🦃 Colonial America · 1796

The First Printed Turkey and Cranberry Sauce Pairing — 1796

Roast Turkey with Cranberry Sauce is a dish from Amelia Simmons's American Cookery (1796), the first known printed pairing of the two.

This exact pairing — roast turkey served with cranberry sauce — first appears in print in American Cookery by Amelia Simmons, published in 1796 and generally recognized as the first cookbook written by an American author. It's worth separating this from the actual 1621 Plymouth harvest feast that inspired the modern holiday: contemporary accounts of that meal point to venison, wildfowl, and seafood, and don't single out turkey the way the modern Thanksgiving story does. Simmons's book leaned heavily on native American ingredients — corn, squash, pumpkin, cranberries — that British cookbooks of the same era simply didn't call for, since those crops weren't part of English cooking. So the specific plate people picture at Thanksgiving is less a direct 1621 tradition and more a print-era invention that happened to stick, four generations after the meal it's supposedly commemorating.

Primary source: American Cookery by Amelia Simmons