Here we go again! Throw a brown shawl over the table, light the rust-colored candles, unbox the china, and bring out all the food we forget even exists the other 364 days of the year. For starters, the cranberry goop. It lays on a platter still holding the shape of the can because no one south of the Mason-Dixon line ever grew a cranberry, and we’re pretty sure couldn’t locate one in the grocery store either. So while we make fun of people who buy Pepperidge Farms stuffing because they can’t mix up cornbread and put it in a cast iron skillet for the dressing, we’re pretty lost when it comes to cranberry sauce. That’s why we just grab the can when we’re piling up the buggy with 60 other cans, all cream of mushroom soup, and don’t give it another thought until we dump it on its plate, three indented can rings on each end and all. Nobody actually eats any of it, but it adds color to the food scene (which reaches from here to the Georgia line), and I’m pretty sure it’s illegal in all fifty states to have a Thanksgiving dinner without it.
Same with the sage. I’m on, like, my second 2-ounce jar of sage in a 36-year marriage. That’s because the only time it gets pulled off the spice shelf is for the Thanksgiving dressing. It’s not really very good, truth be told, but it just smells and tastes like November, so I sprinkle a little in it for the social and traditional element of it. Up north they dump the whole jar in. Man, it’s awful!
It was a few years before I could get the dressing just right because after you crumble all that cornbread, you’ve got to get the right amount of broth in it, or it will be dry. “Put more broth”, Granny would stand over my shoulder.
“I’ve got enough liquid in here now to restock the Pacific Ocean!”
“Well, hon, start on the Atlantic.”
It’s true. The bread has to be beyond soggy and swimming because so much of the water evaporates out. Which begs the question, who thought of soggy bread? Isn’t that something we take great pains to make sure doesn’t happen to our bread on any other given day? Boy, those pilgrims! Those guys must have had a cookbook named I Bet You Never Thought of Eating This!
Then there’s the gravy. Oh, if you get into our neck of the woods deep enough (like to the esophagus), we have gravy pretty much every day. But the Thanksgiving kind is its own breed, because it has to have giblets, and giblets just don’t come in a can. They come in a – well – they come in that place you stick your hand in, the turkey bottom. If you wondered why the Thanksgiving gravy is so good, it’s because it has the heart, neck, liver, and gizzards in it. Yum! I can hear Granny bragging about it to the other Beverly Hillbillies now.
I don’t make mine that way. Mama did. I take a few pieces of the turkey and mix it in when I’m making ordinary, everyday gravy, and call those pieces giblets – which, by the way, is the topic for the first of a series of arguments around the Thanksgiving Day table. Whether it’s giblet with a hard g or a soft g. I’ve had a giblet or two that was definitely pronounced with the hard one.
It was more fun in the days when my brother used to hop up from the table, and go get the World Book to resolve arguments. Now everybody whips their phones out in sync in an effort to be right first.
Well, those are the Thanksgiving essentials. I mean, besides the very main thing - the bird that you actually carve there in front of everybody, complete with a skeleton, and a stick-your-hand-in-there-with-the-marinade part.
He’s the main culprit. He keeps you up all night. Whether you bake him or smoke him, you’ve got to set the alarm at all hours of the night to turn him or cover him or baste him some more. He’s why we only do this once a year. He’s almost as high-maintenance as two or three of the guests, mostly cousins of your cousins on the other side.
Yeah, the turkey’s the main dude, but a few years ago, somebody looked in their pantry after the stores closed and said, “Is that tomorrow?” And a new traditional Thanksgiving dish was born. It apparently was either bring that or Little Debbies. The person pulled out a can of green beans, a can of cream of mushroom soup, and of all things, a can of fried onions, and the green bean casserole made its debut.
It’s a new essential that doesn’t seem to be going away. Somebody invented Turkey’s twin brother, Durkee. Me? I’m okay with the old school stuff. We had enough leftovers as it was to feed most of Beijing and all of Wuhan.
But bring it. If that’s all you had to mix up, bring it. Just don’t do what a friend of mine did. She brought sweet potatoes that looked like they were gonna fit right in. They looked sweet, festive, and buttery, but when you took a bite, your tastebuds went into shock. Her secret ingredient was cumin. It turns out the turkey’s not the only one who needs pardoning! I have to agree with my husband, who said:
“Anybody that would do that to a sweet potato ought to be arrested!”
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