Jane's Cranberry Cornbread

A cornbread that could have been served at the first Thanksgiving!

I swear I intended to have Jane represent the experience of settlers in Jamestown, but let's be honest: it's hard to ignore Plymouth as a source for early colonization and interactions between Europeans and Native communities, particularly when it comes to exchanging food. 

This corn bread is very different from the corn bread you've probably enjoyed alongside chili and fried chicken, but if you're looking for something that can pass as authentic for your Thanksgiving table, this really fits the bill. Read on to find out how to make this yourself!

A Peek into the Pantry Saves Thanksgiving!

Swooping in to go where few people want to tread!

Well, helped save Thanksgiving anyway. I don’t want to take all the credit! 

The semester is rapidly cycloning to a close (which is why this post is over a week delayed…), and amidst all our final projects and fretting about our research seminars, my cohort and I got to celebrate Thanksgiving. I’m lucky enough to live close enough to home to get to visit family for the holiday, so I packed everything up, threw Nanea in my backpack just in case there were any good photo opportunities for Instagram, and headed home anticipating a nice, unfortunately blog post free weekend. 

Little did I suspect that I was going to end up providing something a little bigger than the cookies I wanted to bake.

Jane's Indian Pudding

A colonial classic that's become a bit hard to find!

Happy Thanksgiving everyone! Although Thanksgiving isn't usually my favorite holiday, I have a special extra long post for you today, featuring the comeback of a traditional family holiday dish and a trip to none other than Plimoth Plantation in Plymouth, Massachusetts! Hosting the post today will be Jane, my custom character from the 17th century.

Again, Jane is actually from Jamestown in about 1614, so she predates the Pilgrims by six years and probably would never have even thought to visit New England. But since I live here, I've been having a lot of fun going to different historical sites that celebrate and educate people about the very early days of European colonization of North America. And while we've got a lot of different places to visit, one of the best is Plimoth Plantation in Plymouth, Massachusetts.

Plimoth Plantation is much like Colonial Williamsburg and other living history museums, with costumed interpreters and regular staff members happy to tell you all about the early days of the Pilgrims and Wampanoag. I hadn't been since I was very small, and honestly all I really remember of it was speaking to a Pilgrim about... something in their garden, and being miserably, miserably hot. Needless to say, I was excited to see it from an adult perspective.

Of course, part of this trip was also to do a little bit of research into Indian pudding, a Thanksgiving staple of my mom's family that has, for whatever reason, fallen out of favor. But more on that in a little bit! First, we're taking a trip back in time...

Papa's Mashed Turnips with Molly

A family favorite for well over half a century!

I'll readily admit - and have been honest with you guys in the past! - that I'm not a very enthusiastic eater of vegetables. I'll eat them, but they're never something I really go out of my way to try, and I do often fall prey to assuming I won't like a vegetable without having tried it.

Take turnips, for example. Turnips have been a staple at my family's Thanksgiving table pretty much as long as I can remember thanks to my grandfather (who we call Papa, thus the title), but I'm pretty sure I'd never actually tried turnips before starting this blog and they wound up as an ingredient in a soup I did. Until then, my experience with this particular root vegetable was my mom promising I'd like them if I gave them a chance and the scene in Meet Molly where she complains that the turnips she's being forced to eat from their Victory Garden taste like old socks until her mother adds some butter and sugar to them for her. Needless to say, I was never that enthusiastic about giving them a shot, but now that I've discovered they aren't anything close to bad, I knew what I wanted to feature for Thanksgiving this year.

After all, it's been a family favorite for over seventy years!

Addy's Turkey Stuffing

Just in case you feel like being a little more adventurous than Stove Top this year...

When it comes to Thanksgiving, I don't think I'm alone in being more into the side dishes than I am into the main meal itself. I don't have anything against turkey, don't get me wrong! But I'm more likely to try and run off with the entire bowl of mashed potatoes than I am to start a fight over what pieces of turkey I get.

Certain other family members feel the same way about stuffing, and while I'm not sure this is going to replace Stove Top for some of them, I have to admit, this authentic Civil War era recipe for turkey stuffing was pretty tops, if I do say so myself. It won my heart for being easy to make, tasty, and flexible enough to go with just about any entree if you make it on a random day to accompany whatever else is being made for dinner.

What can I say? Thanksgiving is still a couple days away, we're not making two turkeys this week!

Kit's Curried Pumpkin Soup

Happy Thanksgiving!

This year, Thanksgiving is going to be a little different for me. Like a lot of other unfortunate people in America, I'm falling prey to the new practice of "Black Friday actually starts on Thursday", and so I'm missing out on dinner, hanging out with my family, and generally having a stress free holiday. Honestly, I'm pretty bummed out about it.

But I didn't want the holiday to pass by without doing something for it for the blog, and since I didn't have a ton of time to devote to cooking today, this recipe I borrowed from the same best friend who brought you the brisket we made for Rosh Hashanah and the chicken soup we made just because turned out to be the perfect solution to getting some Thanksgiving in my day, even if I'm missing out on turkey and stuffing.