Before we start on its history, check out the different types of fruit spreads: not just jam, jelly, and preserves, but chutney, conserve, curd, fruit butter, and marmalade.

The history of jam and preserves begins with the history of food preservation. After all, it was only a few centuries ago that technology was created to store foods over long periods.
 
 
INTRODUCTION: THE HISTORY OF PRESERVING FOOD

By the Paleolithic period 2.6 million years ago*—also called the Stone Age, and marked by the earliest known use of stone tools—people were preserving food. They had already realized that if they could save food they collected in times of plenty, it would make survival easier during times of scarcity. They could also avoid having to constantly roam greater and greater distances to look for fresh food.

The earliest natural methods of preserving food were:

 
Here’s more on the preservation of foods from The National Center For Home Food Preservation..

The first steps toward modern preservation methods were spurred by Napoleon Bonaparte in 1785. He needed to send food with his armies that wouldn’t spoil but preserve the food they needed.

Thus canning came to be, enabling fruits and vegetables in all their forms to be preserved until the next year’s bounty, followed somewhat later by mason jars for home cooks.

Here’s the history of canning and the history of mason jars.
 
 
THE HISTORY OF JAM, JELLY & PRESERVES STARTS WITH THE HISTORY OF SUGAR

Credit cooks in the Middle East as the first to make jam and preserves, though historians can’t pinpoint the date. It was before the 11th century; we just don’t know how much before.

It may have been the 4th century or earlier. Recipes for fruit preserves (using honey) can be found in the oldest cookbook to survive from antiquity: De Re Coquinaria (“The Art of Cooking”).

The book is believed to be published in the late fourth or early fifth century, and is attributed to “Marcus Gavius Apicius.”*

________________

*The Paleolithic is considered to have ended around 10,000 B.C.E.

†This is considered a pseudonym of the author(s), honoring a famous epicure by that name who lived some four centuries earlier.
 
 
Sugar Travels From The Pacific To The Middle Eaast

While honey could be used to sweeten jams and preserves, it was sugar that became the sweetener of preference.

The people of New Guinea in the South Pacific domesticated sugar cane some 10,000 years ago. It was later planted in India, where growers in the Ganges Delta became adept at refining the sweet cane juice into crystallized sugar.

Darius The Great (549-485 B.C.E.) brought sugar cane back to Persia following his invasion of India. Persia became a prolific sugar-producing region, and Middle Easterners had lots of it. Not so, the countries to the north.

Jump to the 11th century and the Crusades.

Amazingly, sugar was only discovered by Western Europeans in the 11th Century C.E., as a result of the Crusades (1095 to 1291). Crusaders returning home talked of how pleasant the “new spice” was. The first recorded mention of sugar in England was in 1099 [source].

But it wasn’t cheap.

As an example, a record from 1319 C.E. cites sugar available in London at “two shillings a pound.” That’s about $50 per pound in today’s money.

So jellies, preserves, and other sugar-based foods would have been restricted to royalty and the wealthy.

Marmalade is believed to have been created in 1561 by the physician to Mary, Queen of Scots. He crushed oranges and sugar as a remedy for her seasickness.

For more pleasant uses, royal sweet tooths kept royal kitchen staff busy.

The magnificent feasts of Louis XIV always ended with marmalades and jellies served in silver dishes, eaten with silver spoons (so don’t feel guilty about dipping into the jar with your stainless steel flatware).

Not that Louis and his acquaintances watched their pennies, but sugar wasn’t cheap. It didn’t trickle down to the bourgeoisie (or the British middle classes

As an example, we have a record from 1319 C.E. citing sugar available in London at “two shillings a pound.” That’s about $50 per pound in today’s money.

Unless money knew no boundaries, sugar was a luxury.

Finally, with the enormous expansion of industry and opportunity starting with the Industrial Revolution of the 19th century, most people could afford sugar for their coffee and tea.
 
 
Why Jelly Arrived Later

Jelly came centuries later. It required gelatin to set it. (In modern times, pectin derived from fruits is used.)

