Twice in my life I have been counted on to bake the turkey for Thanksgiving. Both times, the bird was edible but not exactly memorable. Actually, I take that back—it was memorable for its lack of taste. One was too dry, the other too raw. And there’s nothing worse than a raw bird on Thanksgiving. It means sticking the thing back in the oven for who knows how long—and everyone has an opinion about that.
Since I am not responsible for the turkey this year, there’s no danger of my over- or undercooking it. In fact, I don’t even know how to operate the oven, a 1955 Wedgewood with as much chrome as a Cadillac from the same year. It’s a marvel to behold, even if you’re not baking in it (see “Tea for Two”). I’d actually give anything to drive it.
I’ve tried my hand at Thanksgiving desserts more often than main dishes, with pumpkin pie being the old standby—despite raconteur Garrison Keillor’s remark about it being “a living symbol of mediocrity.” One year I tried making it with fresh pumpkins. Hint for those who feel called to do the same: you need a lot of pumpkins.
That reminds me of a gag recipe I wrote in graduate school and attributed to Jesuit theologian Bernard Lonergan, who had designed a painstaking method for achieving intellectual insight. My fake pumpkin recipe went on for five pages before arriving at the first step: obtain a pumpkin by any means necessary. My advisor did not think it funny.
Any time I play fancy-free with a recipe, things do not turn out well, although I try to console myself with the hope that fortune favors the bold (cf. Audentes Fortuna Iuvat (Non)). Perhaps the most glaring example of this was when I surprised everyone with plum pudding. Since plums were not in season, I used the next best thing—prunes. The Latin for plum is prūnum, so I figured, what could go wrong? Let’s just say it gave new meaning to Black Friday.
There are certain things I remember from my childhood Thanksgivings, like going to the parade in Manhattan with my parents. It was so cold once that we huddled inside a store and watched through the window, my father hoisting me on his shoulders so I could see Bullwinkle. Then there was March of the Wooden Soldiers (1934), starring Laurel and Hardy, shown in syndication on a local station every year. Not realizing it at the time, it was a fairy-tale apocalyptic film, complete with Bo Peep, bogeymen, and six-foot wooden soldiers mistakenly ordered at the toy factory by a flustered Laurel.
In addition to the American fare, our meal usually included pasta, fish, an Italian green like broccoli rabe, wine, and pastries like cannoli and zeppole. There were also half a dozen or so of those dumbbell-shaped boxes of panettone, along with bottles of sambuca and grappa. The former was for my father, the latter for my grandfather, nonno.
We did have one interesting addition. Some said it made its way into the family via my uncle’s wife, who was not Italian. Others claimed it was a Native American recipe, although no one ever explained how that could be—especially since it involved cheese. I had never seen Apaches eating cream cheese on Broken Arrow (1956–58), and certainly not Cochise himself, who was played by Michael Ansara and later became a Klingon. So, I had my doubts.
The addition was an appetizer: celery stuffed with cream cheese. The cream cheese had to be prepared the night before by softening blocks of Philadelphia Cream Cheese and mixing in sliced green olives stuffed with red pimentos. The juice from the olive jar was then poured into the mix along with crushed walnuts. The resulting spread was used the next day to fill celery sticks. It resembled filling a cannoli shell with whipped ricotta, so in that sense it was familiar even though new.
The stuffed celery was delicious, the olive juice providing a salty taste that balanced the cream cheese. I could eat a dozen of them but was always admonished to “save room” for the actual meal. The biggest decision I faced at that point was the turkey meat: light or dark? They came around on different platters, and I was determined to make sure I hadn’t filled up before then. Honestly, though, I had a thing for pumpkin pie. Still do, no matter what Garrison Keillor said about it.
Image credits: Davey Gravy, Kateryna Hliznitsova. Want more? Click on “Amazon” for other publications or go to Robert Brancatelli. Visit other blog readers under “Who You Are.” Comment by clicking on “Leave a Reply” below, or contact us through the Contact tab above.
