Christmas Specials | Origins of the Christmas feast

The flight of the turkey

The bird’s many names speak of early globalisation and confusion

BEFORE tucking in this year, spare a thought for the journey made by the big-bodied, bright-plumed and flightless bird that may have landed on your Christmas table. Wherever this specimen was raised and wherever you are dining, the species has travelled a very long distance to reach you. Five hundred years ago the turkey starred in a world tour as a thing of wonder. Its best souvenirs are the names it collected along the way.

In the English-speaking world, no schoolchild fails to notice that the holiday bird and a certain Near Eastern country share the same name. The turkey, however, does not come from Turkey; the story behind this fact shows just how many errors can be strung together to make a single word. Of all the turkey’s misnomers, the official Linnaean name from 1758 must qualify as the wrongest: Meleagris gallopavo gallopavo. It crosses Greek roots with Latin to mean “guinea-fowl chicken-peacock chicken-peacock”. Wrong on five counts, but typical. The only thing the turkey’s namers have got right consistently is that the bird is not-from-here.

Sadly, this is now a fact everywhere; the familiar turkey is extinct in the wild. Before it was domesticated it lived free in Mexico (patriotic Americans may opt to celebrate a few fossilised turds which prove that another strain of turkey was once reared independently, in what is now the south-western United States). Some of the turkey’s wild cousins still thrive in hills and hollows, from Acapulco to Maine. But the gobblers served at Thanksgiving returned to North America only after their Mexican ancestors had crossed the Atlantic twice, first to Spain and then back from England. Yet nowhere, in any language, is this bird called the mexico. Instead its origin has been attributed to other distant places: to Asia Minor, of course, but also to South America, to West Africa, ancient Rome and Ethiopia—and perhaps most persistently to India. It seemed exotic everywhere, never quite for the right reasons.

Before the Spaniards brought the Mesoamerican turkey to Europe, it had been domesticated by forerunners of the Aztecs, first for its colourful feathers and then for its meat. When he came in 1519 Cortés found the court of Moctezuma to have a ravenous demand for the stuff. Turkeys were brought to the king as tribute and sacrificed en masse at festivals and mundane rituals. Between the needs of the royal household and its menagerie of eagles, jaguars and reptiles, Moctezuma must have levied 1,000 birds a day. He gave the Spaniards a batch of 1,500, along with a great deal of gold, in the months before Cortés’s men razed his capital.

From the first the Spanish were confused about what kind of creature they were seeing. Peter Martyr d’Anghiera, a chronicler of the early Spanish empire, described the Mexicans’ gift as being “a great multitude of theyr peacockes, both cockes and hennes, deade and alyve…to cary with theym into Spayne for encrease”. Europeans had known peacocks since ancient times—the bible puts them in King Solomon’s court—but before the printing press and photography, commoners knew them only as a rumour, like the unicorn. By 1530 Martyr was still writing about Mexico, and it had become clear to him that turkeys were not, after all, “peacocks of sober colours”. But by then the big new bird was already generations into its European life, taking on a variety of misattributions as trade routes proliferated.

The turkey was going global at an extraordinary moment in world history, when the whole planet seemed up for grabs. Europeans’ sense of their place in the world changed throughout the 15th and 16th centuries. The Ottoman Turks had absorbed what was left of the Roman empire. Constantinople had fallen to Islam in 1453, spurring Christendom in its scramble for the rest of the planet. By the turn of the next century, Columbus had made half the world New. Ancient Africa’s coastlines were being charted, as Portuguese traders felt their way around the Cape of Good Hope and sent slave-raiding parties up the riverways to stock new plantations in Brazil with forced labour. Then in 1498 Vasco da Gama was rewarded for clearing the Cape by his discovery of the maritime route to India. He landed in Calicut, today’s Kozhikode, whence he brought back the textiles that got called “calico”.

Sea-faring Arabs held a position of unique influence in this world. With Istanbul on the site of old Byzantium, and a useful alliance with Venice, the Ottomans had become the masters of trade on the Mediterranean and beyond. Even before Spain had reached the Americas, trading ships manned by Arabs and their allies were swearing allegiance to the Turkish caliph sitting in the Ottomans’ new capital. In the eyes of Christian Europeans, this made them all people of Turkey, or merchants of the Turkey trade. The goods they dealt were called Turkey goods, and among these were “Turkey birds”.

The first Turkey birds to hit European markets were not, however, turkeys. Instead they were an entirely different race of birds from Africa, plump, pleasantly plumed little pheasants that probably should have been named for the Guinea coast from the start. Ancient Romans had domesticated the guinea-fowl centuries before the medieval Turkey trade began. But the Europe’s guinea hens had died off in the Dark Ages and it took their reintroduction under the caliphate to set up Europe for the big American-for-African poultry bait-and-switch that was to come. For at least a century the Europeans were not feeling too picky about where the so-called Turks were sourcing their so-called Turkey birds.

Even the most literate men were befuddled. Shakespeare had some of the most basic facts of turkey biology backwards. “Here he comes, swelling like a turkey-cock,” mocks a character in “Henry V”, referring to the bird’s embarrassing wattles and puffed-out tail feathers. But this is pure anachronism. The play’s characters would have died in the first half of the 15th century, 100 years before any Englishman could have seen the tom-turkey’s mating display. Henry VIII might have lived to chomp on a roast turkey leg, but what Henry V and his contemporaries knew as a turkey was instead the smaller African guinea hen, without the wattles and swollen pride of the Mexican turkey.

