GIVING THEM THE BIRD

Most folks are eagerly anticipating Thanksgiving, talking nostalgically about family recipes and pumpkin pie. But I just can’t get excited about the turkey.  This is not simply because I have to prepare it.  It’s because I hate turkey.   Frankly, there must be a bunch of us, secret turkey subversives, who just nod and keep our faces even when folks salivate about the big bird on its sacred day.

If Ben Franklin had gotten his way, and the turkey had been selected as our national symbol, gracing coins and crests, maybe it would have been off limits as a food group.  No one I’m aware of eats American eagle. But somehow the turkey has become the edible symbol of our most fundamental American holiday. 

I’m daydreaming of assembling a holiday dinner this week that would be an all-inclusive, anti-turkey Thanksgiving.  What could be more America in the 2000’s than a melting pot meal?  A little sushi appetizer, some Chicken Tiki Masala (now practically the national dish of Great Britain), rice and beans… you get the picture.  Shouldn’t we create something that better reflects the cuisine of our country’s present demographics rather than retreading what some starving immigrants trash picked one late November in Massachusetts?

Sure, go ahead and toss your recipes at me, your turkey deep fryer, your perfectly browned breast draped with bacon, your whole garlic clove in the cavity.  You won’t convince me.   These Band-Aids are the equivalent of throwing a little KY jelly (or better yet Zestra) at the real problem; beneath that sultry skin, turkey is a mostly dry bird.  Even the alleged juicy brown drumstick mostly disappoints.

 

Maybe I dislike turkey because it’s the kissing cousin to chicken, which was forever ruined for me by my mother’s weekly skinless boneless breast dinners, incinerated and dehydrated under the broiler with a dab of margarine.   And then, if I had any hope of reconciliation with chicken as an adult, it has been beaten out of me by the countless frozen breasts with fake tattooed BBQ stripes that rest on lumps of rice or lettuce at every ballroom event lunch, banquet or conference meal.  Chicken is the go-to entre, the little black dress of mass meals.  

But, look, you say, look at all the fab accompaniments there are for turkey!  There are sauces and gravies, herbs and cranberry goop and citrus reductions.  Save your breath.  These only mask the issue, like feminine deodorant spray.  Be honest, a basic slice off the breast is like chewing through gypsum board.  The only possible way I enjoy turkey is a Thanksgiving leftover dark meat sandwich with fresh bread and lots of mayo (my husband would argue here for Miracle Whip.)

I don’t like picturing the farm to table journey of my bird.  We Americans don’t fancy the idea of getting a gander at where our food really comes from.  We’re more comfortable with the concept of shrink-wrap, dry aged, butchered cuts or ground meat.  But with a turkey, you can’t avoid imagining the living animal, even though by the time it gets to you, it more resembles an open casket viewing.  There it is, nude and embarrassed, hunched in forgiveness on your platter, minus a few extremities.  A turkey on the table is so… whole…. so intact. 

We all grew up with illustrations of hatchet-wielding pilgrims clomping around in those buckled shoes after the turkey.  As a child I was scarred by the tale of my mother’s family cook in Arkansas who wrung the chicken’s neck bare handed or chopped it off on a block while the rest of it flopped around a few seconds longer before collapsing.   I think of this image when I pull that old candy-cane neck out of the bird’s body cavity, where its been stuffed like some mafia message from “The Godfather.” And where do the feet go? What the hell happens to the feet?  Do they get shipped to China where they are considered a delicacy? Forget I asked, I don’t want to know.   And I don’t want to contemplate the image of mechanized plucking. Turkey feathers must be the poultry equivalent of a woman’s unwanted facial hair. 

 

Rolling my cart down the grocery aisle during the holidays, I am both repelled and drawn to the jumbled cases of plastic wrapped white skinned turkeys of varying weights, their knees drawn up in a yoga child’s pose. They look like a horror version of those Anne Geddes photographs and greeting cards, the ones with the naked babies in groups or dressed as single flowers and ladybugs.  Unlike the babies, the turkey skin has a mottled, bluish cast, all pimpled and dimpled.  It’s when I reach into the case and see the tiny pool of blood in the packaging that I ask myself what’s wrong with stuffed shells for a change of pace?  Why not honor the contribution of Italian Americans this Thanksgiving season?  Anyone?

By most accounts, the turkey is a mean, ugly bird.  And dumb as a stone.  Maybe anything that dumb deserves to die.  Evolution and natural selection haven’t helped it out any.  We have a pack of wild turkeys in my suburban NY town that claimed the median of a highway strip as their “hang turf” last year.  A hundred yards further and they could have had a nice little stretch of woodland to themselves. But no, these dimwits spent months playing chicken (pardon the pun) with the cars as they exited the interstate.   About every other week there would be a mound of feathery road kill on the off-ramp.   Honestly, any animal whose cry is “gobble gobble” is asking for trouble.

