On Giving Thanks & Eating Turkey

My guess is that if you’re a product of the American public school system, at some point in your early years, you paraded to the cafeteria in either a floppy white paper hat or a brown construction paper headband with orange and brown feathers. Who doesn’t remember learning about the story of the first Thanksgiving when the grateful pilgrims sat down to a three-day-long feast with their friends, the Wampanoag Indians?

You can imagine my surprise, then, when I read in Andrew Smith’s Eating History that Thanksgiving has much less to do with pilgrims and Indians than it does with two women novelists I’d never even heard of: Sarah Josepha Hale and Jane G. Austin (no relation to the far more famous Jane Austen of Pride and Prejudice fame).

Yes, a meal was shared by the pilgrims and the Wampanoag Indians at Plymouth Colony in 1621, when then Governor William Bradford declared a holiday after the harvest, but the day in question was in no way considered to be one of thanksgiving. Anyone who knows anything about the pilgrims knows that a day of thanksgiving would have been spent on one’s knees thanking God in church, not gluttonously feasting around a groaning board. They were Puritans after all!

Our first president was no Puritan but he agreed that thanksgiving was one thing and a celebratory meal quite another. Washington frequently declared days of thanksgiving, but he also went out of his way to recommend that “such Recreation, as, though at other Times innocent, may be unbecoming the Purpose of this Appointment, be omitted on so solemn an Occasion.”

All things considered, you have to wonder how such solemn days of thanksgiving managed to turn into our Thanksgiving extravaganza, complete with the Macy’s Day Parade, football games galore, and enough food to sink a ship.

Well, people being what they are, festive thanksgiving dinners were celebrated around the country, although not necessarily on the same day and not necessarily with the same food. In her 1823 novel Northwood; or, a Tale of New England, Sarah Josepha Hale—later known as “the Mother of Thanksgiving,” devoted an entire chapter to one such dinner, complete with roast turkey, gravy, and pumpkin pie. Shortly after, she made it her mission to have Thanksgiving declared a national holiday. For the next forty years, she lobbied any and all politicians she could, ultimately appealing to President Lincoln himself. In the summer of 1863, on the heels of the decisive battles of Gettysburg and Vicksburg, he granted her wish. Thus it was that the last Thursday in November became a national holiday, celebrated in both North and South.

Some twenty years later, another writer provided the newly nationalized holiday with its colonial history. In her Standish of Standish: A Story of the Pilgrims, Jane G. Austin sent the Thanksgiving feast back in time: straight back to that 1621 harvest holiday declared by William Bradford. All of sudden, the pilgrims and Indians sat down, not to a bountiful harvest celebration, but to a Thanksgiving meal of clam chowder, oysters, turkeys stuffed with beechnuts, venison pasties, not to mention all manner of roasts, vegetables, ales, and root beer.

Thus it was that the pilgrims’ harvest festival was transformed into a national day of Thanksgiving signed into law by President Lincoln in his desire to unite a war-torn country.

But still there’s the matter of the turkey. Why “Turkey Day” in particular?

Well, on the one hand, it’s symbolic. Native to America, the wild turkey was Benjamin Franklin’s choice for the national bird: "For my own part I wish the Bald Eagle had not been chosen the Representative of our Country. He is a Bird of bad moral Character . . . The Truth [is that] the Turkey is in Comparison a much more respectable Bird, and withal a true original Native of America.”

On the other hand, it’s affordable—at least as compared to a standing rib roast or beef tenderloin—as are stuffing, sweet potatoes, corn bread, cranberry sauce, and pumpkin pie. In this regard, TV chef Sandra Lee couldn’t be more in the spirit of Thanksgiving with her cost-cutting menu that promises a festive dinner for eight for no more than $45.00 (as she says, “that’s less than $6.00 a person!”).

Symbolic and affordable. It united our country and still does. Every immigrant group makes the turkey its own, stuffing it with basmati rice, jasmine rice, fried rice, sauerkraut, and even refried beans—foods those long ago pilgrims and Wampanoag Indians could never have imagined!

Does it bother me that Thanksgiving turns out to be as much literary creation as historical fact—and perhaps a little bit more? Not in the slightest. What would Christmas be, after all, without Charles Dickens and his tale of Ebenezer Scrooge?

 As I’ve often had reason to conclude, never underestimate the power of the pen!

Munchkins, Gherkins, Napkins, and . . . Pumpkins?

At this time of year, you can’t ignore them. They’re everywhere. There’s not a doorstep in my neighborhood that doesn’t boast at least one of them. They line the entrance to the supermarkets and the farm stand up the road may as well be Noah’s ark bobbing about in a vast expanse of autumnal orange.

Pumpkins, of course. The undisputed king of the season that begins at Halloween and extends straight through Thanksgiving. What other vegetable is so . . . well, so big? “The blue whales of the vegetable world”—that’s what John Ayto calls them in his The Diner’s Dictionary.

