Why do we eat turkey on Thanksgiving if there are better birds? (2024)

Have you ever tried to rub a raw turkey with softened butter at 5 a.m.?

There I was, coating a bird with butter in preparation for a Seattle Times Thanksgiving taste test (which publishes Thursday). It was impossible. Either the butter wasn’t soft enough or the turkey was still too cold, because the butter was just gliding over that skin, refusing to adhere.

I considered giving up. That turkey was also going to be draped with a cheesecloth soaked with butter and wine and basted every 30 minutes in the oven. Did I need more butter? Probably not. But I persevered. Spoiler alert: All the butter in the world couldn’t have saved that turkey, as it came out the driest of the three birds we taste-tested.

The buttering and basting and early morning alarm had me thinking: Why are we trying so hard for turkey?

The short answer is tradition. The annual Thanksgiving parade and turkey pardons. The Norman Rockwell painting. The famed connection between pilgrims, turkey and the alleged “First Thanksgiving” in the 1600s, described in a 1621 letter by New England politician Edward Winslow as a feast celebrating the harvest with the Native Wampanoag people.

But the lore of Puritans and Indigenous people joining together joyously for roast turkey has been debunked. (That First Thanksgiving isn’t even totally agreed-upon.) Food historian Andrew F. Smith wrote an opus on the topic, titled “The Turkey: An American Story,” where he shows the path from wild turkeys to the domesticated fowl we see today, the celebratory centerpiece of American Thanksgiving dinners.

Like many myths, the legend of the turkey in America boils down to misunderstandings and mistranslations. Essentially, the word “thanksgiving” used to be a general term for celebration, in this case a successful harvest. And turkey was often used interchangeably with guinea fowl. The feast of 1621 that Winslow wrote about had nothing to do with community or gratitude.

The national, familial, turkey-centric holiday we know today originates from another New Englander.

In the mid-19th century, writer and editor Sarah Josepha Hale (author of “Mary Had a Little Lamb”) decided America needed a new national holiday. She spent decades campaigning for the creation of Thanksgiving — she wrote letters to Congress and state governors and published editorials in her magazine, Godey’s Lady’s Book, arguing that Thanksgiving “could pull the United States together even as sectional differences, economic self-interest and political bickering pulled the nation apart,” Smith writes.

Finally, amid the Civil War in 1863, Hale got her wish: President Abraham Lincoln declared Thanksgiving a national holiday.

The turkey comes in because the big birds were plentiful in New England, often distributed to soldiers in the Army. By the end of the century, Smith writes, the typical Thanksgiving meal had a turkey at the center of the feast due to the bird’s low price.

“By the turn of the 20^th century, a Thanksgiving dinner that featured turkey had become enshrined in cookery magazines and cookbooks,” he writes, “which published menus for proper Thanksgiving meals and offered recipes to help the uninitiated prepare traditional dishes.”

Throw in some drawings of Uncle Sam carving turkeys at celebratory tables, a letter from Benjamin Franklin in which he touts the noble qualities of the bird (in opposition to the bald eagle), and the fact that turkeys hatch in the spring, making them ready for slaughter by fall — and you’ve got Turkey Day. It’s a holiday about a bird, patriotism, family, football and gathering.

As my inbox filled up with promises of perfect turkey recipes and news of hotlines with turkey experts ready for thousands of calls, I thought it strange that we’re so bent on cooking this giant, somewhat tasteless bird. The pressure to create a perfect 20-pound bird on a Thursday in November feels greater than whatever the centerpiece is for any other holiday.

I think we keep the turkey around because of tradition. But hundreds of years later, it’s not a holiday about peace or pilgrims, poets or patriots. It’s about that feeling you get when you’re surrounded by your loved ones at the table, groaning with the weight of various carbohydrates and roasted, mashed or marshmallow-topped vegetables.

It probably doesn’t happen enough, but one day a year we can come together around this bird. And while I won’t be rubbing butter onto a cold turkey at 5 a.m. for the holiday, I’m sure there’ll be a turkey on my table.