What’s YOUR Thanksgiving menu?

The Cap’n and I spent Thanksgiving of 1996 on a program in Arad where we and a group of fellow students managed to cobble together a quite respectable dinner.  We were joined by a few British and Australian friends who enjoyed the repast, but were hard pressed to discover the meaning behind the holiday feast.  What did Americans typically do on Thanksgiving Day?  Our friend Dory answered, “Eat until you’re sick.  Then watch football.  Then eat some more.”

I’m not sure the Pilgrims would have agreed with Dory’s summary, but nowadays that’s a pretty accurate description of the holiday.  The holiday of Thanksgiving was established in 1863 (in the middle of the Civil War) by President Abraham Lincoln, creating what Nathaniel Philbrick (author of Mayflower) describes as “a cathartic celebration of nationhood that would have baffled and probably appalled the godly Pilgrims.”  (Oy, what would they have thought of us scarfing turkey in Israel all these centuries later?)

What did the Pilgrims themselves eat for their first major harvest feast in the New World?  Philbrick says the crops that would have been harvested shortly before the feast would have included corn, squash, beans, barley, and peas.  Since barley had been harvested, it is possible that they were able to brew beer.  There would have been no pumpkin pies or cranberry sauce—those delicacies came later—but a wealth of fish and game were possible.  Striped bass, bluefish, and cod were in plentiful supply, and ducks, geese, wild turkeys and deer were likely roasted on spits and stewed in pottages with vegetables.  (Massasoit and other Indians brought 5 freshly killed deer to the meal.)  Interestingly, while we romanticize the turkey as being a New World bird at the time, Philbrick states that

[t]urkeys were by no means a novelty to the Pilgrims.  When the conquistadors arrived in Mexico in the sixteenth century, they discovered that the Indians of Central America possessed domesticated turkeys as well as gold.  The birds were imported to Spain as early as the 1520s, and by the 1540s turkey had become a fixture at English Christmases.  The wild turkeys of New England were bigger and much faster than the birds the Pilgrims had known in Europe and were often pursued in winter when they could be tracked in the snow.

My mother, living in Vermont, often reports on the progress of the wild turkeys across their vast lawn, and the appearance of the poults (or chicks) in late spring joining the parade.  So New England.

In high school and college, I discovered that Americans do not all have the same menu at the festive dinner.  While turkey may be a staple at most tables, side dishes are determined by the family’s ethnicity.  A Chinese-American friend of mine and I once made a joint Thanksgiving dinner (while we were both in England) with turkey (basted with soy sauce), stuffing, cranberry sauce, and stir-fried vegetables.  Italian-American friends of ours in California told us about their niece who had married a Mexican-American man, and how the two families had combined forces for Thanksgiving, roasting a turkey and accompanying it with homemade ravioli and handmade tamales.

Thanks to my New England mother, my family’s Thanksgivings growing up were pretty traditional: roast turkey, gravy, mashed potatoes, peas, cranberry-orange relish.  We had two kinds of stuffing (never cooked inside the bird, but in casserole dishes to avoid slowing the turkey’s cooking time down): apple-celery-onion, and a strange but surprisingly tasty dish invented by my Jewish great-grandmother, made with Corn Flakes, Rice Crispies, grated potato and carrot.  Despite my fondness for the latter stuffing, I’ve found the apple-celery-onion stuffing has more staying power with me, and I make it with cubes of fresh, delicious multi-grain bread, rosemary sourdough, or whatever looks aromatic and flavorful.  I’ve ditched the molded gelatin salad my mother used to make; never liked that.  The Cap’n doesn’t like peas, so I usually make green beans.  Last year I made a chocolate pumpkin tart, but found that the chocolate completely shouted down the taste of the pumpkin, from which I learned a valuable lesson: Sometimes two great tastes do NOT taste great together.  (This year I’m sticking to tradition.)  And when I was very young, my mother put hot rolls on the table with the meal, but after a few years she stopped, since there was quite enough starch on the table already.

A friend asked how Americans in Israel celebrate the holiday.  There is a spectrum of observance.  Some never got into it that much in America, and don’t observe it at all now.  Some keep to a turkey-and-stuffing meal at the end of November, but aren’t particular about which day exactly, most moving it to a Shabbat meal, either Friday night or Saturday lunch.  And a handful, I’ve heard, keep to a strictly fourth-Thursday-of-November plan.  The Crunch family follows the middle road, getting together with other American (or partially American) families and loosely commemorating the day.  Because we combine Thanksgiving with Shabbat, I have returned bread to the table, and we make Kiddush.  Beans once suggested I say the candle blessing thus: “Lehadlik ner shel Thanksgiving,” but I haven’t gone that far.

This year we’ll be joining forces with friends for a Friday night Thanksgiving.  I plan to make my children nap that afternoon, as the meal will be lavish and leisurely.  We will have turkey, gravy, stuffing, the works.  I find the white, thin-skinned potatoes in Israel don’t boil well, so I bake them first rather than boil, then skin and mash them.  I may add roasted garlic and olive oil to give them an Israeli flavor and avoid excess margarine at the meal.  I have cranberries in the freezer which I will chop in the food processor with an apple, an orange, and half a lemon to make my mother’s relish (sweetening with sugar to taste).  And I plan to make a pumpkin pie, but since one of our guests is British, and they generally do not have the chops for that kind of dessert, I’ll be making my What a tart!® tart for his benefit.

What is on YOUR family’s Thanksgiving menu?

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