Gelatin (also spelled gelatine) had been made since ancient times by boiling animal and fish bones and connective tissues. It was a laborious process, undertaken largely by the kitchens of the wealthy, which had the staff resources to undertake it.‡

Aspic, made from meat or fish stock, appears in Egyptian wall paintings. It seems to have dropped from sight, sometime after the fall of Ancient Egypt (30 B.C.E.) and the sack of Rome by the Visigoths in 410 C.E., which led to more sacking by other peoples and the Dark Ages.

No one had enough to eat of the basics, much less laboriously crafted fare.

[1] Jelly is clear. How about this pear jelly recipe (photo © Things We Make).

[2] Marmalade has a clear base, but is different from jelly in that it includes pieces of the fruit. Try this orange marmalade recipe (photo © The Suburban Soapbox).

[3] Jam is made from crushed fruit. For some tropical pizzazz, make this pineapple-passionfruit jam recipe (photo © The Flexitarian).

[4] Preserves differ from jam, in that the fruit is cooked whole (in the case of small fruit like berries) and is recognizable its syrup. In cherry season, make this cherry preserves recipe (photo © Cilantropist).

[5] In a curd, the cooked fruit is puréed and combined with butter into a creamy spread. Try this lemon curd recipe (photo © Saving Dessert).

[6] In an interesting twist, products called fruit butter have no butter or other dairy. This slow cooker apple butter recipe is a great starter recipe for fruit butter (photo © Dessert For Two). See many more types of fruit spreads in our Jam & Jelly Glossary.

Powdered gelatin was invented in 1682 by Denis Papin, a French physicist, mathematician, and inventor. It made the production of jelly so much easier and enabled the development of other foods that required stiffening.

And that’s why jelly came much later.

Interestingly, Papin’s Wikipedia page doesn’t mention gelatin—just his scientific inventions. No doubt, inventing the forerunner of the steam engine tops jelling food.

Here’s a longer history of gelatin.

By the way:

The word jelly comes from the French word gelée, meaning to congeal or gel.

The word jam appears in 18th-century English from the word meaning to press tightly.

The word marmalade appeared in the late 15th century, derived from the Portuguese word for quince jam, marmelada.

________________

‡The primary use for gelatin was as glue.

[8] Pancakes with strawberry jam (photo © Calm Belly Kitchen).

[9] Raspberry jam is the filling for liner cookies and tortes (photo © American Heritage Cooking).

Arab trade brought sugar to southern Europe through Spain, and the first Spanish explorers carried it to the New World.

It is recorded that in 1493, Christopher Columbus brought sugar cane plants to grow in the West Indies. The crop thrived, and the region became Europe’s main source of sugar, beginning around 1500.

Sugar was the main crop produced on plantations throughout the Caribbean beginning in the 18th century, leading to a boom in the Caribbean economies through the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries.

These plantations produced 80% to 90% of the sugar consumed in Western Europe. A by-product of refining sugar was molasses, given to the slaves for sweetening their food. One clever fellow discovered that fermenting the molasses made a delicious drink: rum.

As global trading grew, the price of sugar became affordable in the 19th century to middle and lower-income families in Europe and the U.S.

But sugar was a precious necessity. In 1888, the American folk song Drill, Ye Tarriers, Drill, has railroad workers lamenting, “Oh it’s work all day for the sugar in your tay” [tea].

And that meant sugar for your jams and jellies, candies, and desserts, too.
 
 
JAM IN AMERICA

From European royalty to Americans to American pioneers, to energizing troops during battle, to making life sweeter for children and invalids, and just about everyone else:

Jams and preserves came to the U.S. with colonists.

As a teenager in 1792, John Chapman, better known as Johnny Appleseed, a nurseryman (the title in those days), moved from western Pennsylvania to Ohio. In 1805 began his apprenticeship as an orchardist with an apple grower.

He noted the U.S. surge westward in the early 1800s and decided on his life’s journey: planting apple trees throughout the Midwest, so incoming pioneers could make cider and jam.

One of those pioneers was Jerome Monroe Smucker of Orrville, Ohio, a farmer who opened a cider mill in 1897 using fruit that Johnny Appleseed had planted. Within a few years, he was also making apple butter, in a copper kettle over a wood stove.

