The most important ingredients
With one exception, I’ve accumulated the ingredients for my part of Thanksgiving dinner. I am in charge of hors d’oeurves (otherwise known as appetizers, but I’ve learned how to spell the French version, so, I use it whenever I can) and biscuits. And, knowing my penchant for making too much, I’ve made an iron clad list of what I will prepare to bring over the river and through the woods to my daughter’s house, where my son-in-law will ply us with a succulent, oh-so-succulent, smoked turkey.
Now, this all seems quite normal, but it’s only relatively so. You see, earlier this week I had some time to spare and I sat down in the living room on the sofa where only the cat sits. Armed with a huge cup of tea and three brand-spanking-new magazines that had arrived the day before, I looked forward to a trip thorough the fantasy land of women’s publications.
All of the periodicals had extensive articles about Thanksgiving, describing elaborately decorated tables, mouth-watering side dishes, luscious desserts along with incredibly complicated methods of cooking the turkey and articles about how to reduce stress during the holidays. Hmm … How long ago was it that I thought that the Thanksgiving meal was one of the easiest of the annual holiday feasts?
If I concocted a shopping list that reflected what we ate as children, teens and young adults for Thanksgiving dinner, it would look a bit like this:
15 to 18 lb turkey
Pepperidge Farm stuffing
potatoes
canned yams
brown sugar
margarine
jellied cranberry sauce
frozen peas
Mrs. Smith’s pumpkin pie (the big one)
We would also have homemade biscuits from a recipe that I have committed to memory and mince pie, made from ingredients already on hand, since we always had flour, Crisco and my grandmother’s mincemeat made from the last green tomatoes of summer. It was a simple – and simply wonderful – feast for us, never exceeded by any that I’ve attempted since, full of the anticipation of the crisped turkey skin, the sage-savory stuffing, fluffy mashed potatoes with gravy, the sweetness of the yams and the decadence of two pieces of pie for dessert.
The magazines describe something only vaguely like that. I came to an article in Living, the first magazine in the stack, about “holiday” cookies. Cookies to me are a big commitment. Cakes are relatively easy. You mix the batter, pour it into the pan, bake, unmold and frost. Cookies can mean refrigeration of the dough, rolling, cutting, baking, carefully removing onto racks and decorating. They also mean an aching back from leaning over the counter to work on all of this.
Given this mindset, I read on. Martha wrote about her insistence on only the best ingredients, quoting brands of chocolate that I can’t pronounce, and which aren’t available in most of the stores that I frequent. She then tells the reader that, because cookies are so important, she is now looking for imported flours, artisanal imported butters and even more exotic chocolates, fruits and such.
Yikes! What will these cookies, already a tour de force of work, cost in dollars? Yes, the lady does explain that these special ingredients create cookies that are especially tasty, but gee, in my house, a cookie doesn’t last long enough to be savored. They are inhaled.
While I wax poetic about the simple Thanksgiving of my past with canned jellied cranberry sauce, the idea of which must make Martha swoon, prepackaged stuffing mix and a frozen pumpkin pie, the doyen of housekeeping is advising that we up the ante even more. How do you keep up? Or do you want to? I’m still getting used to arugula.
Of course, the brined and smoked turkey that is my son-in-law’s signature dish for the holiday is not the tented big bird of yesterday, nor are the Brussels sprouts that we now gobble down, just the mention of which would lead to ghastly outcries when we were young, but we try to make it simple, retaining each year, two desserts. This year desserts will be provided by two of the Stevens men. Ten-year-old Tommy has promised a turkey-shaped cake with fondant frosting (he watches the “Kid’s Baking Championship” like his father watches football), and his Dad will grace us all with his expert apple pie.
It’s true that good ingredients, just like good upbringing, make a better product or person, but there is a limit to what “good” means.
For all of us, the act of preparing a meal for others and the warmth of welcome that we offer to those we love are the most singularly important ingredients. Those ingredients are as ordinary as a smile and can’t be bought for any price.
Ann Ferro is a mother, a grandmother and a retired social studies teacher. While still figuring out what she wants to be when she grows up, she lives in Marcellus with lots of books, a spouse and a large orange cat.
