Turkey may anchor the American Thanksgiving table, but what surrounds it depends heavily on where a family lives and where its recipes came from. From sauerkraut in Baltimore to pasteles in Puerto Rico, regional and family traditions reshape the holiday meal in ways that rarely show up in the classic magazine spread.
Wikipedia’s entry on Thanksgiving dinner documents a range of these regional and ethnic variations. Here are 8 of them, and the dishes behind each.
1. Sauerkraut in Baltimore
According to Wikipedia’s Thanksgiving dinner entry, sauerkraut is sometimes served in the Mid-Atlantic, especially by Baltimoreans of German and Eastern European descent. The tangy fermented cabbage lands next to the turkey and stuffing as a nod to the heritage of families who settled in the city.
German food traditions show up elsewhere in the country, too, from the Hill Country towns where visitors seek out the best places to eat in Fredericksburg, Texas to holiday baking, and a roundup of Christmas breads families bake around the world includes several with European roots.
2. Lefse in the Upper Midwest and Pacific Northwest
Midwesterners such as Minnesotans, along with Pacific Northwest residents of Norwegian or Scandinavian descent, set the Thanksgiving table with lefse, the Wikipedia entry notes. Lefse is a soft Norwegian flatbread made from riced potatoes and flour with butter and milk or cream, cooked on a large flat griddle with long wooden turning sticks and grooved rolling pins.
Norwegian immigrants brought it to the United States, where potato lefse became the most familiar version, and families often make it together at Christmas and Thanksgiving. The most common way to eat it is spread with butter and sugar and rolled up, though cinnamon, jelly and lingonberries are also popular, and lefse is a traditional companion to lutefisk. Starbuck, Minnesota, claims the world’s largest lefse, made in 1983.
3. Lasagna on Italian-American Tables
Italian Americans often include antipasti, pasta and lasagna dishes alongside the turkey, according to Wikipedia. Food customs travel with families, and a list of laws and rules about food in other countries shows how much eating customs vary from one place to the next.
For a wider view of the customs that set the United States apart, a roundup of American traditions that confuse the rest of the world offers more examples from outside the kitchen.
4. Pasteles in Puerto Rico
In Puerto Rico, the Thanksgiving meal is completed with arroz con gandules, which is rice with pigeon peas, plus pasteles and potato salad, and the turkey is often stuffed with mofongo, Wikipedia says. Puerto Rican pasteles are made from a dough of mostly green bananas with green plantain, yautía and pumpkin, tinted with annatto oil and filled with pork or chicken, olives, raisins and chickpeas. Each one is wrapped in plantain leaf, tied in pairs and boiled.
The mofongo-stuffed bird has a name of its own. NBC News reported that Manuel Iguina’s family makes pavochón, a turkey seasoned like roast pork and stuffed with mofongo. “Thanksgiving is American, but the Latin influence is everywhere on the table,” Iguina told NBC News.
5. Roast Pork With Cuban-American Turkey
Cuban Americans traditionally serve the turkey alongside a small roasted pork and include white rice with black beans or kidney beans, according to Wikipedia’s entry. That gives the table two centerpieces instead of one. Plenty of older holiday habits have faded over the decades, as a look at once-common Thanksgiving traditions from the 1950s shows, but family dishes like these tend to stay.
6. Mole for Mexican-American Families
Mexican Americans may serve their turkey with mole and roasted corn, Wikipedia notes. Britannica describes mole as a cooked chili sauce that defines central and southern Mexican cuisine, built from dried chiles, dried fruit, nuts and spices, with some classic recipes using up to 50 ingredients. Mole poblano, a specialty of Puebla and Mexico City, adds bitter chocolate and pumpkin seeds.
NBC News also profiled Claudia Meléndez Salinas, who serves tamales with mole from Puebla at Thanksgiving, and Cynthia Orosco Wright, whose Mexican-American family turned the holiday spread into tacos, mashed potatoes included, and served tamales alongside.
7. Cornbread Dressing in the South
Stuffing is where regional lines show most clearly. The most common version mixes white bread cubes with sage, onion, celery and parsley. Southerners generally make their dressing from cornbread, while cooks elsewhere may use wheat, rye or sourdough bread as the base, according to Wikipedia. Add-ins such as oysters, apples, chestnuts, raisins, sausage or the turkey’s giblets also reflect regional and historic differences.
8. Macaroni and Cheese and Collard Greens
Many African American and Southern families serve baked macaroni and cheese and collard greens, along with chitterlings and sweet potato pie, the Wikipedia entry says. Those dishes share the table with the turkey and dressing rather than replacing them.
The list does not stop at 8. Wikipedia also notes that Dungeness crab is a common alternate main dish on parts of the West Coast, that venison often takes the center of the table in the Northeast during deer season, and that in Hawaii the holiday ties into Makahiki, a traditional period from November to January whose feasts featured roast pork, fish, sweet potatoes, nuts and other vegetables.
Part of the reason the menu varies so widely is how it gets made. It is common for family members and friends from different households to bring dishes to a joint meal, the Wikipedia entry notes, so each branch of a family can add its own specialty. Together, these traditions show that a single holiday can produce very different plates. The turkey may be shared, but the sauerkraut, lefse, pasteles and mole beside it say where each family has been.
This article was produced with AI assistance and edited for accuracy against the sources linked above.
Image: Clancy Ratliff from St. Paul, MN, U.S. – CC BY-SA 2.0/Wikimedia Commons