Jerome and his wife Ella ladled the apple butter into stoneware crocks, and Ella then sold it from her horse-drawn wagon to other housewives in the county. Today their venture is worth more than $15 billion.

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[2] You can also celebrate with peanut butter and jelly thumbprint cookies. Here’s the recipe (photo © Chef de Home).

[3] Don’t want waffles? Here’s a special way to celebrate with a sandwich (photo © Jif).

April 2nd is National Peanut Butter & Jelly Sandwich Day. It’s easy to whip up a sandwich; but more special to make a waffle sandwich.

We’re making waffle sandwiches, inspired by a recipe from Cait’s Plate. (National Waffle Day is August 24th—another chance to make the recipe below.)

We used Peanut Butter & Co.’s Smooth Operator, but you can use any flavor of any brand you like.

Peanut Butter & Co.’s other peanut butter flavors include The Bee’s Knees (honey), Cinnamon Raisin Swirl, Crunch Time, Dark Chocolate Dreams, The Heat Is On, Mighty Maple, Old Fashioned Crunchy, Old Fashioned Smooth, and White Chocolate Wonderful.

We used Smooth Operator and Smucker’s Fruit & Honey Spread in Strawberry. We made our own waffles from scratch. Frozen just doesn’t do it for us.

But if you use store-bought waffles, you’ll be ready to eat in five minutes.

> The history of peanut butter and jelly is below.

> The history of peanut butter.

> The history of jelly.

> The history of waffles.
 
 
RECIPE: PEANUT BUTTER & JELLY WAFFLES

Ingredients For 1 Serving

 
Preparation

1. MAKE the waffles. Spread with peanut butter and jelly, add the optional bananas and stack into a “sandwich.”
 
 
P.B. & J. IN THE U.S.A.

Last year, Smucker’s conducted a study on America’s favorite comfort foods. The winner was PB&J.

Comforting America through thick and thin, rich and poor, crunchy and creamy, the survey revealed that PB&J is beloved across all generations.

Jelled, crushed fruits have been around since ancient times. It took a couple of additional millennia for peanut butter to appear.

Peanut butter was developed in 1880 by a St. Louis doctor, to provide a protein food for people who had lost their chewing teeth. In those days, peanut butter was scooped out of barrels by the corner grocer.

Thanks to the proselytizing of Dr. John Harvey Kellogg, who owned a sanitarium in Battle Creek, Michigan, peanut butter became popular at health spas (sanitariums).

It was lapped up by the rich and famous who populated the spas, and the recipe returned home with them. Peanut butter was the fad food of the elite. It moved into the mainstream only after the elite market was saturated.

According to Peanuts: The Illustrious History of the Goober Pea by Andrew F. Smith:

Peanut butter became a trend (in the old days, a “fad”). According to sources in The Story Behind The Dish, peanut butter was originally paired [on crackers or tea sandwiches] with celery, cheese, nasturtium, pimento and watercress.

Here’s more on the history of peanut butter.

In a Good Housekeeping article published in May 1896, a recipe “urged homemakers to use a meat grinder to make peanut butter and spread the result on bread.” The following month, the culinary magazine Table Talk published a “peanut butter sandwich recipe.”
 
 
The History Of The Peanut Butter & Jelly Sandwich

According to The Story Behind The Dish: Classic American Foods by Mark McWilliams, the first published recipe for peanut butter and jelly on bread was from Julia Davis Chandler in 1901.

The recipe also appeared in the 1901 Boston Cooking-School Magazine of Culinary Science and Domestic Economics, edited by Fanny Farmer.

It helped that peanut butter became popular around the time that sandwiches were becoming common lunch food in the U.S. According to McWilliams, they really “burst onto the scene in 1920s.”

Check out the history of peanut butter and the history of jelly…

For the rest of PB&J sandwich, here are the history of bread, and the history of waffles.
 
 

But eat we do! Smithfield sent THE NIBBLE its latest flavor, Smokehouse Reserve Baked Apple Spiced Spiral Sliced Ham (the flavor refers to the glaze packets that are included.

