Thanksgiving

Meant to do my final thoughts on Thankgsgiving either Thursday or Friday. But between cooking, eating, a computer outage, a couple of temper tantrums by my 3 year old and some much needed cleaning of our apartment, only getting to it now.

Thanksgiving is one of America's foundation myths. Every culture has them. And, as with most foundation myths, there is much hidden behind the myth. When Augustus hired Virgil to write the Aeniad, truth had almost nothing to do with the bargain. It was all about giving Rome a myth to be proud of so they could comfortably forget the military coup Augustus had carried out. In our case the happy shiny myth of thanksgiving hides our history of genocide against Native Americans and our establishment as a slave nation. Most Americans prefer the shiny happy myth to the reality. But I believe that if we don't face the skeletons in our closet we can never overcome the consequences of those skeletons. You don't grow and improve through denial.

This is a theme I have explored every year on both Thanksgiving and Columbus Day. I always find myself torn among the holiday as a foundation myth like any other foundation myth; the genocide behind the myth; and the very real meaning that America has to the grandson of an immigrant who escaped pogroms in the old country.

I will not dwell so much on it this year. Others have written about the myth of Thanksgiving on Culture Kitchen this year and if people want to read my thoughts they can click here and read on.

Last entry I described my technique of treating poultry with concentrated tea to give it extra moistness and flavor. I soaked the capon we are having for Thanksgiving for over 24 hours in the tea, turning it over mid way through to expose both sides.

Today I transferred the capon to a more traditional pre-cooking treatment: a salty broth. In its basic form, brining means to soak a bird in salt water for at least 6 hours (I usually do it 12-24 hours). The brine adds flavor and moisture to the meat. I first heard about this method from Alton Brown on the Food Network. I was impressed with the results. As a white meat fan, dryness is an issue. Brining definitely helps.

But I am never content to follow a recipe. So I immediately decided to use a salty broth instead of brine. So I usually take salt, pepper, poultry seasoning (one of my grandmother's favorite seasonings) and some sort of dry soup mix. Then I pour hot water over it to make the broth. Why a mix? Laziness. Making my own broth is more work than I feel like doing and even mediocre dry mixes can add a good underflavor to the meat. I soak the bird in this broth overnight or longer turning the bird midway through.

For brothing (my version of brining) for our Thanksgiving capon, I chose an Osem mushroom soup dry mix. This is a good base for many soups, stews and stuff I make. It isn't anything spectacular, but for an easy way to add some good, earthy, mushroom flavor, it's good. I wouldn't use it as a dominant flavor, but as an underlying flavor it works well. So right now the bird is in the broth.

Last entry I discussed our choice of bird this year: a capon.

Today I immersed the bird into concentrated cherry tea.

Why cherry tea? Because it made sense last year, it worked and people loved it. Sometimes my cooking instincts jump out and give me an idea that is off the wall. About 90% of the time they work very well...we won't talk about the other 10%. Those suck.

For example, the first time I sat around watching Iron Chef (a Food Network show we obsessed over for about a year then got tired of), the idea popped into my mind to bread a meatloaf. Meatloaf often sucks. But there are ways to make a meatloaf wonderful. One is to marinate the hell out of it in something very flavorful. I have done that successfully. Another, which I picked up from a former landlady in Los Angeles, is to wrap the meatloaf in bacon. The bacon fat saturates the meatloaf and you KNOW (assuming you aren't Kosher or Hallal) that tastes good. I came up with the idea of breading the meatloaf as a way of making it moist and delicious. It works. And it was an inspiration that came out of nowhere while watching some really good chefs get creative.

Last year, as I was contemplating a horde descending on our house for Thanksgiving and feeling the need to do something notable, my taste instincts went into overdrive. I have a knack of being able to imagine how flavors will go together. And something about a particular tea blend we had seemed to go well with turkey...or other poultry. I extrapolated on the idea of brining a bird (soaking it in a flavorful, salty solution for a day to add flavor and moisture) and came up with the idea of "teaing" a bird.

This year, on a whim, Joy and I bought a capon for Thanksgiving.

I have always liked Thanksgiving (as a very food-centered holiday) despite a certain ambivalence towards the underlying colonialism of the holiday. Some years I have written a diary focusing on the ambivalence of Thanksgiving (and Columbus Day) for those of us who know how bloody colonialism was in Amreica but also know that our own families may well have been saved from bloody pogroms and holocausts in Europe by the existence of America.

But as a food holiday, I gotta like Thanksgiving. My holiday fare has varied over the years, from chicken to Turkey breast to Turducken. The Turducken was not as wonderful as we expected...though only tried it from one company. Seldom to we have enough guests for a full turkey. Although I have made a huge variety of stuffings in my life (Kasha-based, corn meal based, with every kind of nut or fruit, you name it) my holiday oriented stuffing is always my grandmother's famous concoction which is basically challah, butter (only real, unsalted butter), walnuts, salt, pepper and poultry seasoning. Nothing else. My grandmother was a simple cook and this is one of the few recipes where I keep to that simplicity. A touch of nutmeg or Greek seasoning is about all I do...or substituting pecans when a friend who is allergic to walnuts is joining us.

So my plan for a shortcut backfired a bit.

It's now my third year buying kosher turkeys for Thanksgiving. The best birds of any kind you can buy are kosher because "koshering" is the closest thing to brining. Kosher meats are usually plump and succelent.

They are also salty if you include salt in your season. Of course, I totally forgot that little detail this year.

Let's say, I will be retaining a lot of water for the next couple of weeks.

Oh well.

Yet, given the sage-thyme-rosemary-oregano-garlic butter I slathered therein said bird, may I say my salty bird totally kicked ass.

Oh. Yes. Indeed.

Every year I write a special note regarding Thanksgiving. I think it is always good to examine our national myths as well as our national realities. And, as I indicated during my recent comments on Columbus Day, my thoughts regarding America's foundation myths have been recently affected both by my realization that my own family never would have survived had America not existed as a haven, and by the realization, reading about King Leopold II of Belgium's genocidal regime in the Congo, that the effects of colonialism on the natives of a nation for centuries after that colonial regime ends. But this year I have more hopeful thoughts at Thanksgiving, after the election, than I did at Columbus Day, before the election. The hope of the election reminds me of the real intention behind Thanksgiving, separate from its myth and its reality.

First off, one thing that Americans seldom consider is that Thanksgiving is an ambiguous holiday when viewed objectively. I, like most of us, love Thanksgiving because it is essentially our main feasting holiday, the day we all get together with friends and eat as much good food as we can stuff into our bloated bellies. But Thanksgiving, like Columbus Day, has two basic messages beyond the excuse to eat lots of food. The first, and most commonly recognized, meaning is a celebration of key events that led to our nation’s founding. We celebrate those who made our life today possible. Many of us have a particular reason to celebrate these holidays because without the founding of the United States, our families would not exist. I come from a family whose roots go back to Jewish communities in Germany and Lativia. We came to the United States early in the 1900’s, escaping one of many waves of anti-Jewish attacks in Europe. We came to the US and succeeded. Those of my family who remained in Germany or Latvia would almost certainly not have survived World War II. German and Latvian Jews were largely exterminated in the Holocaust. So in a very real way, I owe my life to the events celebrated (in almost mythical form) on Columbus Day and Thanksgiving. Without these events, the United States may never have been founded and my family may have had no place to go and we would have been exterminated. These holidays represent the opportunity given many of our families to find better, safer lives apart from the Old World prejudices.