So here’s what I don’t get. Munchkins are little bites. Gherkins are little pickles. Napkins are little cloths. Manikins are little men. And pumpkins? Little . . . what? Who could ever have looked at a pumpkin and called it little?

My etymology dictionary tells me the word traces back to the Greek pepon, which meant melon—but that doesn’t really help me very much because as far as I’m concerned, pumpkins and melons have little in common except their size and the fact that they’re both filled with lots of seeds. In Latin it was a pepo, in Middle French a pompon, and in England for quite a long time it was a pompion, also spelled pumpion. Sometime in the seventeenth or eighteenth century someone had the bright idea to add the –kin suffix which in virtually every other instance you can think of denotes either smallness or affection, as in “oh, my little lambkins” and “what a sweet little babykins.” But why would a vegetable known above all else for its sheer size have acquired such an endearingly diminutive suffix? As I said, I don’t get it. Apparently no one else does either because not a one of my reference books hazards so much as a guess. Hasn’t anyone else ever wondered how the pumpkin got its suffix?

Maybe it’s that it’s hard to take such an enormous vegetable seriously. For centuries people have been using it to mock pretensions of grandeur. The Roman writer Seneca referred to the deification of the Emperor Claudius as his “pumpkinification”—not all that different, when you think about it, from the pumpkinification of the pumpkin itself into Cinderella’s magic coach. And no one has ever relished being called a “pumpkin-head”: “They ain’t got two ideas to bless themselves with, the stupid punkin-headed consaited [sic] blockheads!” wrote the humorist Thomas Chandler Haliburton in the mid-nineteenth century.

All this said, I’ll confess to an affection for the oddly-named vegetable. It’s hard to think of another that can compete with that other gargantuan of the season: the ginormous turkey. Because my Thanksgiving table has a sizeable contingent of vegetarians, there’s always an entrée just for them and it almost always features the pumpkin. One year it was pumpkin-stuffed ravioli with a sage brown-butter sauce. Another time it was a Native American vegetable stew served in a hollowed-out pumpkin. But this year, I’ll once again make my daughter’s favorite: a Cheddar-Pumpkin Tart with a Whole-Wheat Parmesan Crust.   

Cheddar-Pumpkin Tart (makes one 9” tart)

For the crust:

1 cup unbleached all-purpose flour

½ cup whole wheat pastry flour

¼ cup grated fresh Parmesan

½ tsp salt

8 tbsp cold unsalted butter

1 egg yolk

¼ cup cold water

Mix the dry ingredients together in a food processor. Add the butter, cut into small pieces, and pulse until the mixture looks like coarse sand. Add the egg yolk and water, and pulse until the dough just comes together. Wrap the dough in wax paper and refrigerate until firm. Roll out between wax paper and place into a 9” tart pan with removable bottom; double over the outer edge to make a thicker outer crust. Refrigerate for 30 minutes. Line with aluminum foil, fill with pie weights (or dried beans) and bake for 10 minutes at 400. Remove foil and weights, prick the bottom and sides with a fork and bake 10 minutes longer, until golden brown. Cool on wire rack.

For the filling:

2 tsp butter

1 tsp canola oil

1 medium onion or 2 leeks, thinly sliced

½ tsp salt

¾ cup pureed pumpkin (canned is better because drier)

2 eggs

½ cup cream

½ tsp dried thyme

¼ tsp white pepper

3 ½ ounces sharp Cheddar cheese (about 1 ½ cups)

Melt 1 tsp butter and the oil in large skillet over medium heat. Cook onion or leeks 10-12 minutes, until soft, stirring often. Sprinkle with salt and set aside.

Beat pumpkin and eggs together in medium bowl. Add the cream, a bit of salt, thyme, and pepper to taste.

Assemble the tart: scatter the cooked onion or leeks on the bottom of the cooled crust. Sprinkle the cheese over the onion. Pour the pumpkin mixture on top and spread over the cheese. Dot with remaining teaspoon of butter and bake for 30-40 minutes, or until a knife inserted in the center comes out clean. Serve hot, warm, or at room temperature. (adapted from DeeDee Stovel’s Pumpkin: A Super Food for All 12 Months of the Year)

Note: Because Thanksgiving itself is a bit crazed around here, I make this tart a day or two ahead of time and keep it wrapped in foil in the refrigerator. Then, when the turkey comes out of the oven on the big day (it needs a bit to time to rest anyway), I just slip the tart into the oven to reheat.

On Chutney

An unexpectedly quiet evening. A bumper crop of apples from a visit to an orchard earlier in the week. A bag of cranberries in the freezer since last Thanksgiving. I don’t know about you, but to me, a spare hour or two plus apples and cranberries equals chutney. Yes, I know that might not be your very first thought, but you see I’d already treated my family to an apple-cranberry crisp the evening before—which they devoured in record time—and I figured I’d vary things up with something savory. The beauty of chutney is that, apart from its starring fruit or vegetable, it’s made out of ingredients you tend to have on hand, it doesn’t take all that long to whip together, and people are unduly impressed when you serve up (or better yet, present them with a gift of) what they imagine must have taken the better part of a weekend to produce.

