Our festive guest of honour

OUR CHRISTMAS traditions often have rather strange and obscure origins.

Why, for example, do so many people cook a turkey? And why, for that matter, is the bird called a turkey? I had a vague notion that I knew the answers to these questions but when I began to research in detail, I discovered it was a bit more complicated than I first thought.

There is a wild African bird called the Helmeted Guineafowl that bears some resemblance to a turkey, though it’s a good bit smaller and not closely related. These were imported into Europe in the late Middle Ages.

Trade from Africa to Europe at the time was controlled by the Ottoman Empire, in particular by traders from the Near East called ‘Turkey merchants’ because of their country of origin.

When the first Helmeted Guinea- fowl arrived in the English-speaking world, they were therefore called ‘Turkey-cocks’.

True turkeys are birds from the Americas. There are two species, the North American Wild Turkey from the south eastern United States and the Central American Ocellated Turkey.

When the first European settlers saw the wild American birds they called them turkeys because they thought they looked like guinea- fowl. The whole thing was complicated by their vague notions of geography — the early explorers and settlers believed they were in fact in Asia when they reached what is now the West Indies.

If you try and trace the first turkeys to cross the Atlantic to Europe, the trail becomes rather faint. It seems the Mayans, and probably the Aztecs, domesticated the Ocellated Turkey in Central America and that birds were brought back to Spain, and possibly North Africa, by the Conquistadors. There is a Spanish reference from 1523.

But most experts agree that European domestic turkeys are not descended from the Ocellated Turkey but from the North American Wild Turkey. And these seem to have crossed the Atlantic into Northern Europe at around the same time, probably in the early 1530s. Some claim that by 1575, turkey was the normal Christmas dinner among the wealthy in England, others say the practice was not common place until the 1700s.

This information destroyed another of my assumptions. I thought that turkey feasts started in America with Thanksgiving Day celebrations. Thanksgiving Day is the fourth Thursday in November. I thought that the custom had crossed the Atlantic and been transferred to the nearest big feast day, Christmas, and that the squash and sweetcorn had been changed to European winter vegetables like sprouts and parsnips to give us our traditional dinner.

But the very first time Americans sat down to a traditional Thanksgiving dinner was on the Berkeley Plantation in Virginia Colony in 1619. The Pilgrim Fathers in New England followed shortly afterwards in the early 1620s.

The origin of the feast is usually said to be derived from Christian Harvest Festivals that thank God for the bounty he has bestowed. ]

In fact, Thanksgiving Day also has its origins in a pagan Native American feast. The early settlers got on well with the ‘Indians’ and were quite dependent on them.

However, English squires are said to have invented the traditional Christmas dinner more than 40 years before the first Thanksgiving dinner.

One strange postscript to the story of turkeys — they are almost unique among higher animals because they are capable of asexual reproduction. A hen turkey can, in the absence of a cock, lay a self-fertilised egg that normally hatches into a small and rather stunted male turkey. This peculiar ability is obviously very useful to wild birds but has caused a lot of problems for the breeders of domestic turkeys.

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