Friday, December 02, 2005

Cold Turkey

After more than ten years of free-riding on others’ generosity, I knew that this year my number was finally up.  My husband put down the phone & said, “Oh Louise, Mom & Dad have got their plane tickets:  Everyone is coming to our house for Thanksgiving this year.” My husband is one of five siblings, all with families.  I had a sudden premonition of our little house, stuffed as full as a Thanksgiving turkey, bulging at the seams with relatives.  “How nice,” I said with a gulp, “that’ll be lovely.” And it was.

Family gatherings are at least as interesting for the diplomacy and deal-making that goes on beforehand, as for the event itself.  We spent a couple of weeks strategizing over the Midwestern turkey summit talks.  My husband is a hardcore vegetarian.  I’d never roasted so much as a chicken wing before in my life.  My husband delicately opened the negotiations with his mother over the phone:  Did she feel that turkey was a truly necessary part of the celebration?  There was a pause and a click. And then he called the butcher.

Meanwhile, I mugged up on festive fare.  I grew up on roast turkey for Christmas dinner, so I felt fairly confident about green beans, mashed potatoes and even cranberry sauce.  But sweet potatoes are out of my national culinary range and the recipes just made me nervous:  “With crushed pineapple and brown sugar?” I read.  “You have got to be kidding!” To fend off my rising panic, I called my Mum in England to get her special holiday stuffing recipe and consulted, long-distance, on giblet gravy.  I drew up a little timetable counting down preparations to turkey time.

We cleaned & reorganized the house to accommodate the 6 extra people who’d be staying with us.  We moved knickknacks out of the reach of ambitious toddlers.  We bought in prodigious supplies of food.  There were apple pies cooling on the screened-in porch, bottles of beer marching down the basement stairs, and five kinds of milk in the fridge from fat-free to full-fat.

On Thanksgiving morning, my father-in-law joined me in the kitchen to bake his pumpkin pies and sweetly scented the house with cinnamon and nutmeg.  As I bathed the pimply pink turkey flesh in the kitchen sink, calmed by those spices, I resolved that, even though I didn’t know what I was doing, the bird would probably turn out alright.  “Just follow the cookbook,” I told myself.

The inexorable logic of food preparation propelled us through the afternoon:  you have to peel the onion, in order to chop the onion, to make the stock, to moisten the bread, to add to the dressing, to bake until done.  The kitchen windows steamed up with exhalations of wild rice and overheated cooks, concentrating furiously.  Around 5 o’clock, I unwrapped the foil to check the bird and saw what looked like a red plastic golf tee sticking out of the breast.  The pop-up thermometer said the turkey was done.

There’s something gratifyingly epic about family feasts.  A flotilla of dishes floods onto the table:  mashed potatoes and sweet potatoes, and carrots and rutabaga and turnips glistening with butter.  There’s rice salad and green salad and two kinds of cranberry sauce, homemade and a ruby cylinder of jelly extruded from a can, and green beans with toasted almonds.  There’s celery stuffing and chestnut-sausage stuffing and gravy and the bird.  And then there’s the pies.

A week later, the tide of relatives has ebbed and our house seems twice its former size.  The sofa bed is back to a couch, we’ve prised the last cranberries from the rug and mailed off the toddler’s left-behind toy.  The glory of American Thanksgiving is that it celebrates values that unite people - family togetherness, hospitality, and home-cooked plenty. 

Still working on the leftovers, for Michiana Chronicles, this is Louise Collins.

Broadcast by Louise Collins on December 02, 2005
Customs & Rituals • Family & Friends • Food • Permalink • Printer Friendly
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