Some stoves are made for Thanksgiving. My stove in New York is one of them. It has six burners and two ovens, which began to coöperate, more or less, in 2002, after five years of stealing each other’s heat—with the result that the people who love sweet potatoes (my daughter, for one) and the people who can’t manage Thanksgiving without mashed potatoes (my son-in-law) are finally happy, along with the ones who demand Brussels sprouts (my husband) and the ones (I won’t mention them) who ask for string beans. I am the only person at my Thanksgiving dinner who insists on braised red cabbage, but then I am the cook with six burners and two ovens, and I always get it.
I bought my stove with Thanksgiving in my head. I imagined large birds, basted and browning nicely at four hundred and twenty-five degrees in one oven, while apple and pear cakes rose, untroubled, at three hundred and fifty in the other, and the stock for my bourbon gravy simmered on top, surrounded by pots and pans of everyone’s favorite fixings. There was some discussion at home about the price of my new stove, but I didn’t listen. By my logic, I was saving money, having dropped my long-standing campaign to replace the painted-plywood kitchen shelves with serious maple cabinets. The stove arrived in the fall of 1997, and broke down for the first time a month later, on Thanksgiving Day, leaving sixteen irritable people eating tuna sandwiches and cranberry sauce at two long laundry tables from the building’s basement which I had squeezed diagonally, end to end, across my dining room, disguised under my mother’s creamy Belgian linens, circa 1930. The emergency repairman appeared in February. With my stove functioning again, I had what would now be called a transformative thought: Thanksgiving but not Thanksgiving. No one would get to vote on the Brussels sprouts or veto the cabbage. No one could say “What? No turkey?” if my corn-bread-and-pecan stuffing came spilling out of a couple of juicy capons instead of a turkey that was bound to be stiff by the time it was carved and on a platter. No one could possibly sniff if the sweet potatoes turned out to be butternut squash—so much lighter—cooked in crème fraîche and maple syrup, with a dab of chipotle sauce. No one would be disappointed if the pies and cakes transmogrified into an apple charlotte out of Julia Child, or even a plum pudding, spared that Christmas, when the family voted bûche de Noël, albeit with a side of hard sauce.
The next morning, I got on the phone and reassembled my Thanksgiving table for the last Thursday (a traditional touch) in February, at eight o’clock (a civilized one). Everyone called it the best Thanksgiving dinner they had ever eaten, perhaps because the people gathered at my table that slushy February night included an English historian, an Italian judge, a German politician and his wife, and two French journalists. They were all fine sources in my writing life, but none were what I would call heavily invested in the menu offered up at the beginning of a brief Pilgrim-Indian rapprochement that, if it lasted at all, was mainly owing to the good manners of a party of Wampanoag braves, who, having diligently gorged on wild turkey for three days at the Pilgrims’ harvest feast (by all accounts, in early October, 1621), burned off the calories deer-hunting in the Cape Cod woods—thus keeping the Plymouth colony in meat for the long winter. The capons were splendid, though not, as my family said, something you would have found lounging on a rock in seventeenth-century Massachusetts—which probably explains why, when I suggested capon again in November, I was voted down.
A few months ago, when my husband and I were driving to Paris from the farmhouse in Umbria where we write in the summer, we stopped in the village of Saint-Père-sous-Vézelay, in Burgundy, for dinner at the restaurant L’Esperance, and over a drink at the bar afterward I mentioned those annual family votes to the owner and chef, Marc Meneau. He snorted at the word “turkey.” He was bewildered, he said, by America’s devotion to turkey. “Un plat bas,” he called it. “Pas du tout festival.” He would have voted capon—a plump Bresse capon that had spent the last two months of its life reclining on cushions in a private cage and eating soft, “secret” food—but when I pressed him he allowed that if he were forced to serve a turkey he would stuff it with petit-suisse cheese and sautéed apples, simmer it sous vide for an hour, and then roast it, with little basting splashes of Perrier to brown the skin. I wrote it all down.
