Tips from a Second Pandemic Thanksgiving
I interrupt the story of my dogs, to mark the second pandemic Thanksgiving. Although I have in front of me the post from the first, even as I scroll through my photographs I do not remember much about it. This Thanksgiving, the more-so-but-not quite “normal” one slips more easily into the stream of memory, placing itself not so much in relation to the pandemic but to other Thanksgivings. The stream meanders back in time to an Italian childhood of turkeys specially ordered through the United Nations commissary, and in place backwards from my settled presence in Houston to sojourns in New Orleans, New York, Boston. I remember the feeling of being a guest—packed along with perhaps 20 others into my godfather’s tiny Greenwich village apartment where platters of food had to be stacked on bookshelves or carefully placed on the bed. I remember even more clearly being the host for the first time in my visiting semester at Tulane where my husband and I cooked the turkey outside sweating in the combined smoke and Louisiana sunshine. Mostly, though, Thanksgiving is a bodily memory—not of eating, but of cooking very specific dishes, accompanied by very specific gestures. Handed down by my mother, these dishes and the memories they serve up are really about my mother’s hands: encircling the worn wooden spoon with which she stirred the cranberry sauce; patting into stacks the whipped cream and wafers that made the chocolate ice box cake. These were not gourmet dishes: in fact the recipes for them came from the back of the boxes and bags that held their main ingredients. They were ‘fifties recipes, designed for simplicity and for middle-class housewives whose worlds were just opening up beyond the manual labor of housework. Wearing my mother’s wedding ring, which as a young person I thought was unbelievably ugly and whose beauty now chokes me up, I replicate my mother’s gestures, stirring and patting these two dishes which, the first of many every year, mean Thanksgiving has begun.
Since my previous attempt to write household hints in this blog, I seem to have become more comfortable giving advice. Perhaps this is due to the ghostly presence of my mother, and the sense that Thanksgiving is about passing things on, even if they are not fancy or perfect. Perhaps my mother’s ghost speakes through me as my mother did in the domestic imperative; Gladys was not shy about expressing an opinion as a truth. Through my mother, then—or should I say for my mother—I offer a series of very declarative tips.
1.You will always run out of gravy. Perhaps helpful guests (or even family members) will throw it out in a desperate attempt to restore order in the kitchen. Even if they do not, there is a limit to the juices even the largest turkey can exude. Make some make-ahead gravy with (harder to find than most recipes admit) turkey wings. Be sure to caramelize.
2.Caramelize everything. When I first came up with this tip, I thought it was a) original and b) Thanksgiving-specific. I am now reminded that my friend Renee has a tattoo that says something like this and sees this slogan as both a cooking suggestion and a mantra for a good and useful life. I cannot disagree.
3. There is no reason not to add a smidgen of apple cider vinegar to most Thanksgiving dishes. It is, in its traditional form, a regrettably low-acid holiday.
4. Speaking of, for a holiday treat, clean your counters with diluted apple cider vinegar, rather than say, harsh and inappropriately unforgiving distilled white vinegar you might use the rest of the year. The smell will make you happy. Do not use powdered cleanser on this day of all days; I am haunted by a friend’s tale of her first attempt at a Thanksgiving dinner during which she accidentally substituted Comet or Ajax for Wondra flour in a panicky attempt to thicken her gravy.
5. All major appliances prefer to fail on Thanksgiving—or rather a couple of days before so you can call multiple repair people who will be sorry for you but who will nonetheless seem to enjoy informing you that the necessary parts live in Florida. This is the time of year to be thankful that you did not buy the expensive protection plan under whose auspices someone will visit your home in two weeks—and which is likely to have expired in any case. If you have a major appliance failure—we have endured the Thanksgiving breakdown of (in different years) an oven, a microwave, a disposal, and now a fridge—cancel the party. Just kidding! Spend wild amounts of money on new appliances and soldier on!
7. If, hypothetically, your fridge breaks and the butter you have been hording in great quantities is as soft as —well, butter—make buttercream. If you don’t have a cake to put it on, make truffles, or eat it with a spoon.
8. If (again hypothetically speaking) your fridge breaks, consider moving from (hypothetically) Texas to a place where at this time of year the whole outdoors is a fridge—or even a freezer.
9. If one of your children, of any age, wants to make a completely untested and infinitely complex and messy recipe after you have done your first clean (see “apple cider, uses for,” above), just let it happen. The project could—and often does-- turn out great. As a bonus, and you will not become the butt of future Thanksgiving family narratives or have to use the money you have saved for new appliances to pay for therapy in which you will quite possibly feature as the kind of parent who stifles your child’s creative urges.
10. You cannot have too many turkey-shaped decorations on your Thanksgiving table. Recycling pumpkin decorations—and saving some of them to be sprayed silver or gold for Christmas—is cheating. Pumpkins, acorns, and fall leaves are acceptable, as is a giant cornucopia made of dried grasses, but these must be accompanied—and indeed outnumbered—by turkeys in various materials. There is no vegetarian exception here; turkey napkins, place cards, and vases are in fact celebrations of animal life (and wholeness) and pair well with veggie mains.
11. Yorkshire puddings should be on all Thanksgiving tables, and should be warmed and eaten the next day for breakfast (with jam), and for dinner (with gravy, (see “gravy, necessity for large quantities of,” above).
12. Always take a walk between the main course and dessert. (See, “dogs, uses of,” in all previous posts) In theory, a 20-minute walk after a heavy dinner will return your blood lipids to wherever they were before you ate the brie en croute many hours ago as you waited for the turkey to pop.
13. For some reason, meat thermometers do not work on Thanksgiving, when they turn into random number generators. Resist the temptation to use multiple thermometers and to compare them; they will never give you the same reading and you will never be able to stop checking just one more device. Despite the advice in tip 9, do not—I repeat do not—rely for crucial information on a thermometer shaped like a turkey. Place it on your tablescape, if you think you have one, and back away.
14. Always refer to your table as a “tablescape.” That way, if you forget something banal like forks or water glasses, you will be able to justify the oversight because you are “telling a story.”
15. Leftovers should be given away, frozen, or thrown out by 10 p.m. on Black Friday. In fact, think of the whole day as an excuse to get rid of the food you have been obsessively producing for the last week or more. Use bamboo containers as a compromise between fancy glass stuff you will want to get back but will be too shy to mention, and planet-destroying plastic.
16. Remember, as you cook, eat, and clean up that, especially if you are over 30, everything you learned about the Pilgrims and the “Indians” (the Wampanoag) was false and self-serving. Commit to more than a land acknowledgement.