Clues in the Cranberries : Thanksgiving Trimmings May Seem Straightforward, but to Food Sleuth Ian Dengler, They Give Away Your Origins

“Everybody in America thinks that his or her family eats a typical Thanksgiving dinner,” says Ian Dengler, a historian who has spent the last 10 years studying what Americans sit down to eat on the fourth Thursday in November. “The truth is,” he says, “that I have never encountered two identical family meals anywhere in America, and I never expect to.”

Dengler, an academic who lives in Berkeley, studies the differences. “People hide what they really think is themselves underneath the turkey,” he says.

“I told him what my family ate,” one of Dengler’s subjects says, “and he not only told me that I was from Boston but also that my mother’s family had been in this country only one generation and that my father felt he had married beneath him. He could tell this from one dish we kids didn’t eat!”

“Simple,” Dengler says, looking at his notes. “I knew that the woman was from New England because of all the mashed boiled vegetables, the lack of spice and the terms she used, like ‘squash pie.’ But I knew that the mother wasn’t really assimilated because, her daughter said, she sometimes forgot to make gravy. With Thanksgiving, nothing is supposed to be sometimes ; it’s supposed to be a tradition. And I knew that there was trouble between the parents because she mentioned that there was cranberry ice, served in fancy glasses, that nobody ate. I guessed it was a holdover from the father’s past--and clearly resented.”

The California Thanksgiving is particularly interesting, Dengler says, because new immigrant groups keep it constantly changing. The fascination with gourmet cooking has made changes, too. The meals pictured were described to Dengler during the course of research in Los Angeles several years ago.

“When someone says, ‘It’s just the ordinary turkey,’ I know right away that I’m dealing with the great Middle West,” Dengler says. “But California is filled with popular and working-class epicures who love their food. It makes for very interesting interviews.”

FOOD STYLIST: OLIVIA ERSCHEN

PRODUCED BY ROBIN TUCKER