Always Serve a Thanksgiving Salad (2024)

FAQs

Should salad be served at Thanksgiving? ›

You want people to come to Thanksgiving dinner for the creamy mashed potatoes and buttery stuffing, but stay for the salad.

Yes, people eat salad at Thanksgiving. About 28% of tables in the US will serve a green salad, 9% a Caesar salad. The people most likely to have a salad are on the West Coast and are spread all over the political spectrum. Visit Insider's homepage for more great stories.

Why do the only eat salad for Thanksgiving? They only eat salad for Thanksgiving because their grandmother fell off the porch and was injured, so their uncle cooked.

By adding your dressing to the bowl first, you avoid a soggy salad, as the majority of toppings won't touch the liquid. It also makes tossing the salad and fully coating your greens easy, as you simply have to toss a few times to ensure an even distribution of dressing.

Southern-cuisine expert and cookbook author Diana Rattray has created more than 5,000 recipes and articles in her 20 years as a food writer. The classic Thanksgiving dinner includes old-time favorites that never change: turkey, gravy, stuffing, potatoes, veggies, and pie.

A Thanksgiving meal is not complete until the turkey is on the table. Turkeys are large, so we get it, but they don't have to be intimidating. The one thing you can do to ensure a bird that stays juicy and doesn't dry out in the oven: Brine it! Get the Dry Brine Turkey recipe.

Turkey is the most common main dish of a Thanksgiving dinner, to the point that Thanksgiving is sometimes colloquially called "Turkey Day." Alexander Hamilton proclaimed that "no citizen of the United States should refrain from turkey on Thanksgiving Day", and Benjamin Franklin had high regard for the wild turkey as an ...

Turkey. Some would say a turkey is the most important food item at the table. A turkey is the center of the traditional Thanksgiving dinner.

It is also worth noting what was not present at the first Thanksgiving feast. There were no cloudlike heaps of mashed potatoes, since white potatoes had not yet crossed over from South America. There was no gravy either, since the colonists didn't yet have mills to produce flour.

Serving salad after the main course of a meal is an older tradition in Italy, and nowadays it is usually observed at large and formal dinners rather than during everyday meals. Eating a salad after a meal can help digestion, while eating one before a meal may help discourage overeating.

What did the Pilgrims really eat for Thanksgiving? ›

So, to the question “What did the Pilgrims eat for Thanksgiving,” the answer is both surprising and expected. Turkey (probably), venison, seafood, and all of the vegetables that they had planted and harvested that year—onions, carrots, beans, spinach, lettuce, and other greens.

Lettuce actually needs a good amount of airflow, in addition to a bit of moisture (but not too much!), in order to stay crisp. That's why restaurants store their lettuce in special perforated bins that allow for air circulation while it's held in the fridge.

Traditionally, the salad follows the main course, but restaurants generally serve salad first, and people have come to believe that the practices of restaurants represent the best service. They fail to realize that restaurants have to work around problems that private households do not.

So, you might not think to add Thanksgiving appetizers to your holiday menu. But, here's the reason why you should: everyone shows up to Thanksgiving dinner feeling hungry! And if you want to hold your guests over until the main event, these easy small bites are the way to go.