I am what you might call an amateur of Thanksgiving. My family prefers the phrase “regrettably hospitable,” but I would add strategically hospitable, because Thanksgiving dinner has turned out to be the stealth weapon of my reporting life. Everybody knows something about Thanksgiving, though not necessarily what we eat or why we eat it. The word has entered the global lexicon; like Mickey Mouse, Elvis, and Obama, it opens doors. I discovered this as a young reporter, attempting to interview a Berber woman in a tent encampment a few hundred miles into the western Sahara, where I was pursuing a misbegotten story about nomadic women’s rights. Her name was Fatma, and she was squatting beside a charcoal brazier, cooking her family’s dinner and answering my questions about oppression with the terse forbearance of an earthling suddenly confronted with a chatty alien, when I thought to ask her what was in her pot. She said it was goat—or, rather, pointed to a goat tethered outside her tent—and, smiling for the first time, asked if Americans ate goat at “the big feast of the hunters and the Christians.” We talked for an hour, through my increasingly bewildered (male) interpreter, during which time I learned that there was no word for “feminism” in her language, or, for that matter, for “recipe.” But she knew about the big feast. I stayed for the goat. It was very tasty.
By now, I can say that most of the people whose lives I’ve invaded since then, notebook in hand, sooner or later asked me about the big feast, and, if they didn’t, I told them. (The exceptions tend to be politicians, who, being not much given to what I would call a fruitful exchange of thoughts, will talk about food only if it’s their food and reflects highly on their status: Silvio Berlusconi, say, enthusing over the white truffles slathered on his pasta, or François Mitterrand, whose bird of choice was a two-ounce songbird, plumped for a month on figs and millet, drowned in Armagnac, and then roasted and eaten whole, beak optional, with your head draped in a linen napkin—the better to inhale the perfume of steaming brandy.) The subject of food, and kitchens and cooking, can lull even the most reluctant and suspicious people into conversation, and when I add Thanksgiving, where the food is not only plentiful but familial and friendly, to that conversation, they will shed any lingering doubts as to my good intentions and tell me what I came to hear. But it also means that at the end of the day, when my notebooks are full, I tend to be so overcome by the sense of friendship I have engineered—or so grateful, or perhaps so guilty—that I invite everyone to join my family for a Thanksgiving dinner. Anytime. Anywhere. Sometimes they come. Once, our doorman buzzed on Thanksgiving morning to say that my “guests” had arrived from Italy. I opened the door to a rustic couple whom I had last set eyes on years earlier, writing about a group of Communist peasants with a dairy coöperative (you turned in your cow, and got back a stock certificate with her name and her snapshot on it). They had recently sold their farmhouse to a rich German, left the Party, and, never having been on a plane before, decided to take me up on my invitation. They picked at the food. The next night, I made spaghetti.
I inherited my Thanksgiving strategy from my mother. It is said that families produce a good cook, or a good gardener, only every second generation, but, given that I am a good cook and my daughter a spectacular one, I have to assume that we are correcting a generational imbalance—making up for the fact that my mother, whose talents lay more in pruning rosebushes than in stirring pots, was a terrible cook and my grandmother worse. My mother’s one culinary achievement was a bland but passable Thanksgiving dinner. (Her stuffing was onions, celery, white bread crumbs, and a pinch of salt.) But it was memorable compared with what usually passed for culinary excitement in Providence, Rhode Island, in the Eisenhower fifties—a place where ordering Frenched chops at the butcher was considered flashy or, as my mother put it, “something they do in New York.” And part of what made it memorable was the collection of hungry foreign people—professors from Brown, musicians in town for a concert, war-refugee doctors my father had met on his hospital rounds—who sat in our dining room then, praising my mother’s stuffing as something exotic and American, or, you could say, authentically bland. It was a beautiful room, a room for feasting—the result of years of assaults on estate sales and hapless dealers who, as she liked to say, arriving home with a twenty-five-dollar cache of Georgian silver or an eighteenth-century Connecticut corner cabinet, “didn’t know what they had.” After she died, I moved almost everything in her dining room to my apartment in New York, hoping to move the spirit, if not the stuffing, of those Thanksgivings with them. My husband is an anthropologist, and it took a while for all that mahogany and silver to settle in with the Sepik River ancestor masks and assorted Pacific totems in their new room, but, once they did, I wrote “Thanksgiving” on a manila folder and started clipping recipes.
