Thanksgiving

Looking for inspiration for your holiday table? Look no further than the Folger’s adaptations of recipes in our collection—from early modern stuffing to sweet potato pudding to pumpkin pie, even mini-turkey pies!

Follow the turkey on its fascinating journey from America to Europe to the Mughal and Ottoman empires, through early modern trade networks.

Learn about the early modern precursor to turducken. Think a huge turkey pie with duck but no chicken. Then, make your own mini turkey pies using this adapted recipe for modern cooks from the Folger collection.

Lavish dinners—and the cookbooks and instruction manuals for how to execute them—were popular during the Renaissance, and they emphasized the art of food, in addition to—and at times, over—its taste. Peacocks were thus an ideal banquet food because their colorful…

An anonymous early modern cookbook in the Folger collection has two turkey and stuffing recipes: one made with oysters, and one without, reflecting the foods available at the original Thanksgiving meals. We adapt the oyster-less recipe for modern kitchens.

Want to add variety to your Thanksgiving? Try this modernized 17th-century recipe from the Folger collection for savory biscuits, fluffy and sweet and savory and firm and spiced all at the same time, recorded around 1672 in Constance Hall’s recipe book.

Folger researchers recently uncovered a very early European potato recipe in our archives in a collection kept by the Grenville family from c. 1640-1750. “To make a potato puding” shows the growing popularity of this New World food in England.

The Folger is home to the largest collection of early modern western European recipe books in the United States, and a team of Folger researchers recently uncovered a very early European potato recipe in our archives. This recipe, “to make a…