This text is part of the special book Plaisirs
As a rolled roast, as a breast drizzled with gravy or whole under a tanned, crispy skin: if you’re celebrating Thanksgiving, it’s a safe bet that a certain gurgling bird will take pride of place at your table.
In many families, the turkey leads the procession of Thanksgiving festivities, flanked by its faithful seasonal companions, the cranberry, squash and mashed potato. A pumpkin or pecan pie often closes the ball. But the menu that we now consider traditional is actually a rather recent adoption.
One feast, many functions
Harvest festivals, religious ceremonies, civic holidays, family celebrations: over the centuries, Thanksgiving has taken on a wide range of socio-cultural meanings. Each time, the menu served there reflects the context and availability at the time.
Native peoples of North America celebrated food abundance and seasonal transition long before the arrival of European settlers. Dances, feasts and prayers then served as a thank you for successful harvests or called for an abundant hunt that would make it possible to survive the winter. “The Iroquoians sowed corn, squash, beans, sunflower seeds. Then we gave thanks and celebrated the harvest in the fall. Moreover, during his visit to New England, Samuel de Champlain noticed that this same kind of celebration was organized in Algonquian-speaking populations, ”says historian Michel Lambert.
Upon their arrival on North American soil, the colonists in turn imported a tradition of graces, this time marked by Christian rituals and peasant traditions from the Old Continent. It is also on our shores that a first Thanksgiving with a monotheistic flavor would have been celebrated. Upon his arrival in the Arctic in 1578, English navigator Sir Martin Frobisher thanked God for having brought the crew to their destination. On the menu: corned beef, biscuits and pea puree.
And the turkey? So abundant in what is now Mexico and the southern United States, it did not yet exist at that time in our northern latitudes.
Over the following centuries, the settlers regularly organized feasts to celebrate abundant harvests, successful maritime expeditions or even military successes. Members of allied Aboriginal nations are sometimes invited.
But it was not until 1859 that Thanksgiving was officially celebrated in the Province of Canada, when the Protestant clergy adopted the custom imported from the United States by loyalists loyal to the British Crown. Twenty years later, the holiday becomes an annual civic holiday, the date of which is determined each year by Parliament. It is perhaps this Anglo-Saxon and Protestant heritage that explains its more timid adoption among French-speakers of Catholic origin.
A celebration rooted in customs
The current date of the celebrations, the second Monday of October, was not fixed until 1957. At the time, in La Belle Province, specifies Michel Lambert, “it was still not associated with the turkey , but rather to game, because it was hunting time. When I was a child, in Saguenay, we ate hare, partridge and moose tourtière. When it was plenty, Thanksgiving was a celebration of thanks for nature that would allow us to survive the winter. It was not a harvest festival, but rather a game festival. And it had no religious connotation.
Less celebrated among French-speaking Quebecers than among our English-speaking fellow citizens, the celebration as we know it today is directly inspired by traditions imported from south of the border. In the United States, nearly 45 million turkeys are slaughtered each November (their Thanksgiving is on the fourth Thursday of the month). In Canada, last year, 2.7 million whole turkeys were purchased in anticipation of the holiday, or 45% of annual sales in the country.
But, as Michel Lambert reminds us, the bulky bird only recently arrived on Quebec tables. “The story of the turkey comes from the Americans. The European tradition brought by the settlers is inherited from the Celtic tradition: we ate geese, wild or farmed, for the celebrations of the cold season, including Christmas. » Around the middle of the XXe century, breeders from Charlevoix and Lanaudière started large-scale turkey production to meet American demand. Their poultry mainly goes to the United States, on the occasion of their Thanksgiving. “But breeders ended up with surpluses and started reselling them in urban grocery stores in Quebec, which could offer them at a much better price than the famous traditional goose. Thus began the migration of turkeys to more northern dishes.
Despite a menu and a symbolic charge that has evolved over the centuries, Thanksgiving remains a time of sharing and giving thanks, an opportunity to celebrate with family and friends the abundance and richness of our pantry.
This special content was produced by the Special Publications team of the To have to, relating to marketing. The drafting of To have to did not take part.