COVID: Turkey Day

You have heard a lot of stories about Thanksgiving cooking disasters, but have always reacted with a certain smug distance. Most of them involve the turkey. The story about using Comet or Ajax as a gravy thickener instead of flour (an urban legend but also a story a friend told about her first attempt to cook a Thanksgiving dinner for her in-laws.  The innumerable tales of dropping the bird, of burned and crushed toes, of scraping the thing off the floor and dog hair off the thing and serving it surrounded by a crown of mashed potatoes to hide dents. Many of these stories involve dogs, but yours have never done anything worse than stand under the carving board with its too-shallow dripping well to eat the juices as they overflow, causing them (the dogs, not the juices) to smell, despite ensuing weeks of baths, like little roasts. This Thanksgiving, the disaster comes home to roost. 

            Before the crisis, the smugness. For almost 40 years you have been hosting Thanksgivings; you have your routine. Thanksgiving dishes, you have always thought complacently to yourself, are not difficult. You make familiar recipes every year, branching out just the right amount to add interest to the proceedings and, say, ras-el-hanout to your sweet potato casserole. You are even smug about (not) eating too much, because, frankly, although you like Thanksgiving flavors, you do not crave them. You can leave the leftovers, except those Yorkshire puddings which made an unexpected appearance 20 years ago along with your friend Kate and have been part of your Thanksgiving Day--and breakfast, lunch, and dinner the day after—for all that time. You like cooking for Thanksgiving, although that cooking sometimes happens on your birthday, when you act slightly martyred. You like beginning the three days of cooking with the cranberry sauce that your mother made from the recipe on the Ocean Spray package, and refuse, as she did, to add anything fancy. You like ricing sweet potatoes on the morning of the day, transforming them from dense to just fluffy enough. Lately, you have embraced pumpkin flan, the gluten-free--and you think superior--cousin of pumpkin pie. Until this year, you have also made your mother’s ice-box cake with chocolate wafers, also inspired by a recipe on a package, also a very early sixties dessert, also bringing you closer to your long- deceased mother as you pat and shape the “cake” using hand motions you save for this dish, this meal, this embodied memory.

            You love the smell of Thanksgiving that begins the day before when your husband makes turkey stock and the stuffing that contains a world of things—whatever feels right to him at the time: almost always dried cherries, usually chestnuts and shallots, sometimes hazelnuts, and recently roasted golden beets. Over the years, the bread base has become gluten free, but the stuffing is still dotted with jewels of things that you get to see for the first time late at night on Thanksgiving Eve, as they now call it, or early on the day itself. Your husband, in a rare lapse into gender stereotype, likes a big turkey, as statement piece. If you, personally and in your relative smallness, can lift the turkey and its pan out of the oven without spilling its juices, the bird is not big enough. Indeed, most pans and ovens are not big enough. Sometimes the turkey scrapes against the oven roof, triggering the moment each year when you and your husband shake your heads and say, “we need a bigger oven” and ignore the problem until the next giant turkey inhabits first the fridge and then the stove for three days in November.

            The only challenge, you always say, the only hard thing, is to make sure everything is hot. If you have a talent, aside from reading faster than anyone you know, it is being managerial. You can organize things and people, as long as the latter are not related to you by blood or marriage, and as long as they are not dogs or cats or COVID.  All it takes, really, are index cards: one for each dish sorted into categories for temperature and heating source. You are locked in a struggle against the lukewarm, except of course for those few things that, thankfully, are happiest at room temperature, a circumstance for which you also have an index card. You have micromanaged Thanksgivings of 10, 12, 16, 20 people, working from the tiny kitchen of your post-Harvey rental (where the turkey was cooked outdoors); from the spacious kitchen in the house that flooded (it had a double oven!); from the elegant but not perfectly practical kitchen in your most recent house.

            This year is different in a way you cannot put your finger on. The cranberry sauce makes its usual overture appearance, but you struggle with pie crust that balloons during its blind bake despite your careful distribution of pie weights and use of multiple protective devices. You are a little unsure about the pumpkin flan that wobbles perhaps a little too much as you remove it gingerly from its water bath. You have been unable to find the cookies for your mother’s icebox cake; they disappeared from supermarket shelves before COVID. You feel a little nervous about the whole enterprise now that COVID is here, although you have reduced the number of diners to seven--just three-non-family members who have been part of your bubble since March. The meal, you are thankful to say, can take place outdoors in beautiful fall-for-Houston weather. The two tables, one for family members and one for guests, are twenty feet apart. To make up for lack of contact, you have used the entire box of Thanksgiving decorations--pumpkins, nuts (natural and sprayed gold), turkeys, and candles roil the tabletops. Perhaps you are compensating just a bit. 