Weighing in at more than five pounds, we served it last night at our monthly editorial dinner.

The ham was so juicy, so easy to prepare (precooked, it needed only 90 minutes of heating) that two more team members are buying spiral-sliced Smithfield hams for Easter dinner.

Each pound of spiral sliced ham contains approximately 4 servings, so our group of nine went home with leftovers, planning how to use them today.

Smokehouse Reserve Baked Apple Spiced Spiral Sliced Ham is a limited edition that joins Smithfield’s lineup of spiral sliced hams:

• Brown Sugar Spiral Sliced Ham, regular or preglazed
• Crunchy Glaze Spiral Sliced Ham
• Crunchy Glaze Quarter Boneless Spiral Sliced Ham
• Hickory Smoked Spiral Sliced Ham, regular or preglazed
• Pecan Praline Spiral Slcied Ham
• Quarter Bone-In Hickory Smoked Spiral Ham
• Quarter Boneless Hickory Smoked Spiral Ham
• Salted Caramel Spiral Sliced Smoked Ham

 
April 15th is National Spiral Ham Day.

> Why we eat ham on Easter, below.

> The history of ham.

> The different cuts of ham.

> The different types of ham: a photo glossary.

> Ham glaze recipes.

> Make a Rainbow Salad with leftover ham (below).
 
 
WHY BUY A SPIRAL SLICED HAM?

Spiral sliced hams were created because bone-in hams are traditionally hard to slice. The slices are created with a machine at the plant or butcher, by slicing a bone-in ham in one continuous spiral. The technique leaves the ham on the bone in its original shape, but easy to remove and serve.

A friend with a ham habit recommends a spiral sliced ham with the bone in. He likes the greater juiciness of a bone-in ham, the ham bone for further culinary use (see the next section), and the convenience of the spiral slices.

Our mother, a purist, preferred the uneven slices and carved her own ham. So it becomes a question of aesthetics and time (and skill) to carve. If a large group of hungry people wants their ham ASAP, go for the spiral.

A spiral ham also looks prettier standing up, with the slices fanned.

Smithfield hams are sold fully cooked and can be heated or eaten cold or room temperature. In fact, we spent so much time last night with the courses leading up to the ham, that we ended up with room temperature ham after our baking ham had cooled. It was just as yummy.

Spiral ham trivia: The spiral-slicing machine was patented in 1952 by Harry J. Hoenselaar, who went on to founded HoneyBaked Ham a few years later. His creation eliminated the frustration of navigating the ham bone and producing even slices.

Here’s more on the spiral-slicing machine.
 
 
WAYS TO USE THE HAM BONE

[2] Smithfield spiral sliced ham, packaged (photos #1 and #2 © Smithfield Foods).

[3] On an Easter table (photo © Today I Found Out).

[4] Baked spiral ham with honey-apricot glaze (photo © National Pork Board).

Except for the those marked boneless, all hams include a bone, which can be used to add smoky ham flavor to other dishes. If you don’t want to use it, ask a friend: Few good cooks will turn down a ham bone!

You can freeze a ham bone; you can substitute a ham bone for any recipe that calls for a ham hock.

• Freeze: If you don’t have much time to think about it, wrap the bone tightly in plastic, and plan to use it within three months.
• Ham Stock: If you have just a little time to think about it, place the bone in a 4 or 5-quart pot with water, carrots, celery, garlic, herbs (bay leaves, parsley, thyme), onions or leeks, and 5 peppercorns (The water should cover the bone by one inch). Bring to a boil; reduce the heat and simmer, uncovered, for 3 hours to extract the most flavor from the bone. Stock is typically left unsalted, for flexibility in recipes. When finished, discard the bone and strain out the vegetables.
• Beans: A pot of beans or legumes of any kind (the difference), will be even more flavorful when cooked with the bone. Make a big pot of beans and enjoy them all week in different forms: baked beans, bean dip, grain bowls, green salad, sandwich spread, tacos and burritos, for starters.
• Congee: We love Cream of Rice porridge, and breakfast on it regularly. The Chinese version is called congee, served as a savory dish with scrap bits of meat and vegetables, and sliced scallions. Find a recipe and cook up a pot. Maybe invite friends and neighbors to brunch? If so, see if you can find a Chinese sausage to add to the congee: a wonderful flavor very different from American and European sausages.
• Greens: The classic is collards with a ham bone. If you’ve never made this delicious dish, head to the store for the collards! You can substitute kale and chard.
• Soups & Stews: Ham bones are added to hearty, slow-cooked soups: bean soups, chowder, lentil and split pea are the most popular.

