Opinion: The history of Thanksgiving dinner is proof of American greatness - washingtonpost

I am on principle opposed to originality in Thanksgiving menus. Call me an arch-traditionalist, if you will — in fact, please do. And having just joined The Post this year, I couldn’t resist the opportunity to take a stroll through the paper’s archives to see what we’d said about Thanksgiving in the good old days.

What I discovered was a capsule history of the past 140 years of this most American holiday. In the 1897 announcement that the clerks of the federal government had been given a half-holiday on the day before Thanksgiving, I thought I saw the early stirrings of the American labor movement. I saw large social shifts, too, as the paper’s Thanksgiving coverage slowly adjusted its focus. In the early decades, food was generally mentioned only glancingly, except for fairly regular features tracking the price of turkeys. It was clear that even back then, food was at least as important to the holiday as religion, but The Post either assumed women didn’t read newspapers or thought they all knew how to cook. The Thanksgiving coverage tended toward sentimental fare such as sermons from local ministers, editorials urging charity toward the poor and moderately bad sentimental poetry. (“A Thanksgiving Hymn” in 1896, dedicated to President-elect William McKinley, began: “O Lord! we thank thee for this glorious land; / United, faithful, beautiful, and grand.”)

By 1920, America was less religious and less sentimental, and newspapers had discovered something that would become a driving force in many 20th-century industries: the buying power of women. The Post seized on that market opportunity, devoting more and more column inches to helping homemakers Do Thanksgiving Right. Recipes, which in the earliest years tended to be scant and distressingly hazy on the details, became numerous, and firmed up into something the modern reader would recognize. Explicit instructions were accompanied by standard measures instead of approximations such as “butter the size of a walnut.”

Many of these recipes tracked the economy and geopolitics. In 1889, in the wake of the Russian flu pandemic, The Post reported that “Russian cookery, Russian servants, Russian clothes, and Russian what-not” had a hold on “every one and everything in the United States.” In this spirit, we offered a recipe for Russian Cream, though I suspect this was “Russian” in the same sense that “french fries” are a particularly Gallic delicacy. When World War I, followed by the Immigration Act of 1924, halted the importation of cheap domestic servants, you can see menus getting simpler, a process that accelerated in the 1930s as food budgets shrank. - Read More

The history of Thanksgiving dinner is proof of American greatness