            Your guests arrive, there are appetizers. You are happy that the turkey has not cooked too fast and that you have time for wine and cheese. For the past ten years, turkey cooking time has inexplicably shortened. This is a fact that people besides yourself, food writers and nutritional scientists, have noted. The 22-pound bird that your mother-in-law got up at dawn to cook for 7 hours, is now more like a chicken, timewise. As oven time gets shorter and turkeys more eager, guests must follow suit. For years you have had your guests on alert should the turkey pop before they have even set off for your house. 

Timing is always a dicey business. In your house, turkey cooking is managed with an array of often conflicting thermometers that spit out seemingly random numbers as they are poked into the thigh, the oven, or the breast. Some of them are shaped like turkeys, which does not help as much as it should. Deciding when a bird is done can be an elaborate process of instrument assessment and triangulation that sometimes calls on the expertise of your more scientific guests. This year, the turkey’s internal temperature rises to 125 and plateaus with more than 40 degrees to go. You try all the thermometers; for once all of them: turkey-shaped, round square, remote and intimate, all agree. This turkey does not have a fever. Your husband cranks the heat up to 400. The turkey responds by not responding. My younger son reminds me to relax.

            You have an idea, if not an original one. Perhaps this is the time, you think, to pass the time by having the guests say what they are thankful for. You don’t often perform this Thanksgiving ritual, but given COVID and the turkey, it seems appropriate. The first person to speak—the one you think of as your least superstitious friend— is worried that expressing gratitude might be a form of jinxing. When it is his turn, your husband says we should be thankful for the short interval that delays inevitable death. This is not how you imagined things going—you had pictured a few warm references to family, perhaps a joke about Britbox or Netflix, or a grateful reference to Stacy Abrams. You realize that, despite all your precautions, and your very real sense of gratitude death is present at this feast. 

You fall into a state of guilt and anxiety as the turkey lingers in the oven; perhaps you have killed your guests by hosting a Thanksgiving dinner. Perhaps they have killed you. Perhaps everyone will be poisoned by your undercooked turkey. Perhaps the cooking disaster is a punishment for hubris—about both your cooking skills and the pandemic. If your flan fails, so can social distancing. You have stretched the CDC guidelines, shaped them to your need for the festivity, your desire for the familiar. It is no wonder that the turkey refuses to participate.

After what seems like a very long time, you notice that the oven is on a different setting than usual; although the temperature is high, the mode is “heat from the bottom.” You have never used this setting, because the Italian stove, which came with the house, is deeply mysterious to you. The instruction manual does not help, even when you consult what you take to be the original Italian. You learn, in several languages, that the setting

works for (English version here) “pizza, cake, and other dishes that take a long time to cook.” Is a turkey like a pizza? Do pizzas really take a long time to cook? Is a turkey like a pizza? You shrug in an Italian way and vow to replace the stove. Knowing it will be a while until the turkey is edible, you turn the dial to what the manual refers to as the “most useful” setting.

            And you never really liked your microwave, either. It decides, at this inopportune moment, that it will join the oven in refusing to heat--except on the “beverage” function. You start piling beverages into the microwave: sweet potato casserole, stuffing, brussels sprouts. The microwave emits a wavelet of heat. You put away the index cards and call time. Your younger son reminds you to relax.  You get the food on the table, thankful that your husband bought a (cooked and now vaguely warm) ham for the non-turkey eaters. If stuffing can be a beverage, turkey can be a dessert.

            Apart from the Yorkshire puddings, which you have forgotten about in the chaos, the star of the show is the one everyone knew was not (quite) for eating. It is an elaborate visual prank of sorts, conceived and engineered by your older son. It is a “cake” made of cornbread and cranberry gelee layers, “iced” in mashed potatoes and topped by roses made of vegetables. Your son conceded that the room-temperature mashed potatoes might be a problem, eating- wise, but the object is beautiful and cuts into contrasting layers worthy of the Great British Baking show. The inside tastes good, and, after all, the mashed potatoes are not much less fresh-tasting than the ones you made in anticipation of an early turkey pop. Perhaps this year, it was too much to expect warmth, deliciousness, competence, familiarity. 

            After the food is put away, after some quiet postprandial time with the guests, you sit in the evening air that is so perfect it feels like no temperature at all. You think about death, and turkeys, and family projects, and friends who risk everything to come to your house. You think about Britbox and Stacey Abrams and renew your thanks for the things that have taken you so far. You think about death again and come to no conclusions. You are thankful that there will be few leftovers to tempt you the following morning.