Thanksgiving: Inside the Box

It all begins with the cranberry sauce, the opening gambit of the long holiday season. It can be made on the Monday before Thanksgiving, or perhaps the Tuesday, if I have listened to the pleas of my students and have cancelled class that day. There will be many dishes to make over the course of two or three days; the order in which I make them, I realized only this year, mimics almost exactly the order in which I learned to make them: classics from my childhood, dishes that have become traditions on my own Thanksgiving table, and, finally, new dishes. I have captured, it seems, or have been captured by, the Darwinian credo: ontogeny replicates phylogeny. Each meal, or rather each story of its creation in a given year, tells in miniature the longer history of family, food, and making. The food critic in me would have more to say about my new discoveries: a gluten-free sticky toffee pudding made with almond and oat flour that I believe is at least as good as traditional glutinous versions; my son’s invented “cupcakes”, made entirely of meringue and filled with grapefruit and orange curd, nestled in frilled dark chocolate wrappers; my husband’s rotisserie turkey made in his new bright-red smoker/grill. But today I want to go back to the beginning, to the two dishes that feel like the nineteen fifties that I made with my mother in the early sixties from recipes from the back of the package.

The sauce itself is insistently plain. I have not added to my mother’s version, which tweaked—just a little—the recipe she found on the back of the packages of Ocean Spray cranberries, available in Italy, to please Americans, at the FAO commissary every November. The cranberries I get now are not Ocean Spray. If they deign to come in packages at all, the recipes on the back use the word “compote” or “gelée.”  Mostly, they come, as it were, naked, floating in cold water, as if in some kind of cranberry bog. Either way, I have to google “Ocean Spray cranberry recipe” to get back to where I want to be. Each year, I forget the beautiful simplicity of the ratio of sugar to liquid: 1 cup water to 1 cup of sugar. Like my mother before me, I replace the water with orange juice and add some zest. The sauce bubbles, then, gels, and Thanksgiving begins.

The recipe for the second item—icebox cake—can still be found on the box of Nabisco Famous chocolate wafers—that is, when the wafers can be found at all. During the pandemic, the cookies disappeared from Central Market and into a long narrative, by the helpful customer service person, of COVID-induced scarcity. I found them, as I did this year, at Central Market’s humbler relative, HEB. Unlike the cranberry sauce, the finished dish is pictured on the box: a cross section of a log with perfect black and white stripes.

It is harder to describe the process of making the cake than it is to make it. My mother and I would each take a cookie in our left hand and, using our right hand, would cover it with whipped cream flavored with vanilla and sometimes chestnuts. We would then add another cookie, and alternate whipped cream and wafer until we had a mini-stack of four (for my smaller hands) or five or six (for my mother’s larger ones). The cookie and cream stacks might slip a bit, but we would flip them sideways and coax them into position, end to end, at the bottom of my mother’s frosted glass dish with an engraving of a dog on it. We would then stack again, adding to the end of the growing log until we reached the end of the dish. I was always the one to cover the entire vertical stack with cream, smoothing it with a spoon until no glimpse of wafer was visible. Then I would swirl the top with a spoon, adding grated chocolate or coco—or one adventurous year, canned cherries in syrup carefully dried so they would not bleed into the cream.

As a child, I thought of the cake, and the process of making it, as magic. Like much that is magical, it was also fraught with risk. At every point in the process, something could—and, even in this simple recipe, sometimes did—go wrong. If things were going well, the cream would stay in the bowl, swelling gently into undulating peaks. Sometimes nothing happened, even when we turned the hand beaters up to high. My mother blamed the “ultra-pasturization” of the commissary cream. Sometimes my father would be sent out for the “real cream” of a neighboring latteria. I am not sure why we did not begin with what was after all cheaperand more likely to churn. There was also the risk, of course, of going too far. If the cream was thickening, my mother would warn me not to “turn it into butter.” This threatened transformation terrified me, until one day, not Thanksgiving, I decided to go there and made butter on purpose and it was very good on the hard French rolls my mother and I used to share—she eating the crusty top and I the fluffier middle and bottom like Jack Sprat and his wife.

The cutting of the cake risked more public failure. If you cut it the right way, with a heated knife at a 45-degree angle, you get the perfect cross-section and mysteriously, magically, striped slices. If you cut the finished cake the wrong way, you get a murky mixing of colors and texture, the wafers revealed as wafers. Now that I am almost as old as my mother ever got to be, I slice the cake in the kitchen and arrange the slices on a spiral on a cake stand.

The gestures my hands made in the making of the dish, the gestures that mirrored my mother’s, are part of my bodily memory. I have only to hold a wafer in my left hand to think of my mother. Each further movement, the scoping and stacking and sliding and patting, feels like I am both my mother and myself. I am transported to Rome, to the early sixties, and to an ex-pat Thanksgiving, always a few days before or after my birthday. Although I made the cake with each of my sons when they were small, I now make the cake alone, playing the part of both mother and daughter. The dish itself is not the “dog dish” of my childhood. This disappeared in hurricane Harvey to be replaced, via Etsy, with one the same size and shape without the frosted glass, and with poinsettias, which I hate, instead of the dog, who was not a cute dog like the ones I love best, but a dignified one with long slim legs and a classic profile.

This blog entry ends with a confession. This year I did not make the icebox cake although I did buy the wafers (two boxes so my sons could eat the cookies on their own, something I never thought to do.) I am not sure why I finally decided to forgo this tradition. Partly it was because I wanted to make an all-gluten free dessert buffet. I suppose I could have made gluten-free chocolate wafers, but that would have betrayed the simplicity of the dessert, which is all about simplicity, about a specific set of gestures and rituals, about thinking inside the box.