Thanksgiving dinner has always struck me as the most ritualistic of holiday meals, not counting the Passover seder and other religious observations that use food as symbols. Not only is the Thanksgiving menu its own set of customs, but it comes complete with its own mythology (i.e., cheerful pilgrims and their American Indian friends, acquiescent turkeys and brimming cornucopias) and a social significance that endures.

These are the ties that bind us and make it possible for everyone, in houses up and down every street, in food kitchens, in mess halls and in local jails, to count on eating the same meal on the fourth Thursday of November, every year.

I’ve always been fascinated by the sameness of the Thanksgiving meal and by the insistence of many people that nothing, absolutely nothing, on the menu be tampered with. In most families, the turkey is cooked the same way as always and recipes for the stuffing and side dishes have been handed down from a previous generation. At the very least, those Thanksgiving dinners of yore are what the cook envisions when he or she labors over the stove, trying to stir up giblet gravy just like Grandma’s.

Just for the record, Thanksgiving did not become a national holiday until 1863, when it was decreed as such by the executive order of Abraham Lincoln and at the suggestion of Sarah Josepha Hale, author of “Mary Had a Little Lamb.” Our Thanksgiving food traditions appear to date more from the 19th century than from the days of the pilgrims, although the prototype Thanksgiving dinner is said to have occurred in 1621 at Plymouth, Mass.

It is from settlers’ accounts of a three-day feast involving whites living at Plymouth and members of the Wampanoag tribe that our Thanksgiving myth emerges. However, it’s unlikely that the menu for this meal would find much favor with modern-day Thanksgiving diners.

According to a Web site that annoyingly plays the tune for “We gather together to ask the Lord’s blessing” over and over, the original Thanksgiving table was laden with the following foods: corn, geese, turkeys, ducks, eels, clams, plums, cod, bass, barley, venison and cornbread. To experience this musical menu for yourself, go to http://holydays.tripod.com/thanks.htm.

If we were seeking historical accuracy with our Thanksgiving menu, we would trade in our green bean casseroles and that canned cranberry stuff for something more authentic like eels in plum sauce. It’s hard to say what the pilgrims and Wampanoags would have thought about self-basting turkeys and those little plastic things that pop out of the breast when the meat is done.

Fact is, they wouldn’t recognize our Thanksgiving meal as having anything to do with theirs.

OK, so I’ll concede that the Thanksgiving menu evolves over time, the Kansas Board of Education notwithstanding. And the process has been slow, just as Darwin might have described it.

For your proof, look no further than turkey recipes in the November issues of the leading cooking magazines. If anyone were pushing the envelope on the Thanksgiving menu, we’d expect to find the evidence here.

Of the four that landed in my mailbox, none offered anything like innovation in turkey preparation or a variation that might produce a remarkable turkey. Gourmet offered a recipe for a miso-rubbed turkey, but the soybean paste’s contribution was moistness, not flavor. Cook’s Illustrated, Cooking Light and Bon Appetit all included recipes for turkeys rubbed, infused or stuffed with such herbs as thyme and sage.

This just goes to show that when it comes to Thanksgiving, it’s all been done before. And apparently, that’s just how we like it.