Thanksgiving Drinks: Historic Recipes With and Without Alcohol

What did people drink at Thanksgiving?

In the 1800s, cider, ginger beer, currant wine and lemonade, and on Sarah Josepha Hale’s table no spirits at all. At the 1621 harvest feast at Plymouth, the one eyewitness account names fowl and deer and not a single drink; water is the likeliest answer.

The Thanksgiving most Americans picture was largely the work of one editor. Sarah Josepha Hale campaigned for decades to make it a national holiday, and in her novel Northwood (1827) she set the table course by course: turkey, chicken pie, “pies of every name,” and on the sideboard decanters of currant wine and bottles of cider and ginger beer. She was proud of what was missing: “There were no foreign wines or ardent spirits.” Her household book of 1839 told women never to make a drink with alcohol in it for family use, and named lemonade “the best beverage for parties.”

Cider filled the gap in the rest of New England: sweet while it was fresh juice, hard once it had fermented, and new cider went into the plain mince pie as well. The Pilgrims themselves had come ashore with beer and “strong water,” but the beer ran short within weeks, the ship’s crew kept what was left, and the settlers drank water and praised it.

So a Thanksgiving table can be historic and alcohol-free at once. Most drinks below come from the books of their day, with the source on each recipe; a few are our own alcohol-free versions of period drinks, and they say so. Start with Hale’s lemonade, which takes five minutes while the turkey rests.