The Italian Amercian always had some sort of pasta along
with the traditonal Turkey.
We always had home made gnoche or Linguine.
Plenty of meatballs and sorted meat.Mostly beef.
Boy!do I missed that.

Chances are you spent part of the weekend poring over gravy-stained cookbooks, drafting and editing your Thanksgiving menu. Before you put the final touches on your shopping list, ask yourself this: Did you remember the sobaheg?

Sobaheg is the Wampanoag word for stew, and there's a good chance it was on the menu for that first Thanksgiving of 1621. A sobaheg recipe from the period calls for Indian corn, kidney beans, pottage fish and "flesh of all sorts" - including venison, beaver, bear, moose, otters, raccoons. Add to that Jerusalem artichokes, ground nuts and other roots, squashes, several types of nuts and pompions, the 17th-century word for pumpkins. Mmmm-mmmm!

If you're rigid about your Thanksgiving menu (Pumpkin pie? Yes! Chocolate cake? No way!), it's worth remembering that the Thanksgiving menu as we know it is a relatively recent phenomenon, according to a fascinating book called Giving Thanks, published by Plimoth Plantation in Massachusetts.

Big Question No. 1: Did the Pilgrims and Indians have turkey for dinner?

The only written account of that first harvest celebration mentions just two food items: deer and wildfowl. It gives nary a hint about what else was eaten or how it was prepared.

Historians have theories, based on period paintings and drawings, cookbooks, and artifacts. And wild turkey, plentiful in New England, is a pretty good guess.

Big Question No. 2: Did they eat cranberry sauce - gelled, goopy or otherwise?

Cranberries were available in the wild, but cranberry sauce didn't yet exist. (And even if it did, the colonists had no sugar to make the recipe work.)

Big Question No. 3: What about the sweet potatoes?

Nope. They didn't grow in colonial gardens back then. For that matter, neither did white potatoes. As for pumpkin pie, the recipe didn't appear until later in the century - and the colonists lacked the necessary ovens.

What's left? Probably berries, wild grapes and eels. Mussels, lobster and geese. Corn, clams and ducks.

The evolution to the 21st-century menu took some time. A Connecticut surgeon wrote in his 1799 journal about celebrating with flip, a heated mixture of beer, liquor and sugar. An 18th-century cookbook described chicken pie, "pompkin pie" and minced pies.

Mary Channing of Great Falls (now Somersworth) wrote in 1835 about a Thanksgiving meal involving turkey, chicken pie, and several fruit pies. In Connecticut, 30 years later, pork was on the menu. In 1896, the Boston Cooking-School Cookbook suggested oyster soup and Neapolitan ice cream. For a brief period in the late 19th century, celery was all the rage as the proper accompaniment for roast turkey. Some families had special footed celery glasses, prominently displayed.

World Wars I and II created a special challenge for Thanksgiving cooks. Rationing led to recipes for molasses-sweetened pies and wheat-free bread. Some families ate chicken dinners so soldiers overseas could have turkeys.

In recent years, according to the Plimoth Plantation book, lasagna has become common on some Thanksgiving tables - a tradition not just in Italian-American homes, but also among recent immigrants from Eritrea, Bosnia, Trinidad and India. Talk about your melting pots!