'I came across one Thanksgiving salad recipe which contained lemon jelly, carrots, pineapple and marshmallows…'

Helen Angove gets her head around Thanksgiving.

Of the 110 travellers to America on the Mayflower, 60 died during their first harsh winter. In the spring, however, some Native Americans made contact with the colonists - showing them how to cultivate corn, dig and cook clams, get sap from maple trees and build native style homes. That autumn, the colonists celebrated a successful harvest along with members of a local tribe - a huge celebration that turned into a giant pot-luck supper, as everyone brought food to share.

This story is one of the defining stories of American life. It’s a story that every child imbibes with their milk and cookies - even though these days it’s hard to hear that story without a certain sense of irony. Those early colonists would not have survived were it not for the friendship of the native Americans, who were rewarded in turn with smallpox, genocide and land theft.

My friend tells a story about when her father was working for one of the Native American tribes in Southern Arizona. He invited a friend from the tribe, plus family, to join him for Thanksgiving. Whites and Native Americans sitting down to eat together, just like the story.

It was a fiasco. Firstly, the guests showed up several hours late. A cultural difference, of course - in their tribe, feasts typically went on all day, and the meal happened whenever the guests arrived. To time the arrival of the guests for the convenience of the meal, rather than the other way around, was tantamount to saying the meal was more important than the guests.

By the time they arrived, the food was cold, my friend’s father was starving, her mother furious, and just to put the final touch to the day, the guest's dog got into the kitchen, pulled the turkey off the table and dragged it off to eat it.

A story somewhat reminiscent of some of the more general relations between Native Americans and their “non-native” countryfolk, perhaps.

But, politically correct or not, Thanksgiving is a huge festival in the States - bigger, possibly, even than Christmas - and it seemed churlish not to join in and enjoy it. So I did my research, and had a go.

One of the things I have noticed with American food is that a lot of things are sweeter than I’d expect. The bread is typically much sweeter - in the end I gave up buying supermarket bread and bought a bread maker. It’s quite common to serve a fruit salad as part of the main course of a dinner, or even salads made of jelly, with bits of fruit and vegetables floating in it ( I came across one Thanksgiving salad recipe which contained lemon jelly, carrots, pineapple and marshmallows…).

The Thanksgiving meal is no exception. Cranberry relish, candied yams, syrup glazed carrots, pumpkin baked with maple syrup, sweet potato casserole made with marshmallows, biscuits (in English terms, scones) with jam, honey glazed ham, and even a cranberry "bread“, which to my mind was a cake recipe. All served with the savoury turkey, gravy, stuffing and mashed potatoes.

The number of ways of cooking turkey was also a surprise. Served smoked, deep fried (where do you find a deep fat fryer big enough for a turkey?) or roasted with various glazes. Sometimes more than one of these at the same meal. The most elaborate turkey recipe I heard about was a “turducken” - boned turkey stuffed with a duck, in turn stuffed with a chicken. I don’t even want to think about the salmonella potential of that.

The desserts continue the theme of enormous variety of very sweet food. Pumpkin or sweet potato pie is of course the classic, but it doesn’t seem uncommon, for a big family Thanksgiving, to provide five or six desserts.

So we had our Thanksgiving. Not quite traditional - we’re vegetarian, so no turkey. And I fear I may have failed to cook enough to end up with the statutory (American sized) fridge full of leftovers. But we did eat ourselves silly, and thoroughly enjoyed it.

There was, however, one part of the spirit of Thanksgiving that we didn’t quite get into. The “thanksgiving” aspect of it really is taken very seriously - a day to thank God, not just for harvest, but for “His (sic) many blessings to our nation, a place of diversity, freedom and hope”. In the current political climate, I’m not quite sure I can get my head round that.

Helen Angove is an Anglican priest from the UK, who moved to California in July 2003.

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