A Prairie Monday in October

A Monday in October, out where the grain is already cut. The poplars have gone gold, the stubble runs to the horizon, the elevator stands over it, and cars are pulling in at a farmhouse two at a time. Dinner is at four because it has always been at four, and the oven has been on since ten.

The date is younger than the holiday. Canada has kept an annual Thanksgiving since 6 November 1879, but the October Monday was fixed by a proclamation issued at Government House, Ottawa, on 31 January 1957, appointing the second Monday in October — that year and each year after — a day of general thanksgiving to Almighty God for the blessings with which the people of Canada have been favoured.

Older feasts are claimed. Martin Frobisher and his crew held what is often called the first Thanksgiving by Europeans in North America, in the Eastern Arctic in 1578, with a sermon and a meal of salt beef, biscuits and mushy peas. The French settlers who came out with Champlain from 1604 kept the Order of Good Cheer at Port Royal, after the winter on Île Sainte-Croix went badly.

The stuffing has a printed ancestor. In Hartford in 1796 Amelia Simmons wrote To stuff a Turkey: a grated wheat loaf, butter, salt pork, two eggs, and a little sweet marjoram, summer savory, parsley and sage, pepper and salt — then fill the bird and sew it up. Her herb notes add that thyme is good in soups and stuffings, that sweet marjoram is used in turkeys, and summer savory likewise. Poultry Seasoning, Sage, Ground, Savory, Ground and Marjoram Leaf, Ground are that list, two hundred and thirty years on.

The pie came the long way round. The pumpkin is a North American plant that went to France and reached Tudor England from there; Hannah Woolley printed a Pumpion Pie by 1672, the slices fried in egg and herbs, then baked with butter, raisins, currants, sugar and sack over sharp apples. Simmons's first pumpkin recipe used mace, nutmeg and ginger, her second allspice and ginger — which is why Pumpkin Spice Blend keeps mace in it alongside cinnamon, allspice, nutmeg, cloves and ginger. Apple Pie Spice Blend does the second pie, because there is always a second pie.

Pumpkin Patch, Organic and Cranberry Apple, Organic are what sits in the pot between the meal and the drive home. No caffeine, no hurry, and somebody will fall asleep in a chair.

Eight products. One table, and everybody is at it.