We Eat British Turkeys

Of all the foods that the New World gave to the Old World as part of what we call The Colombian Exchange—maize, the potato and tomato, cacao, many squashes and beans, to name but a few—none were so readily accepted by Europe and lands beyond as that ur-American fowl, the turkey, about which we think thankfully at least once a year.

After Columbus, many foods made their way East; however, their landing was marred by fear and superstition, allocation to the privileged only, and sometimes mere ignorance of how to cook and eat them. For example, it took more than 100 years after 1492 for chocolate (cacao) to move from a drink served only at the Court of Spain into Austria and Eastern Europe, where the common folk gave it life as a confection.

True, turkey was served—by the Native Americans, as a gift to the newcomers—on what scholars believe was the second (not the initial) Thanksgiving Day feast, which didn’t take place until the 1620s. At that time, however, two flocks of turkeys pecked out their living on the North American continent, a domesticated one in both Mexico and our modern Southwest, the other, a wild one in what’s now New England.

The wild ones, though, didn’t taste great. It’s probable that the first Thanksgiving turkeys were from the long-established Mexican and Southwestern United States flocks. But how did those turkeys get to the feast tables of the Massachusetts Pilgrims?

From England.

Because the turkey, brought back to Spain by Columbus, was from Honduras, where he landed on his fourth voyage, it was of the strain and progeny of the original turkey flocks from Mexico and the (now) Southwestern United States. Because it was so readily accepted, propagated, and cooked with delight by the English and other Europeans, when it was brought (back) to the New World by the English in the late 1580s and into the early 1600s, it was that turkey to make the trip.