American Thanksgiving as a republican meal, a repudiation of the high cuisine of monarchies
For a national meal, Thanksgiving is really rather extraordinary. It is not a public event, it is not showy, it is a home-cooked meal of ordinary ingredients shared by the whole family. Ten years ago, the Boston Globe published a piece I wrote about this. What follows is a slightly edited version.
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“On Thursday, almost nine out of ten Americans will gather around the table for Thanksgiving dinner–some version of the traditional family-style meal of roast turkey, stuffing, cranberry sauce, and pie. And one again the accepted (but regularly challenged wisdom) about how the Thanksgiving meal took root and what it means will be rolled out.
The story is as much a tradition as the meal itself. Today as we doubt the hoary schoolroom version of an unbroken tradition going back to a founding feast shared by Native Americans and Pilgrims, as we think about families excluded as well as included, it is easy to overlook what an unprecedented national meal this is.
Food–what we eat and why we eat it–is rarely as simple as the tales we tell about it. Thanksgiving as we know it today–a holiday that brings family and nation together over roast turkey (or now perhaps tofurkey) took shape a 160 years ago. It was built on a political principle. It is a deliberate, small-r republican contrast to the haute cuisines that for millennia had been served at events of state.
Food embodies ideas as well as customs, and our standard Thanksgiving draws on a long tradition of anti-monarchical republican political and culinary thought. These ideas had deep European roots in France, England, And the Dutch Republic, and even before that among Roman republicans and the Church fathers.
Political philosophers and cookbook authors in these anti-monarchical traditions had long railed against the appetizers, complex sauces, sweets, and expensive imported ingredients that made high cuisine so showy. Indulging in these created an appetite for expensive luxuries that, it was widely believed, ruined the individual, the household, and the nation. Although these may appear far fetched claims, they were not when food was was the largest item in a family’s budget, and when kings could spend significant parts of their budget on feasting to impress, conditions that prevailed into the nineteenth century and beyond.
In the United States, advocates for a thrifty meal in the family setting that was the foundation of the republic put this Thanksgiving meal on the way to becoming a national celebration embracing all citizens. Starting in the 1840s, Sarah Josepha Hale, a novelist and editor of Godey’s Lady’s Book, the nation’s most widely circulated women’s magazine, campaigned in print and in letters to politicians to extend Thanksgiving, a holiday already celebrated in New England, to the country as a whole. She finally persuaded Abraham Lincoln to declare a national holiday in 1863. It was, in Lincoln’s words, intended to restore “peace, harmony, tranquility and union” to a nation torn by the Civil War.
At that time, the ruling classes in much of the world dined on French high cuisine, widely regarded as a mark of a civilized, progresssive nation. From Britain to Russia, from Mexico to Japan, and in the United States as well, diners dressed in formal attire sat at tables set with expensive crystal, china, and silver. Servants passed a sequence of richly sauced meats, elaborate molded desserts, and hothouse fruits that neither they, nor the professional cooks who prepared them, could enjoy. These meals exemplified everything the the aristocratic, republican tradition was arguing agains.
To Hale and others like her, a feast based on such high cuisine, far from being the hallmark of a modern nation, would only perpetuate the monarchic traditions so firmly repudiated by “our Great Republic.” To make good on its political ideas, the new state had to find a middle way–a meal that lay somewhere between the lavish extravagance of Old World aristocratic feasts and the scanty fare of the common people.
The will to bridge this gap had long been at work in American political thought, and had long been expressed through food. In the 1760s, as a patriotic protest the Daughters of Liberty had organized boycotts of expensive, imported tea, offering recipes for local herbal alternatives. In 1796, a few years after crowds in Paris had protested the king’s failure to ensure their daily bread, Amelia Simmons, the author of the first American cookbook, ‘American Cookery’ (1796), promised her reader pies and cakes “adapted to this country and all grades of life.” And Lydia Maria Child’s “Frugal Housewife” (1829) which went through 32 editions in the succeeding 25 years, preached the values of the simple home-cooked meal as truly republican.
In her magazine, Sarah Hale published recipes for roast turkey and pumpkin pie, and popularized homecomings for the holiday through sentimental poems, images, and stories of “traditional” Thanksgivings. In the Union states, at least, her campaign finally found a receptive audience, accustomed through long tradition to the notion that household meals of national ingredients contributed to the flourishing of the greater American family. Although the wealthy continued to dine French-style on other occasions, and although the South was not to accept it until after Reconstruction, Thanksgiving was on its way to being the celebration we recognize.
Turkey, by the mid nineteenth century, becoming affordable and readily available, allowed the whole family generous servings of meat. Gravy was a democratized version of the richer sauces of high cuisine that used expensive wine and stock, as a relish of native cranberries is an accessible version of a long tradition of sweet sour fruit sauces that stretch back through medieval Europe to Islam. Everyday vegetables such as onions and sweet potato were a far cry from the asparagus and peas of high cuisine, as sturdy pies of pumpkin and apple were from fancy molded desserts.
Neither turkey nor pie nor any of the other dishes that appeared on the Thanksgiving table was completely new. All of them had appeared at other times and in other contexts. The dishes we call traditional are creative reworkings of of culinary elements from different, often even unrecognized cultures.
These reworkings created a feast that in its accessibility to all citizens was uniquely American. Even children, traditionally barred from aristocratic tables, were included in the meal to be nourished physically by ample, wholesome food and mentally by absorbing civic principles from the adults’ manners and conversation.
Over the years, as Thanksgiving dinner has spread to all regions, all fairths, and successive waves of Immigrants within the United States, it’s been easy to forget what a radical achievement it was, and what a specific expression of American ideas. When we look across the table on Thursday, we see a meal both more politically American and more philosophical than many of us give it credit for. What could be more worthy of thanks.”
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In revising this piece, I reflected on how American Presidents found it hard to decide on the right kind of meal for visiting foreign dignitaries. Should it be the starchy formal state dinner that has been the norm in diplomatic circles or should it be something more consonant with American values, like the hot dogs that FDR and Eleanor Roosevelt served King George VI of England and his wife, Elizabeth in 1939? And since then, debate has continued to flourish over both menus and settings.
And to remember how the Carters took this one step further. If a dinner given by the President was symbolically the meal of the greater American family, then it too should include children. So nine-year old Amy Carter, book in hand to read when conversation became too much, joined the guests at a number of state dinners. http://archive..org/blog/presidential-daughters-attending-state-dinners-part-3/
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Here’s a link to the original article (may be paywalled). https://www.bostonglobe.com/ideas/2013/11/24/thanksgiving-how-eat-american-politics/dr3jHLnGnsS7Cj9i9X44jP/story.html
Here’s a later post of mine pointing out that Thanksgiving remains one of the most affordable of feasts. https://www.rachellaudan.com/2016/11/price-politics-and-the-thanksgiving-meal.html
Great article. Speaking of the tradition of sweet sour fruit sauces what fruits would have been typical? Were people serving roast poultry with lingonberry sauce for example? Would stuffing have been involved? Where does that tradition come from?
I don’t know about lingonberry, Paul. The french served turkey with raspberries in the seventeenth century. The English used red currants (not from grapes, Ribes family) and rowan berries. I don’t know the detailed history of stuffing but putting stuff in holes is very old. Often it was meat but bread or cornbread was much more economical.
A belated thank you for this!