But like the turkey, I’m a big talker.  I dream about a turkey-free Thanksgiving, but I’ll never really take action.  My family wouldn’t allow it.  If it were my call, I’d eliminate the other colorless foods that have become a tradition in our family, my mother-in-law’s corn and oysters casserole, the stuffing and mashed potatoes, which will sit like wallpaper paste in our stomachs, the rutabaga, the white rolls and then the gravy made with parts that have been sitting inside the turkey’s ass in a bag (don’t get me started about the word “gizzards.”)  Once it’s been cooked to perfection it all looks like nursing home steam table food.  No teeth required. 

 

In the end it’s the ritual.  It’s about all of us coming together.  It’s about tradition, no matter how much I might daydream about a more sumptuous menu.  And regardless of the time invested to plan, shop and prep, my loved ones will clean their plates in roughly 20 minutes following the word “Amen.”

They will stand up, groan and stretch and return to their touch football game, their headphones and texting, their X-box war game or their custom couch indentation in front of the flat screen TV.  We sisters will clear and soak, load and dry, and lay out dessert, as unquestioning of the routine as the wives in the Bin Laden complex.

 

 

But none of us complain.  We love one another’s company, the addition of a displaced person at the table, the stray college buddy, the big city boyfriend, the sense of completion that all of our chickees are back in the nest for this long weekend and we get to mother the whole lot.  And for one day, at least, turkey and all, the world feels in its place.

 

Happy Thanksgiving!

 

 

 

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The Berry Patch

The local berry farm closed a few years ago.  That was a sad day for me.  The farmer’s kids didn’t have the desire to keep up the family land that had for so long produced juicy strawberries in late June and then perfectly honeycombed raspberries (purple and red) right on their tail.  In late July, there’d be blueberries so fat and sweet you could pop them right in you mouth. Sugar would have been redundant.

The closing of the patch was a loss to many of us locals and summer people and anyone who enjoys the ritual of growing or gathering their food understands why. Not only was there something satisfying about serving my family fresh, local grown berries, but there was a sense of accomplishment in picking them myself.

Heading to the berry patch was really more about communing and about companionship.  Bent over or on my knees between the rows of green bushes, dragon flies humming, and crickets chirping, the field was my church at times, the ritual a kind of morning vespers. Berry picking was something I did with my friend Liza (aka “Groove” a nickname from the 70’s, the exact origin of which has been lost).  Liza and I grew up on our little lake bay in the summers. She is the oldest continual friend I have and two of our children were born in the same years.  They have inherited their friendships by birth, an unspoken powerful connection.  Those ties go deep.

In the many years that Liza and I berry-picked, we survived the eye-rolling and the ridicule over our dogged devotion while the short season lasted.  Together and alone we braved hot temperatures, rain and mist, bugs and flies all to find our peace, chatting and picking, talking and advising, finding the rhythm of the row as we filled the little green cardboard boxes and loaded them onto the farm’s hand nailed wooden trays.

It was the conversation that counted, more than anything.  As our hands felt down the stalk, determining the firmness of a berry, our eyes focused on the color and our minds were free to talk.  Picking was also about tending a friendship, sustaining the strong parts and feeling tenderly for the weaker places.  Nothing was off-limits, in that easy way that lifelong friends have with one another.  We covered kids and parenting, picked over our marriages and memories and reinforced summer rituals we’d now instilled in our own children; Monday night square dancing, Friday night s’mores at the campfire. We gossiped and swapped stories.  We ate handfuls of berries straight from the vine.  Being in the patch accomplished many things.

When they were younger, Liza and I would drop our kids at the morning camp and race to the patch to pick and talk.  As they got older and able to join in, we’d occasionally bring them in the afternoons.  Even the most zealous berry picker soon became bored by our itinerant worker staying power.   They soon lost interest.

At home, berries were eaten plain or became ingredients for my annual ritual of jam-making.  I loved jam days; the washing, boiling and canning, ladling the sluggish ruby mixture into the cut glass Ball jars and later affixing the personal labels my artist friend Laura made for me.  The jams were my gift to dear friends at the holiday, a little bit of summer vacuum sealed in a jar.

It hasn’t quite been the same without the patch.  Yes, there are berries aplenty in the farmers markets around.  But it’s not the same.  It’s not like passing the field weekly and noting the height of the bushes, watching the farmer on his tractor and feeling the anticipation of opening day with the fervor of a baseball fan.  I miss the satisfying heft of lifting my pallet on the scale to be weighed, of stashing the boxes of fruit in the back of my car and closing the tailgate.