My stuffing began as a recipe from the Times, circa 1974: onions, green bell pepper, and celery hearts, sautéed in butter, mixed with corn bread and some crumbled toast, and bound by a cup of chicken broth and a few raw eggs, according to the yellowed page that is now disintegrating between my daughter’s Indian-pudding recipe and one for parsnip-and-pear purée. (Thanksgiving that year was “Southern,” the paper said, “plus a few trimmings of European inspiration”—which may or may not explain the red cabbage I started making then.) The stuffing has expanded over the years, with my kitchen confidence, to accommodate sausage, orange juice, parsley, thyme, sage, and an extravagant amount of toasted and chopped pecans. It is still expanding, but in 1976, when I got out my mother’s stuffing spoon and served my first Thanksgiving dinner at her table, I followed every recipe I used down to the quarter teaspoon. Clearing out a closet the other day, I discovered a box of snapshots from that Thanksgiving, taken by my friend and, at the time, downstairs neighbor Jane O’Reilly, who had appeared at my door at nine in the morning, bearing fresh coffee cake to fortify us for a long day’s cooking. One of those pictures is on my desk now; I am basting what looks like a twenty-pounder, balanced precariously on the open door of the oven that preceded my new stove. There are children and dogs underfoot, and grownups hovering with pot holders and coffee cups in their hands. We are all laughing. Thanksgiving looks easy, and it probably was, back in those early feminist days before the idea of the perfect meal invaded the heads of otherwise accomplished women, convincing them that voluntary servitude in the kitchen was the secret of their liberation.
At last count, I have cooked Thanksgiving dinner in seven countries, starting with Morocco. The year was 1968. The city was Meknes. The bride—me—was cooking without benefit of silver, recipes, or a table. And the groom, deep in field work with a brotherhood of hospitable Sufi curers and musicians who danced their patients into trance in amiable, if occasionally bloody, exorcistic rituals, had decided, by way of reciprocation, to introduce them to Thanksgiving. Our larder, when I got this news, consisted of bread, Boulaouane wine, and several sacks of eggplants, Meknes being some months into an eggplant season that threatened to last all winter—and did. I had never tasted an eggplant in Providence, or, for that matter, at Vassar, where I went to college. My first experience with eggplants was in New York, at graduate school, and they were still as exotic to me as my mother’s stuffing was to the Europeans at her Thanksgiving table. I had already made grilled eggplant, tagine with eggplant, couscous with eggplant, soup with eggplant, and even eggplant stuffed with eggplant, and whenever I was tired of eggplant we would drive to Rabat for a steak smothered in pizzaiola sauce—the specialty of a restaurant called La Mamma, which was frequented that fall mainly by diplomats who were also tired of eggplant but not, in my experience there, by Sufi exorcists. So I made do.
I concocted an eggplant flan so thick with onions, cheese, and spices that the taste of the eggplant faded, though not, I have to admit, into the taste of red cabbage or sweet potatoes or Brussels sprouts. Everybody said they liked it. They said they liked my chicken, too—the only poultry within a hundred miles was chicken—and even my stuffing, which I had put together with onions, dates, and flatbreads from the local market. We sat in a circle on the floor (around a large brass platter that, along with a rug, two cushions, and a straw-filled mattress, amounted to the family furniture) and scooped up everything with our fingers, just like Pilgrims and Indians, and drank a good deal of mint tea and told stories. I would count that Thanksgiving as my first success. If the Sufis were a bit bewildered by my household arrangements—men and women eating together, sharing the best parts—they were too kind to say so. I was known thereafter, and not without affection, as the woman who chopped up bread and put it inside her chickens instead of leaving it on the platter, to wrap around the eggplant and sop up the sauce.
