The history of holiday feasts: a status report

Tis the season to eat birds, especially turkeys. Despite tradition and Dickens tales, few families eat goose at Christmas. Fewer eat blackbirds. Almost none set a coffin on the dining table. But Halloween traditions still skew holiday cuisine weeks after children put away costumes and masks.

Bongi's Turkey Farm in Duxbury has been raising its own turkeys for decades. Anyone who joins the gourmands waiting in line for its turkeys must think at least a bit about the history of a bird Europeans prize as quintessentially American.

Until Christianity spread across Western Europe and the British Isles, pagans ate fatted geese to celebrate the ancient New Year, Nov. 1. The Celtic Samhain festival, marking the end of the year and commemorating the dead, eventually became Halloween, a holiday still spiced with paganism. The Germanic Yupe, an end-of-harvest festival, partly merged with Halloween. Pagans ate fatted geese in rituals dedicated to Thor, hoping he would grant a fine harvest the following year. Through the Renaissance, wealthy people ate geese on Halloween, mostly from long-forgotten pagan tradition. Migratory geese arrived and disappeared mysteriously, and the large birds seemed part of a magical seasonal rhythm.

Eating wild and domesticated geese gave peasants a momentary taste of nobility. Peasant families traditionally provided part of their harvest to local lords, chiefly as payment of rent for cottages and field. Typically, every family provided a live hen as partial payment, and tradition dictated that the lord provide a harvest feast. At the head of the table, the lord and lady of the manor ate goose, while elsewhere in the hall peasant families ate chicken. Prosperous harvests meant slices of goose passed among the common folk.

Around 1550, British nobles began eating turkey at harvest festivals and Christmas. Turkeys domesticated by the Aztecs arrived in Britain in a roundabout route that began in Mexico and passed through Spain and later through the Netherlands, then under Spanish rule. At first imported or smuggled as rare delicacies, turkeys brought into the marshy East Anglia region of England formed the core of flocks that graced specialized farms by 1600.

Another exotic bird entered Western European culture from Africa. While the ancient Greeks and Romans knew the bird Portuguese explorers called the guinea fowl, knowledge of it disappeared in the aftermath of the Roman Empire. Britons called the bird the turkie-henne; the name indicates that the turkey had become the standard by which the nobility judged smaller and less tasty exotics.

From East Anglia came many of the first English settlers of Massachusetts. In their new home they found a surfeit of geese and turkeys, and they celebrated their first harvest in modern, royal style, choosing turkey over goose.

Until the 1850s, the British poor ate chicken at holidays. Dickens popularized what Americans now consider the traditional English Christmas, but in tales such as ''A Christmas Carol" poverty runs deep. The family of Tiny Tim belongs to a goose club as a way of acquiring a goose for Christmas dinner. Across the ocean most families could afford a turkey, especially the ones raised alongside the family flock of hens. Geese became less popular by the decade, but still remain more popular than blackbirds.

How four-and-twenty blackbirds got baked in a pie and set before a king ought to intrigue any adult cooing the nursery rhyme to an infant. The birds seemingly survive baking, and sing when the king opens the pie, rather than flying away. A little consideration changes rhyme into a puzzle historians of cuisine have attempted to solve.

Animated pies graced royal banquets after about 1350. Essentially an entertainment interrupting a feast, the pies produced surprises, usually live birds, rabbits, frogs, turtles, and, less often, gorgeous women and male dwarfs. Until about 1680, British nobles greatly enjoyed the shock value of living creatures bursting from oversized pies. Dwarfs typically strutted the length of banquet tables, recited poetry, and did magic tricks. Jeffrey Hunter, a much-celebrated 17th-century dwarf, stood only 18 inches tall, but he greatly impressed King Charles I when he burst in full miniature armor from a pie. He became the royal dwarf, a lifelong sinecure.

Until very recently, the word ''pie" designated food baked inside a scarcely edible pastry crust, and usually meant a mix of meat and vegetables. The shell served the purpose of a modern casserole dish, and cooks called it a coffin. Modern shepherd's pie continue the tradition in England. Inside hard pastry the American tourist discovers a mix of lamb and vegetables or beef and vegetables, both topped with potatoes, another New World import to Europe. Nowadays the tourist knows that whatever lies beneath the topping is not only cooked, but dead. In earlier centuries distinguished guests at banquets had no such certainty when hosts handed them carving knives.

Italian chefs perfected animated cookery around 1450. A magnificent cookbook published in Italy about 1505, called ''Epulario," remains an anonymous work today, despite determined scholarly research. Translated into English in 1598 as ''The Italian Banquet," it explains in detail how to bake live blackbirds in coffins. After preparing and shaping the crust, the chef fills the hollow shape with flour, then lays a thick crust over the top, then bakes it. After baking, the chef cuts a small hole in the base of the coffin, allows the flour to flow out, and then just before serving stuffs the pie with live birds.

Nowadays most families south of Boston enjoy the turkeys on which nobles alone once feasted. Only a handful of people dine on geese, and pies mean baked apples or pumpkin beneath flaky crust. No one thinks of live birds or rabbits scattering from opened coffins.

And only rarely do old harvest and fertility traditions come to mind, say when men remember bachelor parties in which a scantily clad woman rose from a large fake cake, not a pie, and not a coffin that tastes of Halloween.

Norwell resident John Stilgoe is Orchard Professor in the History of Landscape at Harvard University.