Don’t leave a ham bone where a dog can get at it: Cooked bones can splinter and get stuck in their throats.
 
 
More From Smithfield

• How To Prepare & Carve A Ham
• How Much To Serve
• Know Your Knives
• Recipes For Leftover Ham

 
 
WHY WE EAT HAM ON EASTER

The paschal lamb or an easter ham?

Lamb is a traditional Easter food because Jesus’ last supper was the Passover meal, which includes a ritually sacrificed lamb.

In Europe, lamb is commonly served at Easter, based on the tradition of the Passover feast, and fitting commemoration of Jesus, the “lamb of God,” who, as a Jew, would not have eaten pork.

So why is ham so often served at Easter?

Convenience: Prior to modern times, salted pork would last through the winter and ham would be ready to eat at Easter, before other fresh, quality meat was available [source].

Before refrigeration, pigs and cows were slaughtered in the fall. Since it took a fair amount of time to butcher these large animals without modern tools, the cold winter temperatures helped to keep the meat from going bad before it could be properly aged to develop their flavor [source].

By Jewish law, the sacrificial lamb could be up to a year old. Sometimes, based on how the dates fell for Passover and Easter, spring lambs born 6 to 8 weeks earlier could be slaughtered for the holiday.

Transform leftover ham into a colorful salad, packed with fruits, vegetables and ham chunks.

This recipe, featured by Smithfield, is copyright Dorothy Reinhold, Shockingly Delicious.

Ingredients For 1 Luncheon Salad

• 1 head of bok choy
• 1 red or reddish apple, such as Fuji*
• 1 bunch purple grapes
• 2 slices ham, cut into chunks or strips
• 3 mini bell peppers or 1 large, ideally red, orange or yellow
• 1/4 cup fresh blueberries
• 1 tablespoon vanilla-infused olive oil†
• 2 teaspoons white balsamic vinegar (substitute sherry or wine vinegar)
• Fresh chives

1. CHOP the bok choy into bite-sized pieces. Place in large bowl or plate.

2. CUT the apple into quarters, removing core, and cut it into chunks to add to salad. Add grapes to salad. Cut 1-2 slices of ham into strips and add to salad. Cut mini peppers in half, removing stem and seeds. Cut into small chunks and add to salad. Add blueberries to salad.

3. DRIZZLE the olive oil on salad, followed by the vinegar. Using a kitchen shears, snip chives in tiny pieces atop the salad.

________________

*You can substitute any apple you have. Fuji apples are sweet, juicy and crisp with an undertone of spice. It can be yellow-green with red highlights to mostly red in color. It is a cross between two American varieties, the Red Delicious and the Ralls Jennet, a popular breeding apple that was grown at Monticello by Thomas Jefferson. The Fuji apple was developed in Fujisaki, Japan in 1939 but wasn’t introduced to market until 1962 in Japan, and not until the 1980s in the U.S., where it has become one of the the country’s favorite apples.

†Most of us haven’t infused a vanilla bean in olive oil—but try it! Or substitute any flavored oil you have: basil, garlic or rosemary.
 
 

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Our job includes a lot of research, which often turns up surprising things.

One of this is piñata cake, a concept that originated in the U.K. and is also popular in Australia.

We also found it in Germany, called surprise cake.

You don’t hit a piñata cake with a stick. It’s when you cut into the cake that the treasures (candy) spill out.

The treasures are theme candies that fill a “secret” center well in the cake. The well is cut after the layers are baked, so you can place anything in the well without fear of melting.