Within ten minutes, I’d peeled and chopped up my apples and had them happily simmering away on the stove with the cranberries (straight out of the freezer), some brown sugar and raisins for sweetness, some onion, ginger, and vinegar for tang, and a sprinkle of curry powder for a little warmth. Twenty minutes later, the various bits and pieces had magically transformed themselves into a ruby-colored, exotically-scented sludge of a paste that I let cool before spooning into jars which I then stashed in the nether regions of my refrigerator where no one ever looks. And there my chutney will remain, quietly mellowing and maturing until Thanksgiving rolls around, when its jewel-toned piquancy will shimmer all the more alluringly alongside the turkey, mashed potatoes, and gravy—each and every one delicious, but not, as far as appearance is concerned, particularly attractive.

When I was a girl, the only chutney I knew was Major Grey’s Mango, which my mother always had a jar of on the door of the refrigerator. I don’t remember any of us ever actually eating it, though; she used to serve it with cheese and minced scallions as a fancy hors-d’oeuvre when company came over. It was when I went off to college in New York City that I discovered the wonderful world of spicy chutneys. I used to take the subway down to St. Mark’s Place and meander my way into one of any number of inexpensive Indian restaurants where you could dine like a rajah or rani for about $10.00 a person (admittedly, this was quite a few years ago). The moment you sat down, you were given a plate of crispy pappadum and a trio of chutneys, invariably including a spicy green one (whether coriander, chili, or mint), a tangy brownish-purple tamarind one, and burnished-red minced onion in cayenne.

At some point while I was eating my way through the gallons of chutney I consumed during my hundreds of visits to St. Marks Place, it dawned on me that the chutneys in Indian restaurants had very little in common with the Major Grey’s Mango in my mother’s refrigerator. At some point later, when I had a fully functioning kitchen of my own and had developed a fondness for producing jams, pickles, and chutneys, it occurred to me that my obviously Americanized apple and cranberry chutney was different still (they don’t have cranberries in India, after all!). What have they got in common other than the fact that they all consist of chopped up bits of fruits, herbs, and vegetables—which, by the way, is what the word sort-of means: it’s from the Hindi chatni— and ultimately from the Sanskrit catni—which means, simply, “to crush.”

It was Julie Sahni, author of Classic Indian Cooking, who finally set me straight. There are three types of popular relishes—or chutneys—she explains in her Classic Indian Cooking: chopped vegetable relishes (like the cayenne-sprinkled onion one); fresh herb pastes (like the chili, coriander and mint ones), and preserved relishes made by cooking cut-up pulpy fruits like apples, pears, tamarind, or mangoes, with sugar, vinegar and spices (like my mother’s Major Grey Chutney and the apple-cranberry one I cooked up the other night).

Then I happened to read David Burton’s wonderful The Raj at Table: A Culinary History of the British in India, which begins with a telling exchange of parting gifts, so to speak. Although British rule over India officially ended in 1947, the subcontinent held onto quite a number of specifically English institutions, including the parliamentary, legal, and railway systems, not to mention the language itself. What was not kept, unsurprisingly, was English food. On the other hand, when the English departed, after some hundreds of years in India they took very little with them. A few words perhaps—like bungalow, dinghy, jodhpur, jungle, pajamas, and shampoo. Mostly what they took was the food. Whether or not there really was an officer in the Bengal Lancers named Major Grey is a subject of much contention, but no one can deny the enduring popularity of the chutney that bears his name. It’s even inspired a little ditty:

All things chickeney and mutt’ny

Taste better far when served with chutney.

This is the mystery eternal:

Why didn’t Major Grey make colo-nel?

If the Brits got away with it, I figure, why can’t I? And so I give to you my recipe for an entirely inauthentic but very delicious American chutney. Make it today. Before you know it, it’ll be Thanksgiving.

Apple-Cranberry Chutney

3 cups whole cranberries (fresh or frozen)

4-5 apples, peeled, cored, and chopped

1 cup light or dark brown sugar

½ cup raisins (light or dark)

¼ cup minced fresh ginger

1 cup chopped onion

¼ cup vinegar (I used cider vinegar, but other fruit ones would be nice too)

pinch curry powder

grated zest of 1 lemon

Mix everything up in a large pot, bring to a boil, reduce heat, and let simmer for about 20 minutes, stirring often, until the mixture is thickened. Let cool, spoon into jars, and refrigerate. Of course you can eat this right away, but it’s a lot better if you wait a few weeks. This is also great, by the way, with pears instead of (or even in addition to) the apples.