Culture: Cooking for Thanksgiving

TORONTO, ONTARIO - Most United States citizens are already in recovery mode from an enormous Thanksgiving meal. The traditional meal of turkey, gravy, mashed potatoes, stuffing, cranberry sauce, and whatever family recipes supplement the societal conventions lends itself to over-eating and even indigestion. I've only cooked a Thanksgiving dinner once, twelve years ago when I was a graduate student in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and it was the first big group meal I had ever cooked.

The meal came about since I decided it was pointless to travel back across the continent for four days. There were plenty of other folks in my first-year graduate student class in chemical engineering who also had too far to travel and decided to stay, so I ended up with a group of five, which at the time was as many as I thought I might be able to handle.

Somehow, I found a turkey that wasn't too enormous for the group--and for the half-size oven in my dorm room. I suppose it would have made more sense to get a duck, but the Star Market in Allston, Massachusetts had a small turkey with the some of the dark meat removed (or something like that, I don't remember the details) that seemed a reasonable size to me at the time. However, it was so small that my recipe for stuffing was really too large for the bird, and some of it ended up having to be cooked separately.

My memory has faded for more than just the physical reality of the turkey. I know I consulted my mother about how to cook the turkey, but she couldn't teach me how to make gravy remotely and I've paid enough attention at holiday meals since then to understand just how pathetic my effort at the time was; it was a wonder that it tasted like gravy at all and I remember it was quite thin. I also remember that I tried a stuffing recipe that included sausage (I still have it inserted in my copy of Joy of Cooking acquired that Christmas, in fact) and I chose such lean sausage instead of the Jimmy Dean Sage sausage in the recipe that I decided that didn't turn out well, and I vowed to do more traditional stuffing if I ever did a Thanksgiving meal again. Probably the only dishes that were without issue were the mashed potatoes and salad.

Mostly I remember spending the whole day in the tiny dorm kitchen, logistically trying to get everything done. I remember listening to pre-recorded holiday programming on The Connection, which aired on WBUR 90.9 FM from ten to noon at the time, and I distinctly remember tuning in KGO-AM over the Internet at noon and listening to the Thanksgiving charity show hosted live by Bernie Ward as he interviewed people cooking a meal for people just as I was doing.

When people came over for the meal, I remember that it seemed pretty well-received. The turkey turned out amazingly well for a novice; I remember thinking that the white meat, especially, seemed quite moist and tasty. I wasn't brave enough to cook a dessert yet, so we had to settle for ice cream that one of the guests brought. Nobody told me they were sick in the days afterward, so I chalked it up as a success and decided to do it again someday.

By the next year, I was working at a start-up in the Boston area. I ended up working on Thanksgiving Day, so I wasn't cooking a Thanksgiving meal, and instead started doing large dinners on St. Patrick's Day. In fact, I would work on Thanksgiving Day until I started a tradition of leaving the country for Thanksgiving in 2001.