Over the next several years, I managed to cook some semblance of Thanksgiving dinner whenever I was off reporting, trying to win the hearts and minds of unlikely people. The worst was a dinner I put together in Södertälje, Sweden, in the fall of 1975, for the families of three Yugoslav workers from the local Saab-Scania factory. It wasn’t the food that failed. My cranberry (well, lingonberry) sauce was good, and the turkey, fresh from my babysitter’s boyfriend’s mother’s oven, across the street, even better. But my guests, as history soon showed, didn’t really think of themselves as Yugoslavs. They thought of themselves as Serbs, Slovenes, and Croats, and, while they had always been agreeable and even effusive when we talked alone, they were not in the habit of breaking bread together. The conversation was, putting it nicely, strained; it flowed with the slivovitz that the men had brought, and each of them brought two bottles. They were close to brawling when the Slovenian’s wife opened a box of homemade pastries—flaky, buttery mille-feuilles layered with thick whipped cream. Peace returned to the kitchen table in my borrowed flat and lasted until, flushed with compliments and brandy, she smiled at the Serbs and Croats and said, “Slovenians make the best cakes.”
Then, there was the Thanksgiving dinner I cooked for a family of Ugandan-Asian refugees in Southhall, an outlying London neighborhood where, in the early seventies, tens of thousands of South Asian immigrants lived. I shopped with the lady of the house—who, having vetoed a turkey of suspicious provenance (Harrods), had ordered her own from a halal butcher—and cooked in her tidy kitchen, monitored by her son, an excruciatingly pious eleven-year-old who, on his imam’s instructions, had stayed home from school to glare into my pots and pans, hoping to catch his mother and me in some unpardonable culinary indiscretion. (I repressed the urge to sneak some bourbon into his mother’s roasting pan, to capture the last sticky bits, and then into the pot of gravy, where all the alcohol would have evaporated in eleven minutes at a brisk simmer: a trick I had learned from a New York neighbor who had learned it in A.A.) My daughter, who was in London with me—“missing a whole month of important peer-experience,” her nursery-school teacher had protested—still remembers the perfume of Gujarat spices rubbed into turkey skin, and I came home with the recipe that transformed my dull creamed spinach into a marvellous saag paneer that I still serve, though not, admittedly, with Thanksgiving turkeys.
But none of my foreign Thanksgivings were as strange as the one I cooked in 1990, on the Rue du Cherche-Midi, in Paris, where I kept an apartment-cum-office for sixteen years. It wasn’t the food. I had shopped for a week. There were no mice sheltering behind the stove, as there had been the Thanksgiving before. (They roasted, sadly, with the turkey.) And I had discovered a table leaf in the cave, which gave me the space to invite fourteen people, if some of them brought chairs. The problem was my guests and their finicky European palates. The teen-age son of some French friends sat down, announced that he ate only “white things,” and helped himself to the lion’s share of turkey breast and mashed potatoes. My daughter’s boyfriend of the moment, a German student she had acquired on her last vacation, explained that he ate only “separate things”; he tackled his dinner dish by dish, disappearing into the kitchen after each one to wash his plate. My husband insists that the banker at his end of the table actually divided his meal into three mysterious sections—on the same plate but not touching—and ate them separately. I hadn’t noticed. By then, I was at the glacier on the Rue du Bac, buying vanilla ice cream.
The problem with cooking Thanksgiving dinner away from home is never just the shopping, though that can drive you crazy: buttermilk (for corn bread) in Italy? chipotles in France? fresh pecans in Germany? The problem is what I would call the local culinary aesthetic. (Reinold Kegel, who cooked at the American Academy in Berlin when I was a fellow there, read up on the big feast and, inspired by the idea, and perhaps by the availability, of pumpkins, produced a Thanksgiving dinner that, barring the turkey, was almost entirely orange: pumpkin soup, pumpkin purée, pumpkin pie.) The fact is that a lot of Europeans are like my daughter’s friend. They find it at best peculiar, and at worst revolting, to be expected to sit down to a groaning board of Thanksgiving dishes and, more to the point, to eat them smushed together into one big glorious taste—preferably under enough gravy to insure that no food, as it were, sits alone. They like their tastes one at a time. Try going to a Chinese restaurant with a Frenchman or an Italian; he will order separately, guard his plate, and refuse to share his lemon chicken in exchange for a helping of your Hunan beef. One Frenchman I know even cleans his fork with an alcohol wipe between courses, and I remember a Thanksgiving in Umbria where two of my neighbors paled when I handed them pumpkin ravioli and turkey on the same plate. “In Italy, we eat our pasta first,” one of them said tartly—after which they swept their turkey back onto the serving platter, and proceeded to do just that.