There’s talk of a new patch opening next year.  The plants are supposedly in the ground now, although I can't see them from the road.  Liza and I have more luxury of time as our children have aged.  In the absence of berry picking, we’ve found other places and ways to commune, on hikes with the dogs, in chairs at the beach with sunhats covering our heads.  Will we still find the same magic in the patch, that moment of release from our homebound selves?  Will our pattern be broken, our devotion lessened by the long break in our ritual?  I’ll let you know next summer.  

Happy Valentine's Day

Recipes are the currency by which generations of women define and distinguish themselves from other families.  These sometimes secret formulas, handed down from mother to daughter, are inscriptions of endearment, the personal stamp encrypted in each dish like DNA.  For my husband’s family, it’s the rutabaga recipe at Thanksgiving and the corn and oysters stuffing.  On my side, it’s the secret ingredient of buttermilk in which to cook lima beans, Snickerdoodle cookies and a simple homemade teriyaki marinade for flank steak that tenderizes meat as if it were a five-star chop house.

 

And if cooking is a physical manifestation of love, then it was a heart-felt gift this past summer to receive my grandmother’s well-worn 1943 original  Joy of Cooking.  Like a butterfly working it’s way out of the cocoon, my mother has begun wriggling free of her possessions.  It’s an almost compulsive need to shed herself of her earthly weight before she is incapable of doing so, although thankfully there are no signs that she is flagging.  She is a methodical person, a plotter and list maker like me, and she is determined to hand her three girls the physical pieces of our legacy in person.

When I eyeballed the cracked spine and no-nonsense pale blue and white cloth cover, I hesitated.  True confession: I’m a sloppy cook book chef.  I like to improvise too much and I’m lazy when it comes to precise directions.  Blanching, poaching, measuring, sifting, these are all too fussy.  I like to experiment a little, break the rules.  Besides, I thought, I had already lovingly transcribed my favorite family dishes onto index cards in a recipe holder I‘d made as a kid in 4-H.   The book was delicate, the pages yellowed.

Inside the front cover was a notation in pencil from my grandfather.  And then in my grandmother’s alternatively loopy and cramped handwriting was a poem she had clearly copied as a younger wife, presumably to remind herself that the way to her young husband’s heart was ultimately through his stomach.

“Crestfallen bride, you labored long

To bake that lovely cake
And heard your husband’s
“Not so good as my mother used to make”

Before you shed your angry tears
Or hang your head in shame, 
Remember – not too long ago
His father said the same”

I smiled when I read this anachronistically docile and sentimental ditty.  Nana Stokes was anything but a blushing bride.  She was a grand, strong, southern woman, a concert pianist who moved north when she married a Yankee.  She had her funny eccentricities, her fur coat, her French words, her guided tours to foreign countries.   But almost above all of that, she was a consummate cook whose love for us all manifested itself in her giant Sunday suppers.  Long before people anguished over clogged arteries, gluten-free diets and veganism, she was a cooker of lard, that southern staple that made for feather-light fried chicken and pie crusts that flaked like croissants.   She boiled okras and used bacon grease liberally.  She salted watermelon and made berry sherbets and pound cakes with dairy cases of butter. She would have laughed in the face of canola oil or scoffed at Mrs. Dash.

My grandfather, a much quieter soul, was probably stunned into submission by her cooking.  I imagine that it was her ability in the kitchen that held him at times, that endeared her to him, that smoothed out her rough, bossy edges and her strident voice.  I wonder now, how he viewed her when she was hard at work, her tongue  clucking, arms flailing around the timing of her roast, a shock of curly hair wilted onto her forehead by the blast of oven heat. 

Even in the later years of their marriage, where habit and familiarity had frayed their patience, made them snappish and outwardly less considerate, her cooking brought all parties to the table on a Sunday after church.  Food was the great equalizer.  Being called to the table meant children washed their hands and grown-ups laid down their discussions before pulling up a chair and smoothing a napkin on their laps. Heads bowed, lips murmured, silverware clattered.   Family time. 

Flipping through the middle pages of The Joy of Cooking, a yellowed newspaper clipping fell out, and I reached to pick it up.  Now this was more like the feisty grandmother I knew. 

“Remember Christopher Morley’s little stanza – 

 “The man who never in his life
 Has washed the dishes with his wife
 Or polished up the silver plate –
 He is still largely celibate.”

And there it was, I smiled to myself.  The bookends of a bride’s life captured in this best-selling bible of domesticity.  She had left her father’s house to marry with the unbridled hopefulness of a young woman. And she had evolved, like all of us, into a more realistic and gimlet-eyed wife.  Her chosen stanza reflected the shrewder woman who had come to terms with a rich, mellowing love amidst the servitude and routine of real life.  It was this wife who had wisely learned to barter a little nookie in the bedroom for some help in the kitchen.

Because lets face it, when all else fails, a cook can always withhold the dessert.