The Pilgrims made seven times more graves than huts. No Americans have been more impoverished than these who, nevertheless, set aside a day of thanksgiving. H.U. Westermayer. (This statement abounds on Internet quote and blog sites, but those who cite this passage acknowledge that none of them has found any biographical information about this person who uttered such a keen observance.)
The Pilgrims celebrated the first Thanksgiving, not out of gratitude for abundance as we do, but rather out of appreciation for life itself. Survival was their sole quest during their first year in the new world. The few who withstood such hardships mourned their great loss, but also gave thanks for another day to persevere.
Although no records exist of the foods they shared that first Thanksgiving, historians have pieced together, from journals and logs, what such a meal would contain - turkey and other fowl, deer, shellfish, fish, squash, pumpkin, onions, carrots, maize, berries and nuts. While food preservation is as old as mankind himself, with those in frozen lands storing their catch on the ice surrounding them, and those in the tropics using the sun to dry the harvested foods, the Pilgrims probably dined on mostly fresh kill and whatever they gleaned from field and forest.
I contemplate about the conditions that the Pilgrims experienced as Bob and I harvest and preserve crab, possibly one of the shellfish that the pilgrims feasted on. Since October, it’s been a busy time for us. I feel like a farmer's wife preserving the bounty of the garden. Over the years, I’ve occasionally canned a few fruits - mostly pears from the bountiful tree in the yard of my in-laws and jelly from the wild grapes on vines that covered one whole corner of our yard on Magnolia Street. As a child, I helped my mother on Saturday nights in the summer peel and slice the peaches that my dad knew would not last until Monday in his grocery store. Mother added sugar to the slices, froze them and served them partially thawed over ice cream. But until we moved to the coast, I had never spent days preserving foods as those with access to gardens do.
These days, my husband catches the crab, cooks and cleans them. With claws to crack and pick, he joins me on the back porch as I pick the bodies. One afternoon, I picked 45 bodies in less than two hours. Before I mix together one of our three favorite recipes, I go through all the meat twice to remove those illusive membranes that are wont to cling to this white, white meat. With deviled crab, I sterilize the shells by reboiling them before stuffing them with my late mother-in-law’s favorite recipe.
To date, we have put in the freezer, 88 crab cakes, 52 deviled crab and nine containers of crab meat in milk for bisque. We were really glad when we learned the trick of packing crab meat in milk instead of water. Needless to say, it's so good to have these dishes in the freezer whenever we have company or I want to put together a quick supper. I always make three recipes of crab bisque for Wednesday night before Thanksgiving. Now that so many of our grandchildren are grown (or think they are), crab bisque has become one of their favorite meals.
And, one granddaughter thinks any leftover bisque makes a good breakfast, too. She reminds me of her mother, at age 12, when we spent Thanksgiving holidays in Port Cartier, Canada. Our daughter was invited to spend the night with a bilingual French family who had a daughter the same age. The next morning, the mother served homemade black bean soup for breakfast. For the longest time, the child thought that to be the perfect breakfast food.
Of course as most October/November-issues of women’s magazines testify, food is a major part of any Thanksgiving Day. While tradition dictates the menus in many homes, others choose to dine out where someone else has undertaken the preparation. And always, there are the lonely souls with no one to celebrate this truly American holiday. We tend to forget them.
But giving thanks is an action verb, requiring more than lip service. When we truly offer thanks to God and to those who have touched our lives in positive ways, we must not only count our blessings, we, like the Pilgrims, should seek ways to share them with family, friends and strangers we do not know.
Perhaps, Edward Sandford Martin, 19th century essayist and poet, one of the founders of The Harvard Lampoon and first literary editor of Life Magazine, says it best. “Thanksgiving Day comes, by statute, once a year; to the honest man it comes as frequently as the heart of gratitude will allow.”
2014
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