Pilgrims' progress.

When most Americans think of Thanksgiving past, they imagine the autumn of 1621 at Plymouth Plantation in Massachusetts where for 3 days in late September, the Pilgrims shared their harvest with the Wampanoag Indians. But this probably wasn't the first thanksgiving in the New World. "Pilgrims ... were religious, so they were always giving thanks ... when they had food to eat or on other occasions when things went well," says Darra Goldstein, food historian and editor of Gastronomica magazine.

The Pilgrims' thanksgiving meals reflected foods flint were local and accessible. Although seafood seems odd at a modern thanksgiving meal, the pilgrims--close to the water--ate cod, herring, bluefish, lobsters and clams. "But probably what they were eating most of all was eel," says Goldstein. "Most people in [modern] America feel a real aversion to them, but eels were everywhere."

Even turkey, which has come to represent Thanksgiving, was served less frequently than ducks and geese. "Wild turkeys ... don't have a lot of meat on their bones," explains Goldstein. "Geese and ducks have a lot of fat, and that makes them more succulent." The idea of a turkey as Thanksgiving's centerpiece came from Governor William Bradford's memoir Of Plimoth Plantation, in which he recalled the settlers catching a "store of wild Turkies."

As for the Pilgrims' most famous guests, their significance may loom larger ill the imagination than in historical fact. "It's true that the Wampanoag Indians were very helpful to the Pilgrims and introduced them to corn and wild turkey," says Goldstein. "They likely shared in some of the thanksgiving ...