Thanksgiving: An American Meal

When Thanksgiving spread around the country in the mid-19th century, it was in the hope that holiday good feelings would heal the rift between North and South. So, the Thanksgiving menu had a certain amount of can't-we-all-get-together culinary nationalism to it.

The main course? Turkey, of course, an indigenous American bird. It was well known that Native Americans and the early colonists used cranberries to flavor meat, so you clearly had to serve cranberry sauce with your bird. Americans were renowned pie-eaters in the 19th century, making pie the obvious dessert, and the supreme holiday pie was filled with pumpkin -- another native American ingredient.

As a result, roast turkey, cranberry sauce and pumpkin pie became emphatically tied to the holiday. Until the cranberry juice craze and the discovery that turkey breast is low in fat, quite a few Americans never ate turkey or anything cranberry between one Thanksgiving and the next, and that's probably still true of pumpkin pie.