Thread by @Akil_N_Awan

I dread eating Turkey on #Christmas, so in an attempt to understand why we eat this overstuffed dry monstrosity, here's a short thread on the History of 🦃 and eating Turkey on #Xmas

Turkeys are originally from N America, and mitochondrial DNA of domesticated turkey has shown that they were first bred and domesticated in ancient Mexico by the pre-Aztec people around 800 BC. Alongside dogs, the turkey was the among the first animals domesticated there

The Puebloan people of the southwestern US also domesticated turkeys ~ 200 BC, but these were initially raised for feathers, which were used in rituals & ceremonies, as well as to make feather robes or blankets, but that strain vanished sometime after the arrival of the Spanish

So the turkey was actually domesticated independently at two different times by two different peoples in North America.

In pre-Colombian mesoamerican societies, Turkeys were more than a food source. They were culturally significant as sacrifices in ritual practices.
Archaeological evidence shows Turkey bones were rarely found in domestic refuse in Mesoamerica & most turkey remains found had not

been eaten; some were found buried in temples and human graves, perhaps as companions for the afterlife. This fits with what we know about the iconography of the period, where we see turkeys depicted as gods and appearing as symbols in the calendar.

The Ocellated Turkey was viewed by the Maya as vessels of the gods, used in religious rites & honored accordingly,becoming coveted symbols of power & prestige.
One Maya ruler even chose a royal epithet with Turkey in it: Chak Ak'ach Yuhk “Great Male Turkey, Shaker of Cities”.

The Aztecs considered them to have great cultural significance, using them as sacrifices in ritual practices.
The Aztec name for turkey was wueh-xōlō-tl (guajolote in Spanish), a word still used today alongside the term pavo [incense burner handle as Tezcatlipoca, the turkey claw

In Aztec mythology, Chalchiuhtotolin, the Jewelled Fowl or Jade Turkey was the shapeshifted animal form (nahual) of Tezcatlipoca-a central deity in Aztec religion. In his fearsome Turkey form, he terrorized villages, bringing disease & sickness (from the Codex Borgia c.1300)

Moctezuma, the last independent ruler of the Aztec empire, also ate Turkey at splendid feasts. Bernal Diáz, the 16thC Spanish conquistador wrote that a typical royal meal included hundreds of specially made dishes which included turkey, served on finely decorated Cholula pottery.

The Spanish brought turkeys back to Europe with them, where they spread rapidly, even reaching as far as Germany before the end of the 16th Century.
This 1581 Gerrman cookbook from Frankfurt describes over 20 recipes for “Indian chicken”

Turkeys were first introduced to Britain in 1526, but it took a while for them to get to dining tables.
The London Poulter's Guild records the birds that were for sale in London's slaughter markets in 1521 as swans, cranes, bustards, herons, bitterns, pheasants, curlews, mallards

teals, plovers, pigeons, larks, chicken, geese, snipes, and partridges but NO TURKEY.
By 1557, it lists "Turkey Chickens, cocks" which is also a clue to where we get the name from.
The word 'turkey' comes from Turkish merchants in commercial hub of Constantinople in the 16th C

who sold wild fowl from Guinea in West Africa to European markets, leading the English to refer to the bird as “turkey cock” or “turkey coq” (coq is French for rooster) & eventually “turkey” for short. When British settlers arrived in Massachusetts, they applied the same term to

wild fowl in the New World even though they were a different species.
We don't know if Henry VIII was the 1st to eat turkey in England. It's likely most tend to think this due to the 'Mandela effect' where they mis-remember his gloves for a turkey leg in this Holbein painting

Nevertheless, turkey quickly found a place at banquets in Elizabethan England. A 16th C poem describes a Christmas feast “Beefe, mutton, and porke, shred pies of the best, pig, veal, goose and capon, and turkey well drest”. One of the earliest written record of turkeys is

attributed to Archbishop Thomas Cramner in 1541 who wanted to curb gluttony in the higher clergy by only allowing one bird to be served per dish which due to their size negated the need to have more than one.
By 1573, farmer Thomas Tusser noted that turkeys had started being

served at English Christmas dinners, but that goose & capon - a castrated rooster - remained the roast of choice at the festive season for some considerable time.
In 1615 turkey also first appeared as an English household meat in Gervase Markham’s book, The English Housewife.

This spectacular, feather-topped turkey pie is by Dutch painter Pieter Claesz from 1627.
The London Poulters’ Guild records also noted that in the 1680s "it became customary to give the company clerk a turkey at Christmas" as an annual gift, costing the company 6 shillings.

Nevertheless, turkey remained quite exclusive.
James Woodforde, an English clergyman who wrote The Diary of a Country Parson described his Christmas dinner in 1773 at New College, Oxford as consisting of: “Two fine codds boiled with fryed souls [soles] around them and

oyster sauce, a fine sirloin of beef roasted, some peas soup and an orange pudding for the first course, for the second we had a lease of wild ducks roasted, a fork of lamb and salad and mince pies”
But It's really not until the Victorian era that turkeys began to be popularised.

Although were still very expensive compared to alternatives. Famously, in Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol, published in 1843, Scrooge sends Bob Cratchit a massive turkey to replace his goose [illus. Charles Edmund Brock 1905]. Even during Queen Victoria’s reign, turkey was not

the most popular Christmas roast. But changes in production, transportation & refrigeration technologies all helped make turkey more affordable and less exclusive. It certainly helped that Turkeys no longer had to be ‘driven’ by foot from Norfolk all the way to London for the

Christmas trade, wearing little leather boots to protect their feet on the arduous journey. Even in the1930s, a turkey would cost the average person a week’s wages to buy, but this changed with refrigeration, particulary after WWII.
Today in the UK, we eat ~10 million turkeys

every year for Christmas. We share this tradition with the US, Canada, Australia & New Zealand but surprisingly, pretty much everyone else rarely eats Turkey at Christmas.
One of my favourite invented traditions is the Japanese who eat KFC for Christmas!
Whatever you eat, enjoy!