Last month, thinking about that Thanksgiving, I called up Ron Suhanosky, who owns the restaurant Sfoglia, across the Park from me in New York, and asked him how he cooked “Italian” Thanksgivings for his customers. He said he didn’t. He took his family to Nantucket; brined a turkey for four days; stuffed it with hazelnuts, “drunken prunes,” and sweet Italian sausages; and generally “put a spin on Thanksgiving that’s Italian.” Homemade mostarda. Raw-kale salad. Brussels sprouts with crispy mortadella. A crusted sweet-potato sformata (he described it as “kind of a sweet-potato quiche”) with béchamel, bread crumbs, Parmesan, and cream. And for dessert, his wife’s department, Italian bread pudding or a panna cotta. It sounded good—all but the part about “no gravy, just a drizzle of olive oil.”
Then, there is the problem of whose turkey you are cooking. A good French turkey is either a wild turkey, shot on the wing, or a turkey raised especially for Christmas—which amounts to the same thing: eight or nine pounds at most. And in Paris those eight pounds can set you back a hundred and fifty dollars, because your butcher knows that at Christmas the French will spend as lavishly on fish, fowl, caviar, foie gras, and champagne as we do on stocking stuffers and prime ribs. Last summer, I asked my friend Catherine McGurn, a French dentist married to an American lawyer, if she had ever found a turkey big enough to satisfy the Americans in the Paris office of her husband’s firm. She consulted a notebook in which she had recorded the menus, and travails, of her Paris Thanksgivings, and told me, “Once. 1991. Seventeen pounds.” She said that the Americans ate everything in sight, down to the last cranberry and sweet potato, while the French friends whom she’d invited “took these little plates” and nibbled politely at everything except her stuffing, which they wolfed down, recognizing it as the same stuffing (known grandly as La Farce) they eat at Christmas: pain de mie mixed with pork sausage, ground veal, crumbled chestnuts, foie gras, and truffles. The McGurns live in Rome now, a city that, from the point of view of Thanksgiving, makes Paris seem like Plymouth. Last winter, finding herself in Paris the day before a belated holiday dinner, she flew home with a hundred Belon oysters in an ice bag in her suitcase, along with some good French cheeses, rillettes, pâté de campagne, and a couple of blocks of foie gras from Les Landes. The lawyers in Rome loved it. No one noticed that there was no bird.
Last summer, I decided to try an other Thanksgiving dinner in Italy. Don’t ask why I was even thinking about Thanksgiving—in Italy, in the heat, with a deadline looming and the garden outside my windows full of tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, zucchini, basil, garlic, arugula, baby lettuce, and a dozen other fresh, ripe, lovely Italian things that I can only dream about, at home in New York, in November. Or how I was going to cook it, given that my Italian stove is even more temperamental than my New York stove ever was. True, it also has two ovens, and the bigger one—call it the turkey oven—also stopped working in 1997; the difference is that my Italian oven still sits there, twelve years later, waiting for the technician who can figure out how to fix it. As for my stovetop, it is made entirely for pasta. There is a huge burner in the middle—which ignites with a whoosh of flame that laps at the handles of even the tallest pots and has to be coaxed down into submission before you can turn around—surrounded by four tiny burners whose only possible purpose is simmering pasta sauces that have already taken an hour or two to heat.
Still, it would be my first summer Thanksgiving anywhere. I was determined to cook it. The only summer Thanksgiving I had ever been to, let alone cooked, had taken place in 1974, at Mary McCarthy’s house in Castine, Maine, to celebrate Richard Nixon’s resignation. Mary was a serious hostess and a splendid cook, and, more to the point, the only other person I knew who served Thanksgiving dinner out of season. Even her stuffing was splendid, despite the fact that there wasn’t a trace of corn bread in it. On the other hand, she was not given to sharing recipes. (Years later, when we were neighbors in Paris, I ate it again at one of her November Thanksgivings, and asked her to write it down. She smiled sweetly and said, “No, I don’t think so.”) But the thing I remember most about her Castine Thanksgiving was how easy she said the marketing had been: she had called a farmer, ordered a sixteen-pounder, and three days later it was there.
