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Thanksgiving Week on the Ridge

By Carol Flynn

Thanksgiving has been considered an official U.S. holiday since it was declared by President Abraham Lincoln in 1863. Of course, taking time to give thanks for one’s blessings, and holding harvest feasts, long predated the Pilgrims’ events in the “New World” in the 1600s, but the U.S. assigned those concepts to a specific day each year.

For the next few days, we’ll look at some trivia that connects the Ridge to Thanksgiving week.

Anyone still deciding what to serve for Thanksgiving dinner need look no further than the Chicago Tribune food columns of fifty and more years ago. The food editor, Mary Meade, was none other than Beverly’s own Ruth Ellen Loverien Church, from 1937 until her retirement in 1974.

“Mary Meade” was the generic name the Tribune used for its woman food writers for years, because it was a common understanding, not only in the newspaper industry but in the workforce in general, that most women would not stay long in professional jobs but would marry and make home-keeping and raising families their careers.

Ruth was the fourth Mary Meade, and she broke this mold. She combined marriage and motherhood with a professional journalism career. She earned a degree in food and nutrition journalism from Iowa State University, and moved to Chicago in 1936, where she took the job with the Tribune.

In 1942, Ruth married Freeman Sylvester Church, a third-generation Beverly resident. They made their home in North Beverly and had two children.

Ruth eventually oversaw the largest food staff of any newspaper in the country, including five home economists. She established a kitchen in the Tribune Tower for recipe testing and food photography. She wrote at least twelve cookbooks and pamphlets, with authorship under her own name. She pioneered “specialty” cookbooks, such as one devoted to pancakes, waffles, omelets, and other breakfast foods. She also started the first wine column in a newspaper.

Some of the recipes she suggested for Thanksgiving through the years appear here.

Tomorrow we’ll look at the Ridge’s contribution to National Game and Puzzle Week, and on Friday, we’ll return to “Mary Meade” to look at some of her recipes for left-over turkey.

Thanksgiving Week – Part 2

By Carol Flynn

Thanksgiving week is also National Game and Puzzle Week. The timing is intentional, as this holiday kicks off the next six weeks of friends and family gathering to socialize and celebrate. And after the winter holidays come a few months of cold weather perfect for indoor activities.

Puzzles and games are a time-honored way to entertain, engage, and bring together people of all ages. Tabletop boardgames fell out of favor when video games became popular, but the COVID pandemic brought a resurgence of interest in tabletop board games as people looked for fun activities while they were confined to home.

Forty years ago, the Beverly Hills Junior Woman’s Club came out with a boardgame for this community. “The Game of Beverly Hills/Morgan Park” was a fund raiser, likely for nursing school scholarships. The game, based on Monopoly, was a customized product from a company in Michigan. You can read all about it in this week’s Beverly Review at: https://www.beverlyreview.net/news/community_news/article_ce5223bc-6a82-11ed-89bb-8f4a686346d3.html

People bought the game as a keepsake. Janice Bruno Griffin of Morgan Park recently reminded RHS of the game when she contacted an RHS representative about the copy she had. Copies of this game are likely to be found in homes throughout the community.

It’s interesting to note which businesses on the game board are still around today and which are only part of memory now. The game is a snapshot in time, both recording history and becoming a part of history.

Happy Thanksgiving from the Ridge Historical Society

Part 3 of Thanksgiving week on the Ridge

November is also Native American Heritage Month.

Let’s take a moment to recognize and reflect on the Indigenous People who populated this land for 20,000 years before the European settlers came here.

The Land Acknowledgement Statement for the Blue Island Ridge is:

“We acknowledge that we are located on the ancestral homelands of the Potawatomi tribe, a member of the Council of Three Fires. Other tribes that lived in the Blue Island Ridge area in the 18th – 19th century include the Miami and the Illinois Confederation. Many additional tribes including the Fox, Sauk, Winnebago, Menominee, Meskwaki, and Kickapoo lived nearby and accessed the area for trading and portage routes.”

This week began a new series in the Beverly Review on the history of Native Americans on the Ridge. The first installment can be found at: https://www.beverlyreview.net/news/community_news/article_00f2f326-6a80-11ed-bda0-67d5ab1d8cc4.html

There would not have been a first Thanksgiving feast in 1621 for the Pilgrims from the Mayflower if the Wampanoag tribe hadn’t taught them how to secure food in their “New World.”

The Wampanoag showed the Pilgrims how to fish and hunt in the area, and how to cultivate the native food plants and gather fruit. Some items we take for granted now were not around 400 years ago. For starters, there were no sweet or white potatoes. Potatoes did not come up to North America from South America for another 100 years.

Also, the Pilgrims had not yet planted wheat fields so there were no pies and no bread. The sugar rations and almost all the food they brought with them had quickly been depleted on the journey over, so there were no jellies or sweet desserts to be made.

The Pilgrims had brought no large livestock with them on the Mayflower, only chickens, and a few pigs and goats, so there were no dairy products except maybe goats’ milk. Dairy cows would come later.

Plus, no ovens had been constructed yet for baking, so all cooking was done over open fires.

An early journal has the colonists going fowl hunting for this harvest feast. Duck, geese, swans, and turkeys were all plentiful. The Wampanoag guests brought an offering of five deer to the celebration, so venison, probably some roasted and some served in a hearty stew, was without doubt on the menu.

Historians also believe that seafood was a major component of the feast, this being New England by the coast. Mussels, lobster, bass, clams, and oysters were readily available. The first Thanksgiving was very heavy on animal protein.

The vegetables cultivated at the time included corn, pumpkins, squash, turnips, garlic, onions, beans, carrots, lettuce, spinach and cabbage. The pumpkins would have been roasted. Fruits available for gathering included blueberries, plums, grapes and gooseberries. Cranberries were there but it was another 50 years before there were reports of boiling them with sugar to make a jelly.

Flint corn, the multi-colored Indian corn, was plentiful at the first harvest. Most likely, the corn was turned into cornmeal, which was boiled and pounded into a thick corn mush or porridge that was occasionally sweetened with molasses, which was made from sugar cane, which came from the Caribbean. This was called Indian pudding, a take on the English fondness for “hasty pudding.”

Herbs, and nuts like chestnuts, walnuts and beechnuts, were plentiful from the forests. Along with onion, these would have been used for stuffing the fowl and flavoring dishes.

The celebration itself was a three-day event, with feasting, ball games, singing and dancing. Assumedly, grace was said before meals, but it was several years later that an official prayer service was added to the annual harvest celebration to give thanks for rain after a two-month drought.

Here is a vintage postcard recognizing the role of Native Americans in the first Thanksgiving.

Thanksgiving Week on the Ridge- Part 4

By Carol Flynn

Thanksgiving has come and gone for another year.

As we promised a few days ago, here are some recipes for left-over turkey.

They were published in the Chicago Tribune during the years the position of Mary Meade, the food editor, was held by Beverly resident Ruth Ellen Church.

These are from 1972 and they show the culinary whims of fifty years ago.