19 Long-Lost Thanksgiving Foods That Were Everywhere Back In The Day, But Have Since Vanished From Everyone's Tables

Nothing out of the ordinary here!

If you're used to seeing this on your Thanksgiving dinner table, you probably call it 'manigot.'

Here's one dish that is a mainstay on the Field family Thanksgiving table. It mixes creamed corn and regular canned corn with cornstarch, milk, and eggs. Once it's baked, it comes out solid and sliceable. A dish like this is not exclusive to Thanksgiving and can often be found year-round in the South. It's quite good and not too sweet, even though it looks a little weird.

You can jazz up a regular corn pudding with cheese, chives, and anything else your heart desires.

This is another dish that my mom makes every year, passed down to her from her extremely British grandmother, but it is pretty much only for her. Whole pearl onions are cooked in a creamy white gravy, and that's pretty much it. You have to really like onions to want this on the table.

It kind of looks like onion cereal. Onion-o's.

This is another more traditional dish that my mom will add to the dinner table. They are comparable to mashed potatoes in texture but slightly sweeter and earthier in taste. The rutabaga is a hearty root vegetable that was easier to acquire in cold Northern European countries, which led to this dish's popularity. Now, we can get potatoes whenever we want in America, so the mashed rutabaga dish has waned.

There aren't a lot of fried foods that make it to the Thanksgiving table, but if you ask former president Grover Cleveland, these parsnip fritters were essential. They have the taste and consistency of a potato pancake, and Cleveland insisted on them during a Thanksgiving meal in his first term in the White House. They were so nice that the country voted for him twice.

My family used to have these often, not just at Thanksgiving, in a clever ruse to make the children at the table eat dome vegetables. Cooking the carrots in brown sugar and honey helps to release their own natural sweetness, and combined with a bite of mashed potatoes and turkey, they become a little slice of heaven.

The bread-based stuffing that is commonplace at every Thanksgiving was once chock-full of this polarizing ingredient. That's because there were tons of oysters available to all classes of people 300 years ago. But now that they have become a rather expensive delicacy, those oysters are often replaced with mushrooms in stuffing. If you sit down this Thanksgiving and have oyster stuffing on the table, consider yourself lucky.

Here's another stuffing varietal that has similarly fallen out of fashion, thanks to the decimation of the American chestnut tree, which caused the nut's price to skyrocket. The chestnut was extremely popular in the holiday seasons of Thanksgiving and Christmas, but, alas, there is rarely anymore roasting of them on an open fire. Just a bowl of chestnuts today will cost you a pretty penny.

If you've never cooked an entire turkey before, you're in for a real surprise. Reach your hand into the carcass, and you will find a pile of weird-looking meat in a bag. These are the giblets: the heart, neck, liver, and gizzards of the turkey you're about to eat. While they may not be very appetizing looking, they are delicious. Instead of chucking the entire bag out and using pre-made gravy this year, you can do as your ancestors did by boiling the giblets to create a stock that you can use to make turkey gravy. It takes a while to do it, but it tastes so much better.

I've been looking through a lot of old Thanksgiving menus, and almost all of them list olives as a dish. Turns out, olives were once a high-end novelty food that was reserved for only the finest of feasts. My family will put them out as part of any appetizer spread, but I never thought of them as part of the full meal. I can see how they might fit in, though; there's nothing on the traditional Thanksgiving menu that comes even close to tasting like an olive.

Maybe this year we can put the olives inside the turkey? Thoughts? No?

The relish tray exists in the same realm as the olives and, in fact, could even have olives on it. The trays started as ornate, segmented plates that were used to display high-end pickled foods, like olives, cucumbers, peppers, and so on. They became far more ubiquitous over time, and they still have strong regional connections to Midwest supper clubs, but they often aren't on the "traditional" Thanksgiving menu. I think there should be a relish tray for every meal.

Yes, just celery. Almost every old menu I've seen lists "olives" and "celery" as dishes. I get the olives; there is flavor there. But celery baffles me. Perhaps there was still some novelty to it? Maybe it's the predecessor of what our modern-day crudite is? Whatever the case may be, I'd probably avoid putting raw celery on the dinner table unless it's accompanied with some excellent veggie dip.

Here's a dish that is making a comeback. These gaudy, nut-covered balls of cheese were a staple of many mid-century dinner tables, a time when intricate and ornate dishes were all the rage. They are a great way to express your individuality with the ingredients, finding ways to make them pair perfectly with your turkey dinner.

We should also fill the turkey with a bunch of cheese balls, for science.

Made with various canned (or fresh) fruits and marshmallows, I always considered ambrosia more of a summer treat, but it apparently was an essential part of many a Thanksgiving spread. It remains a staple in many Southern US gatherings, and while it does stretch the definition of the word "salad," it's really delicious and sweet.

I can imagine Artemis and Apollo chowing down on this all day.

For some reason in the 1950s, Americans temporarily went wild and became obsessed with Jell-O. The idea of using the gelatin-based snack in both sweet and savory dishes was commonplace and led to some gaudy and outrageous dinner table concoctions. A sweet Jell-O salad may be chock full of fruit and marshmallows, while a savory one could have anything from ham and cabbage to tuna and olives. 

They look...interesting? I'm frightened and confused.

There are a lot of people who skip the cranberry sauce on Thanksgiving, especially if it's right from the can. For that reason, I understand the impulse to want to try something new. However, following the Jell-O mold trend and turning cranberry sauce into cranberry...soufflé? Salad? It does not compute.

The only thing better than a great Thanksgiving meal is the great leftover sandwiches you can have for the following couple of days. But there was a time when people turned away from bread and went to the natural replacement: aspic, a savory meat jelly that was molded around all those leftovers. Dishes like this are popular in other parts of the world, but they are essentially extinct in America. And I don't care how good they might taste; they will never beat a post-Thanksgiving turkey gobbler sandwich.

Thanksgiving is a pie holiday, and you're bound to see either a pumpkin, apple, or pecan pie on the table. But one of the forgotten pie traditions that always appeared around Thanksgiving is the mincemeat pie. The "mincemeat" in this pie is actually dried fruits soaked in booze and spices. It's still popular in the UK at Christmastime, but it's fallen out of fashion here in the States.

Finish off your night with one of these, and you'll be properly soused.

I guess a pie can be anything, because there used to be a popular version made with vinegar. It's eggs, water, flour, sugar, and, you guessed it, vinegar. And it turns into something edible! Life is wild sometimes. The vinegar pie has been around for a few centuries, but really took off in Depression-era America when fresh fruit was harder to obtain.

Very unassuming, but it hides secrets.

In the same way that Jell-O leaned into its popularity, here's another example of a brand trying to pitch itself as a festive holiday treat. In the late '50s, Dr. Pepper started advertising Hot Dr. Pepper as a heartwarming post-meal drink. I love Dr. Pepper, so I simply must try this.