At the first Thanksgiving dinner, eaten by the Wampanoag Indians and the Pilgrims in 1621, the menu was rather different from what's served today. For one thing, the pumpkin was roasted, not made into a pie. And there definitely wasn't a side dish of mashed potatoes.
In fact, the first hundred Thanksgivings were spud-free, since potatoes weren't grown in North America until 1719, when Scotch-Irish settlers began planting them in New Hampshire. Mashed potatoes were an even later invention. The first recorded recipe for the dish appeared in 1747, in Hannah Glasse's splendidly titled “The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy, Which Far Exceeds Any Thing of the Kind yet Published.”
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