(If you’re in the chips, silver dollars would be nice!)

The uncut top layer then goes on top of the well layers, and the whole cake is frosted.

A four-layer cake is recommended to have enough room for lots of candy to tumble out.

You can make them in any occasion. We’re keeping a recipe for a Valentine’s Day: a red velvet cake in red and pink layers, filled with Valentine candy.
 
IT’S EASY!

“We can’t stress enough just how easy these cakes are,” says The Whoot in Australia. “Everyone will think you must have gone to so much effort.

“It has a very festive look and you can make it in colors to suit any theme.”

The only caveats are:

 
THE HISTORY OF PIÑATA CAKE

A 2015 article in London’s The Daily Mail says that “Asda kicked off the trend last year with their Smartie pinata cake and Lakeland [a manufacturer] soon followed, selling all the paraphernalia needed to create ‘surprise’ cake.”

Asda is a supermarket chain in the U.K., that first created the cake for sale in its stores.

After the success of the cake, Asda printed the recipe on its lifestyle website.

The first cookbook with a piñata cake recipe seems to be Cakeology by Juliet Sear, published in 2015.

She notes that piñata cakes had become popular in the past year, i.e., 2014.
 
PIÑATA CAKE FOR EASTER

For a holiday in which the Easter Bunny brings baskets full of surprises, piñata cake this makes a great holiday cake.

Carrot cake, the favorite of the Easter Bunny, is both theme-appropriate and dense.

If you have the frosting skills, you can you can make a basket weave frosting, turning the “piñata” into an Easter basket filled with Easter treats.

Of course, piñata cake works for any holiday, any occasion, any theme colors. The decorations on top can be as simple or ornate as you wish.

Ask someone else to cut the cake, and be the first to see the surprise.

Some of the many ways to create a piñata cake. Links to the recipes are below.

Here are the recipes in the photos:

 
CHECK OUT THE DIFFERENT TYPES OF CAKES IN OUR CAKE GLOSSARY.
 
________________

*The recipe is in German and uses Dr. Oetker baking products. We present the photo as a guideline for the most elegant piñata cake we found. You can cut and paste the recipe into Google Translate if you want a translation.
  

[1] Momsdish says that her turkey neck soup recipe is “absolutely the best.” Here’s her recipe (photo © Momsdish).

[2] The vegetables in this soup are made with a vegetable spiralizer (photo courtesy Wholesomeness.com.au).

[3] Turkey necks (photo © Perdue).

[4] One of the two varieties of wild turkey, the North American wild turkey, is the source of all the domesticated turkeys we eat (photo © Randy Fath | Unsplash).

[5] The other variety is the ocellated turkey, native to Belize, Guatemala, and the Yucatan Peninsula. What a beauty! It was never domesticated(photo © Imgur).

[6] The Broad Breasted White breed is the most commonly raised turkey due to its rapid growth, large breast size, and mild flavor (photo © Greg Lippert | Unsplash).

[7] The Narragansett, a heritage†† turkey breed (photo by Temuls Lightning Poncho, CC BY-SA 4.0).

THE NIBBLE first created its Daily Food Holiday Calendar in 2004. But it’s taken us this long to address one of the more unusual holidays: National Turkey Neck Soup Day, March 30th.

Turkey neck soup is a concept we’d only come across on the calendar. This year, for the first time, we had enough down time to wonder:

Who established a holiday for turkey neck soup?

And do you need more than one turkey neck?

We couldn’t find an answer to who, but it turns out that turkey neck soup is a more economical way to feed a family than, say chicken or turkey soup made with the main parts of the poultry.

And yes, you do need more than one turkey neck. Some people freeze the necks from the giblets bags that come in whole turkeys and chickens, until they have enough.

You can buy turkey necks in the poultry department of supermarkets from Perdue and Shady Brook Farms, along with non-branded packages.

Turkey necks themselves are bony, but they do have meat; and thus can be used to make that Paleo diet darling, bone broth.

> A brief history of turkey is below.
 
> Here’s a more extensive history of turkey in the East Coast.

> The history of soup and the different types of soup.
 