The bad thing about good memories is how cheerful and optimistic they can leave you feeling. I was going to find the finest turkey in Italy—or, at least, a turkey as good as hers—and with that in mind I got in the car, drove two hours from my house to a parking lot under the Borghese Gardens, and made my slow way, by taxi and foot, through Rome to the Via della Maddalena, where I asked Angelo Feroci, arguably the city’s best meat and poultry purveyor, to find me a sixteen-pound turkey for July or August. Feroci looked astonished. “Impossible,” he said. His turkeys were not only Christmas turkeys—“Come back in December,” he told me—they were Italian Christmas turkeys, which is to say, “younger and smaller and better” than anything the French ate. Then I remembered: most good butchers in Italy frown on large turkeys; it is a matter of reputation. They call them “poor food,” because birds like that are usually raised in feed yards—not to sixteen pounds but to fifteen or sixteen kilos, which translates as thirty-five pounds of old Tom turkey—after which they are sliced thin, packaged, and sold cheaply in supermarkets as petti di tacchino. (Those slices are so ubiquitous that even the peasants who refuse to distinguish between a duck and a goose, at least if they happen to be selling one—or, for that matter, who refer to all squash, from pumpkins to zucchini, as zucca—admit that turkey is turkey.) They are the kinds of turkeys my husband remembers from the Army, which may be why turkey is not his favorite food. The farmers who supply places like Feroci’s would never raise one; the farmers competing with feed yards to supply my local co-op, in Todi, would never consider anything smaller. Their feeling, which dates from centuries of poverty, is “the bigger the bird, the more people it can feed.” (They feel the same way about vegetables. This year, I rescued a twenty-inch cucumber from the back of my vegetable garden. I had thought it was a skinny watermelon until the gardener said, “Cucumber, almost ready to eat.”)
I asked Feroci what he told the Americans in Rome who wanted Thanksgiving turkeys. He told them, laughing, “Invite fewer people, or order two.” He allowed that he had been ordering “Christmas turkeys” for November since the early sixties, when Burt Lancaster, who was filming the interiors for “The Leopard” at Cinecittà, walked in and asked for one. There was some discussion. Feroci won the first battle—seven pounds, no bigger—but he couldn’t persuade the actor to let him bone the bird and stuff it with, among other good things, prunes and pistachios, ready to be cooked and cut across into “pretty slices, full of colors inside.” Now, he says, his customers get “pretty” or none at all.
That was June. I was still searching for a sixteen-pounder in July, when an old Paris friend and fellow-journalist named Merete Baird decided to fly to Italy with her husband for a long weekend. She asked if I needed anything from Paris, and I heard myself saying, Yes, a turkey. My husband was horrified, but Merete is Danish—which is to say, exuberant in the face of a challenge—and she said, “Of course.” Her turkey travelled, like Catherine’s oysters, in a thermos bag in the luggage hold, and, despite its hours in airport taxis, French security checks, and Italian baggage claims, smelled fine when I unwrapped it. I set the table on the porch for eight people and began to cook. At seven and a half pounds, it just fit into the little oven where I had been doing my roasting for thirteen years, and I had thought to buy a bottle of bourbon for the gravy. Sadly, there were no pumpkins in my garden yet, or even canned pumpkin at the co-op, and, given the refrigerator-life expectancy of a bird that had just emerged from the hold of an Air France jet, there was certainly no time to persuade a dairy farmer to ferment a couple of cups of milk into latte acido, or soured milk, which, I had just discovered, was close enough to buttermilk for a corn-bread stuffing.
