When people picture the first Thanksgiving, they imagine a postcard fantasy of turkey, stuffing, and pumpkin pie. The truth is far messier and far more interesting. Long before the holiday became a national ritual, the English settlers at Plymouth and the Wampanoag people sat down to a meal in the autumn of 1621 that had nothing to do with the feast we know. The real star of that table was not turkey. It was corn.

And the dish that carried the day was samp. Imagine a thick, humble porridge, nothing glamorous, made by pounding dried corn into rough pieces and simmering it until it turned soft and comforting. The English learned it from the Wampanoag, who had been doing it for generations. In their world it was called nasaump, and it could be dressed up with dried berries, nuts, sometimes even bits of fish. This was not some celebratory showpiece. It was survival food. It got people through hard winters, long workdays, and seasons when the land offered little else. When the English arrived starving and clueless about how to grow anything in this strange new place, nasaump was one of the reasons they lived long enough to tell the tale.

The gathering of 1621 was not called Thanksgiving. It was a harvest celebration and a diplomatic meeting rolled into one. The settlers were relieved to still be alive after a brutal winter that wiped out nearly half of them. The Wampanoag saw an opportunity to strengthen a fragile alliance with a desperate new group on their land. The food on the table reflected that uneasy partnership. Venison, shellfish, maize, wild plants, fowl, a few precious vegetables, and beer if you were lucky. And in the center, a pot of corn based dishes like samp that everyone understood. Simple. Filling. No pretense. A bowl of shared humanity.

Thanksgiving as we know it was invented much later. In the nineteenth century, an editor named Sarah Josepha Hale decided that America needed a national holiday to pull itself together. She wrote letters to politicians for seventeen relentless years. Eventually Abraham Lincoln gave in. In 1863, with the Civil War swallowing the country, he declared a national day of thanks. It was meant to bring people together in the middle of the nation’s darkest hour.

As the decades rolled on, Thanksgiving morphed into something new. Regional dishes blended into one big national feast. Turkey took center stage. Cranberry sauce migrated across the country. Pumpkin pie rose to power when canned pumpkin and cheap sugar flooded the market. By the early twentieth century, the modern Thanksgiving table was locked in place and it bore almost no resemblance to what happened in 1621.

But samp and the corn based dishes around it still tell the real story. They connect the holiday to Indigenous knowledge and to a moment when two cultures shared what little they had in a world filled with uncertainty. In a celebration now built around abundance, samp reminds us that the holiday began with survival, humility, and the simple grace of feeding one another.

In a strange way, this humble bowl of cornmeal might be the closest taste we have to the original Thanksgiving.