The turkey reached Europe from the Americas in the 16th century, via Portuguese adventurers and merchantmen. Indeed, while the names for turkey in most European languages identify the bird as being ‘from the Indes’, the Portuguese name is the only one that pin-points its origins correctly. It was around 400 years before the turkey made real inroads into the Christmas goose’s claim as the bird of choice for the Christmas table in England. Even though turkey with all the trimmings is now seen in other parts of Europe as the quintessentially English Christmas lunch, it is in fact typically American, the turkey being a native bird there.
In England, the turkey remained the privilege of the merchant classes (the aristocracy, like the poor, continued to eat the traditional goose at Christmas) until well into the 20th century. At least 300 years after the turkey reached Britain, Charles Dickens documents the social turkey/goose divide in A Christmas Carol, published in 1843, the novel which gave popular mythology the figure of Ebenezer Scrooge. The struggling Cratchits (Tiny Tim’s family) were members of a ‘goose club’, to which the less well-off contributed tiny instalments all year, which yielded a goose for Christmas lunch.
“And now two smaller Cratchits, boy and girl, came tearing in, screaming that outside the baker’s they had smelt the goose, and known it for their own; and basking in luxurious thoughts of sage and onion…”
But when Scrooge adopts the Festive Spirit, it’s turkey he goes for, and not goose. In the novel’s closing chapter, Scrooge leans out of the window and calls to an urchin:
“An intelligent boy!” said Scrooge. “A remarkable boy! Do you know whether they’ve sold the prize Turkey that was hanging up there — Not the little prize Turkey: the big one?”
Goose clubs were still going strong as the 19th century faded into the 20th. In The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle, published in 1892, Arthur Conan Doyle’s creation Sherlock Holmes meets a working-class man who tells him:
“This year our good host, Windigate by name, instituted a goose club, by which, on consideration of some few pence every week, we were each to receive a bird at Christmas. My pence were duly paid, and the rest is familiar to you.”