Feast Your Eyes On What 19th Century New Yorkers Ate For Thanksgiving

NEW YORK CITY — New Yorkers used to gobble up Thanksgiving Day turtle. Yes, you read that right.

A collection of 19th century menus maintained by the New York Public Library provides a mouth-watering — and sometimes queasily surprising — glimpse at how New Yorkers celebrated Thanksgiving in the past.

For home cooks looking for fresh ideas for their Thanksgiving spreads, the menus could provide some culinary inspiration. After all, doesn't "wild turkey, stuffed with Italian chestnuts" sound divine?

But for every turkey dish that wouldn't be out of place in a 2022 Thanksgiving spread, some 19th century specialties have perhaps rightfully fallen out of food fashion.

Take turtle soup — the dish once so fashionable it nearly drove diamondback terrapins to extinction. Thanksgiving menus from the 1800s are stuffed with turtle soup.

Other menu items such as "haunch of antelope" may seem odd for a contemporary Thanksgiving, but could conceivably be added back to the fold by some adventurous gourmand.

So, join Patch on a culinary voyage back to Thanksgivings more than 100 years ago in New York. You just might find some inspiration, or at least be thankful that turtles no longer are on the menu.

More seafood followed, or whatever turtle — "Diamond-Back Terrapin" — can be considered. Salmon with béarnaise sauce rounded out the seafood options.

Diners then could feast on a "saddle of English mutton," "ribs of prime beef" and "Philadelphia turkey stuffed with chestnuts." The menu also included "grilled sweetbreads," which are organ meats from the thymus or pancreas.

Pumpkin pie was on the dessert menu, alongside mince pie and vanilla pudding soufflé.

Three years before the Windsor Hotel burned in a fire that claimed 86 lives, the hotel served up a Thanksgiving meal that likely will seem strange to New Yorkers now.

An 1896 menu details a meal with (of course) clear green turtle soup, escalopes of striped bass, sweetbreads, "saddle of Southdown mutton" with currant jelly and "fresh mushrooms on toast."

And there was no pumpkin pie to be found. Diners instead had the choice of plum pudding, apple pie, "champagne jelly" and other assorted desserts.

The 1899 Thanksgiving meal at the Broadway Central Hotel is another smorgasbord of foods that are either head-scratchers or enticing, or perhaps both.

The spread included "cream of artichokes" soup, "smoked tongue and spinach," broiled anchovies on toast, "home-made hog's head cheese" and "Philadelphia capon" in celery sauce. (A capon, for the curious, is a rooster that has been castrated and considered more flavorful than chicken and turkey, according to The Spruce Eats.)

Again, the menu also offers "stewed terrapin in cases, Baltimore style."

"Vermont turkey" with chestnut stuffing and cranberry sauce is perhaps the most familiar Thanksgiving dish on the menu, aside from the pumpkin pie.

Meat lovers likely would love the 1896 Thanksgiving meal served at the Butterfield Hotel in Utica.

The menu offers English hare, "patties of game," quail on toast, green wing teal (a duck), mallard duck, wild goose, broiled wild pigeon, roast partridge, saddle of Nebraska venison" with grape jelly and "haunch of antelope" served with apple jelly and asparagus on toast.

The game-heavy offering is capped with "wild turkey, stuffed with Italian chestnuts."

Readers might be wondering when Thanksgiving meals started to seem a bit more familiar.

A Hotel Duane menu from 1941 is a mix of both old and new Thanksgiving.

The "roast Vermont turkey" with raisin dressing and cranberry jelly wouldn't be so out of place today, although the mashed yellow turnips in lieu of potatoes might not go over well.

The sweetbreads sauté hearkens back to past menus, while the candied sweet potatoes seems downright Food Network.

One item — the "kuroki salad" — defied an intrepid Patch reporter's attempts to Google it. The dish, whatever it was, appears to have spiked in popularity between 1911 and 1921 and disappeared from menus altogether since, according to New York Public Library's "What's On The Menu?" tool.

The Waldorf Hotel's 1956 Thanksgiving menu takes us back into familiar territory, starting with Blue Point Oysters.

While not necessarily what people think of as a "Thanksgiving food," oysters appeared on 1896's menu The Windsor and kept returning.

The Waldorf's menu does have some other odd offerings, such as "old fashioned cream of pumpkin Carolina" and "New England oxtail soup."

But other foods sound very much like Thanksgiving: roast Vermont turkey with chestnut stuffing, giblet gravy, Cape Cod cranberries, Mousseline potato, Brussels sprouts and candied sweet potato.

Even the "Iowa succotash," while not exactly common nowadays, hearkens back to Native American cuisine.

What the menus show is that the "traditional" Thanksgiving meal for New Yorkers is a more recent development. Don't be afraid to try something new — or old.