkey and its crowning place at the Thanksgiving table. But, OK, so what happens when nation-building starts to change, and men and women especially are filling different roles now in life? You don’t necessarily have a woman raising children. She also may have a career. She may not get married. She may not have children. There’s plenty more choices and reflections in society about what Americans are today. What I found, as a single woman marching through the decades, really, until I got married, is that I would arrive at a Thanksgiving meal and no two Thanksgivings ever looked alike for me because it depended on where I was.

Collins: Except the Detroit Lions were always on TV, right?

Nordin Beato: Right, except for the Detroit Lions. And in any case, when you arrive at the door, let’s say you’re a guest. Inevitably, you are going to have the women fussing around in the kitchen and the men are going to be parked in front of the TV watching football.

There are some crossovers happening there. Yes, there’ll be some men in the kitchen, there’ll be some women watching football, but that’s generally, it’s a very strange gender divide suddenly. That’s what you’re experiencing. At least that was my experience. And so I always didn’t really know where to go because, you know, I was in another woman’s house. I couldn’t necessarily take over in the kitchen. And, you know, I like football. I watch it, but I’m not, like, a hardcore football fan.

So, I wrote a column about trying to survive that dichotomy. And whether it’s attempting to bring a side that would either kind of be not so enthusiastically received because it didn’t fit into the menu, but what I learned from my mother-in-law, who also – and a lot of people do this – you have to navigate, “Where am I going to be? Am I going to be a guest? Am I going to be the quarterback in the kitchen?” Right? So she had found that since she was going with her daughter’s family to her, to the other mother-in-law, that she would prepare a Thanksgiving meal on Wednesday for her and her husband, and she said it would fill the house with these lovely smells, and then they would go have the meal, and then on Friday they could have leftovers.

So, being in the blended family that I am [in], I have two stepchildren who also are spending time with their mother and then also with us so I’ve kind of adopted this as a nouveau Thanksgiving tradition. And often Wednesdays is when we make the big meal and then on Fridays, we gather with our family and we actually have a really great tradition that started during the pandemic, and we all wrote down 10 things that we were grateful for and put them in a box and then we passed the box around the table and you pull one out and you read it, as long as it’s not your own gratitude.

Collins: Mm-hmm.

Nordin Beato: And I am so surprised, but the children – the kids, they’re older now – they want to do this every year. This has become our one tradition that we do in kind of a shifting world. Gratitude is really the best ingredient at the Thanksgiving table, I think.

Collins: Absolutely. This could have gone really political there for a second and I’m glad it didn’t. We got back to the romanticizing of the “lordly turkey” and where we’re going to be. I think it’s important to see past a lot of the conversation that’s happening and to get back to those really basic ingredients. So where are you going to be, and what are you making and bringing?

Nordin Beato: Well, true to tradition, no two Thanksgivings ever are alike, and I wasn’t sure if I was going to be a guest or if we were going to be hosting. I had invitations coming and going all the time.

But we’re going to do a Friendsgiving with another couple, and we’re going to host. And I’m kind of excited because I just received through a family member some flatware that my grandma used; I’m going to pull that out. But my husband’s going to be in charge of the turkey, I know that we’ll have fresh cranberry relish, we’ll have a tube of the other stuff.

But my favorite thing that I’ve learned to do in recent years is roasting Brussels sprouts with walnuts, and then you top it with maple syrup and dried figs, and then a little bit of Parmesan cheese. So that’s one thing I like to do, and that’s as far as I’ve gotten at the moment, but it’ll be good.

Collins: That sounds wonderful.

Thank you for being here. Thank you for all the work you do for The Christian Science Monitor, and have a great Thanksgiving.

Nordin Beato: Thanks, Clay. Happy Thanksgiving.

Collins: And special thanks to our listeners. Find links to the stories we discussed and others in our episode show notes at CSMonitor.com/WhyWeWroteThis. This episode was hosted by me, Clay Collins, and produced by Mackenzie Farkus. Jingnan Peng is also a producer on this show. Our sound engineers were Tim Malone and Alyssa Britton, with original music by Noel Flatt. Produced by The Christian Science Monitor. Copyright 2024.