When you consider the slow speed of travel in the 16th century, it’s nothing short of astonishing how quickly turkeys caught on. The trigger may have been King Ferdinand of Spain’s order, in 1511, for every ship sailing from the Indies to Spain to bring 10 turkeys—five male and five female. Olsen dates formal Spanish turkey farming to 1530, by which point turkeys had already made it to Rome and were about to debut in France as well. From there the birds hopped over to England, where they got one of their odder names. (In the Romance languages and German, the bird was called “Indian chicken,” because the Americas were referred to as “the Indies.”) The origin of the word “turkey,” according to many contemporary scholars, unfortunately boils down to the English being rubes: the word “Turkey” meant, “You know, exotic things from far away. Like Turkey the country. That’s exotic and far away.”

The success of Central American, European-cultivated turkeys in England from the reign of Henry VIII onwards is what made it possible to send them on ships to Virginia in 1584 and Massachusetts in 1629, “a distinct case of carrying coals to Newcastle,” admitted Keith Stavely and Kathleen Fitzgerald in their culinary history entitled America’s Founding Food. Not only were the New England birds reportedly bigger, but “William Wood [the author of a 1634 guide to New England] stated that they could be found year-round in groups of a hundred or more. Thomas Morton [the founder of the colony of Merrymount] was told by Indians he queried that as many as a thousand wild turkeys might be found in the nearby woods on any given day.”

It was these New England turkeys (the Meleagris gallopavo silvestris, according to a 2009 DNA study) that achieved new heights of culinary fame, while simultaneously offering a lesson in the complexities of colonialism. When the French epicure Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin wrote of going on a wild-turkey hunt in 1794 in Connecticut, he observed that the flesh was so superior to that of European domesticated animals that his readers should try to procure, at the very least, birds with lots of space to roam.

That advice might seem ironic to modern readers not just due to the appalling state most turkeys are raised in today, according to Staveley and Fitzgerald, but also because wild turkeys were at the time of Brillat-Savarin’s hunt already close to extinction in New England—a stark reminder of the environmental aspects of European imperialism and their effect on Native American ways of life. Non-domesticated turkey populations survived further west, and only returned to New England with the reforesting of farmland cleared by early settlers. This isn’t the only reflection in turkey history of the disastrous dynamic between Europeans and Native Americans: just look to Jared Diamond’s controversial Guns, Germs, and Steel theory that Americans were at a disadvantage relative to Europeans in part because turkeys and dogs were the only domesticable animals in Mesoamerica, leading to lower levels of agriculture and lower disease resistance. (The Eurasian germs that laid waste to American civilizations developed in part through concentrations of humans and livestock.)