 
RECIPE IDEAS FOR TURKEY NECK SOUP

 
However, if a so-called turkey neck soup has a good portion of turkey meat, then it’s regular turkey soup. If cooks have all that meat at hand, they don’t need to focus on the neck.
 
 
THE HISTORY OF TURKEY NECK SOUP

The first turkey neck soup was made somewhere in what is now Mexico and the eastern and southwestern U.S., where the wild turkey originated (photos #4 and #5).

Like many ingredients in soups and stews, turkey neck soup likely evolved as a practical way to use all parts of the turkey, including the neck, which isn’t as easy to eat otherwise*.

Turkey neck soup is still common in various cultures and cuisines where turkey is eaten, including American Southern cooking, where it’s often cooked like chicken soup, seasoned with herbs and vegetables. See other preparations in the footnote† below.

Similar soups elsewhere around the world, where poultry necks are valued for both their rich flavor and collagen content.

Today the soup represents a traditional form of nose-to-tail cooking that predates modern food waste concerns, focusing on using every part of the animal.
 
 
When Did The Turkey Originate?

Wild turkeys (Meleagris gallopavo) have been around for millions of years. Fossil evidence suggests that their ancestors appeared in North America around 5 million years ago, during the Miocene epoch.

The modern wild turkey species likely evolved around 2.5 million years ago, during the Pleistocene epoch.

Turkeys are part of the Phasianidae family, which includes pheasants, quail, and chickens,. They share a common ancestor with other game birds that date back even further.

(Ducks belong to a different family, Anatidae, which includes geese and swans‡.)

Indigenous peoples in the Americas domesticated turkeys over 2,000 years ago, long before European contact.

Archaeological evidence suggests that Native Americans domesticated turkeys as early as 200 B.C.E. to 500 C.E., particularly in central Mexico and the southwestern U.S. (Turkeys were one of the few animals domesticated by pre-Columbian Mesoamerican peoples, bred turkeys for both for their meat and feathers.)

The birds found their way to the East Coast, with the gratitude of the Pilgrims for whom they were a critical food source.

There are two main species of turkey:

 
When Spanish conquistadors arrived in the Americas in the early 16th century, they encountered domesticated turkeys and brought them back to Europe. From Spain, turkeys quickly spread throughout Europe and were later reintroduced to North America by European colonists.
 
 
How Did The Bird Get Named For A Foreign Country?
 
In many languages, the turkey is named after countries that had nothing to do with its origin. For example:

 
These names reflect the confusion about geographic origins during the Age of Exploration.

And the original name for the bird?

The Aztec (Nahuatl) name for turkey is huexolotl or uexolotl (pronounced way-SHO-lotl).

The linguistic root of huexolotl still exists in modern Mexican Spanish, where the word for turkey is “guajolote.”

[Source: Claude.ai 2025-03-30]

*Turkey necks, while most commonly used in soup in the U.S., are also braised/roasted, smothered in gravy, grilled, smoked, even deep-fried.

†There are also heritage breeds such as the Black Spanish, Bourbon Red, Narragansett (photo #7), Royal Palm, and Standard Bronze; but these are less common in supermarkets and typically obtained from butchers. See them here.

††A heritage breed is a traditional livestock breed that was developed over time through natural selection and selective breeding, often before the rise of industrialized agriculture. These breeds are typically genetically diverse, hardy, and well-adapted to specific environments or traditional farming methods. For turkeys, this means natural mating (no artificial insemination) and slow growth (6-7 months to reach market weight compared to 3–4 months for commercial breeds like the Broad Breasted White).

‡The distant common ancestor of both chickens (Phasianidae family) and ducks (Anatidae family) was likely a primitive Galliformes-Anseriformes bird that lived some 60–90 million years ago during the Late Cretaceous or early Paleogene period. Both chickens and ducks belong to the order Galloanserae, a major bird clade that includes Galliformes (landfowl like chickens, turkeys, and quail) and Anseriformes (waterfowl like ducks, geese, and swans). A clade is a group of organisms that includes a common ancestor and all of its descendants. It represents a single branch on the tree of life.

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