But the small guinea fowl proved no match for the newcomer, which has finer flesh and feathers and a less irritating demeanour. Borne by men of the Turkey trade, the newer kind of “Turkey bird” spread rapidly from Spain. By 1530 it had reached Italy, then England in 1541 or earlier, and around Scandinavia by 1550. With little fanfare, the new breed was changing patterns of animal husbandry. The ordinary chicken was too entrenched to be dislodged, but the turkey made headway in the market for gloriously feathered poultry that could command a large tray. Pheasants, herons, swans, and even flamingos and peafowl had all been devoured in medieval courts. Not because their flesh was any sweeter than chickens’—it was not, by all accounts—but because the creatures themselves were rare and spectacular; any one of them served to make a more exclamatory point at the end of a banquet board. To stuff and serve a roasted bird that dressed itself like an exotic king: what better way to declare victory over a conquered land? When the Dutch landed on Mauritius at the end of the century, they set about eating the dodo to oblivion. By then the turkey was well-established, breeding readily and relatively tasty.

So what do the actual people of Turkey make of all this? They are in no position to cock a snook, for they call the turkey…the hindi. Like the first Spaniards arriving in Mexico, most of the people of the eastern Mediterranean thought the turkey looked more like a peacock than anything else. And they already knew the peacock well, from the India trade. So the modern Turkish for turkey is “India bird”. At some point the trade in turkeys must have displaced peafowl in the Turkish diet, but the name stuck. (And who is to say for certain that they were wrong? Suppose at one point hindi meant simply any ostentatious fan-tailed bird with a thick body, which could really use a few more minutes in the oven.) The Turks are hardly alone in this. Hebrew calls it hodu, an ancient name for India, and the French is still dinde—from Inde. Georgian, Russian, Polish and others keep them company. And many more, if you add the Europeans who named their India trade for the old port of Calicut: Dutch calls the turkey kalkoen, the Scandinavian languages and Lithuanian likewise. Even the Sinhala of Sri Lanka, Calicut’s near neighbours, call the bird kalukuma, which must be a borrowing from the Dutch.

The overwhelming trend has been for confusing the hot new exotic thing with another—slightly more familiar—exotic thing. When one part of the world discovers another, cases of mistaken identity abound. Around South-East Asia the turkey became the Dutch chicken, the French chicken, the “foreign chicken”. In past centuries the thing to do with a special delicacy was to serve it up on a platter to mark a feast. And when a thing is so new that our ancestors did not know what to call it, it must be a special thing indeed. The odd-looking Muscovy duck, the only other poultry to spread from the New World, is a parallel case. Its names attribute it to the North-East passage to China; to the Barbary coast; to Cairo.

“It’s Greek to me” is peculiar to English only in so far as Greek is fairly close to English. Actual Greeks, and most other Europeans, say the same thing by reference to the weirdest language they can find, as the French do with “c’est du chinois”. No one knows how to give a funny name like the Chinese, for whom the Mandarin xihongguo (“Western red fruit”) for tomato, is par for the course. But the logic of Chinese is such that they need not use foreign-place names to turn a thing exotic. Poetry does the job for them. In Guangdong a traditional meal for the winter holidays is casserole of “dragon, phoenix and tiger”. A puree of snake, chicken and cat, by a different name. With delicacies like those hiding in the garden, who needs to go abroad? (Their version of “it’s Greek” is “it’s the language of birds”.) Their turkey nowadays is a relatively uninspired “fire chicken”, for its face’s tendency to flare up shades of red, white and blue. Earlier they called it the “seven-faced chicken”, which spread to Korean and Japanese.

Flights of fancy

India was always the champion, from the point of view of a 15th-century European: there was no more exotic place on Earth. Hence “the West Indies”, “American Indians” and other famous mistakes. But the actual Indians of the day had their own taste for faraway fancies. In 1612, within a century of Cortés’s trip to Mexico, the Portuguese had brought the turkey to the court of the Mughal emperor Jahangir. As a man whose own son Shah Jahan was to sit on something called the Peacock Throne for a living, Jahangir knew something about spectacular birds. These animals “were very strange and wonderful, such as I had never seen and up to this time no one had known their names,” he wrote in his memoirs. “In body [it] is larger than a peahen, and smaller than a peacock. When it is in heat and displays itself it spreads out its feathers like the peacock and dances about. Its beak and legs are like those of a cock. Its head, neck and the part under the throat are every minute of a different colour.” His greatest painter, Ustad Mansur, made minute studies of this marvellous creature, each as beautiful as any European image of a unicorn.

The Great Mughal’s excitement at a novelty from abroad can seem like a thing of magic itself, from today’s vantage. He might have been the richest man in the world and commanded hundreds of thousands of soldiers, but the turkey’s exoticism made it an object of wonder for him.

How different the world looks from the 21st-century dining table. The rise of the cargo-container ship and the abundance it brings everywhere have turned people’s feelings about the origins of food upside down. Now that supermarkets are stuffed with exotic fare airfreighted from distant coasts, Westerners try to gesture towards their own heritage when laying a festive table, the more local the better. Americans persist in prizing the turkey for being a homely critter of the heartland, just like granddad had, even when their meal’s very name is that of a foreign country. Posh Britons are turning to the colourless goose for Christmas, on grounds of tradition. What was raised next door is in vogue, all the better if it was raised in the fashion of our forebears—never mind that those ancestors prized delicacies that travellers had brought from afar. In Jahangir’s day, a great bird was given a name to reflect the greatness of the journey that brought it to the table. They almost got it right, too. Modern Hindi follows the Mughal court in calling the turkey peru—just half a continent off the mark.

This article appeared in the Christmas Specials section of the print edition under the headline "The flight of the turkey"

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