When Did Turkey Become a Thanksgiving Tradition?

Video Transcript

"Hello, I'm Matt Cail and on behalf of Expert Village, I'm here today to tell you all about the history of Thanksgiving. While the Pilgrims had a good party in the fall of 1621, it wasn't a Thanksgiving dinner like we think of nowadays. Some key things were missing. First off, you think of like the good old pumpkin pie that you have at grandma's. Well, no, there was no pumpkin pie back then. They may have actually had some boiled pumpkin but no pumpkin pie was on the dinner table. Another thing missing were mashed potatoes. Those good, creamy mashed potatoes with gravy over the top. No, potatoes are a crop indigenous to the new world and the Pilgrims did know about them but at the time the knowledge was not common on exactly how you could use potatoes and some people even thought potatoes were poisonous so we didn't want those on the dinner table, no way no how. And lastly, the centerpiece of every Thanksgiving dinner, turkey, good, yummy, succulent turkey. Probably not on the dinner table at this first Thanksgiving as we come to think of it nowadays. Probably not. The Governor, Mr. Bradford, did ask people to go out fowling as he called it to get turkey. The problem was, is that the Pilgrims referred to turkey as a lot of different types of birds and more than likely it was either geese or duck that they had on the dinner table and not the turkeys we eat nowadays."