I searched my memory for the tastes in Mary McCarthy’s stuffing. I spent the morning trying to reconstruct it. It was not a success. But I managed to transform my sweet-potato purée into a carrot purée—there were young carrots in the garden—with molasses that someone had brought from New York years earlier standing in for the maple syrup, red peperoncini for the chipotles, and fresh cream from the dairy for the crème fraîche. I brightened some local spinach with beetroot greens. I made grits, with Sardinian Pecorino—the nearest thing I could find to a sharp Cheddar—using the last bag of stone-ground cornmeal that I had brought from New York, since, for reasons I have never pierced, Umbrians stop cooking with cornmeal at the summer solstice, and it virtually disappears from the market shelves. But I couldn’t claim credit for the apple-and-frutti di bosco crumble, steeped in Maraschino liqueur—my friend Lin Widmann, an Anglo-Argentine painter from a long line of English pudding fanatics, made that—or even for the French turkey, which I have to admit had been born delicious.
Given the success of my little July Thanksgiving—I thought of it as a trial run—I scheduled a big Thanksgiving for August 7th. I looked for a new oven. I visited poultry farmers. I tried to negotiate the slaughter of one of the sixteen-pounders I would always see, strutting like teen-agers, in their back yards. I held out ridiculous sums of money, but I could not shake the farmers’ conviction that you don’t slaughter a bird that will double in size, and yield, in a matter of four months. Their answer was always the same: “Too small. Not ready.” Marketing is not what I like to do in Umbria. Unless I am off somewhere on a story, I don’t do much of anything that can’t be done within a mile of home. I sit on the porch steps and watch the sun rise. I smile at sunflowers. I sit at my desk and write. Toward the end of the afternoon, I check out my figs and my pots of basil and marjoram—Umbrians love marjoram and will not touch oregano—thyme and parsley, and then I tap my way through the vegetable garden with a big stick (Umbria is viper country) and a basket, and head for the kitchen to chop and slice whatever I’ve carried back. At night I cook it. Once in a while, I will drive north to Todi and pick up a chicken or a guinea fowl at the co-op, or south to Avigliano for mussels or spigola at the local fish store. But if you had asked me, in July, where in Perugia or Terni to find a big new oven that would fit between the counters that flank my stove I wouldn’t have been able to say. And if you had asked me where to find a farm-raised sixteen-to-eighteen-pounder I would probably have cried.
By then, I had exhausted two Italian provinces in my turkey quest. So I crossed the Monti Martani (a massif best known as the epicenter of the earthquake that toppled the ceilings of the Basilica of St. Francis of Assisi in 1997) to consult with my friends Joanna Ross and Bruce Adgate. The Rossgates, as they are sometimes called, have been an Umbria resource since the day they decided to quit their jobs in New York—Joanna was a theatre agent and Bruce an actor with Ellen Stewart’s La Mama theatre company—to move with their ten-year-old son to Eggi, a village near Spoleto (where Bruce had spent three summers performing Euripides in the mid-seventies). They went to work restoring a fifteenth-century village house, best described at the time as a pile of stones, and in the process unearthed a bread-and-pizza oven, just outside the wall of their son’s bedroom. The oven was falling apart, but they peered into its cavernous beehive chamber and immediately thought Thanksgiving, or, as Bruce puts it, “Getting it back in shape went right up there with plumbing and heat as one of my high priorities.” He worked on the oven all summer, making pizzas. By November of 1993, he was able to roast a Thanksgiving turkey for ten people. (His biggest turkey, to date, weighed thirty-seven and a half pounds, and thirty-five people spent the better part of two days polishing it off.) In July of 2009, he volunteered his oven for my next Thanksgiving, and, more to the point, his services at the oven, because just firing it up—feeding it wood until the embers turn red and the bricks lining it white hot—takes four or five hours of skilled hard labor and leaves you drenched, even in November. In August, you start drenched.
So I moved Thanksgiving across the mountain. I stopped looking for an oven, and a few days later, when Joanna called with the news that she and Bruce had prevailed on their butcher to find a farmer willing to part with a turkey for fifteen or sixteen people, I stopped looking for a bird, too. We made a guest list of American friends who lived in or around Spoleto and would be spared having to cross a mountain after a feast that, according to Bruce, promised to last past midnight. We made a shopping list. Bruce, whose Thanksgiving specialty is pumpkin pie, came home that night with the first pumpkin of the season. Joanna discovered a dusty bottle of maple syrup at the back of a shelf in a discount supermarket called Sabatini, which didn’t surprise me; she can find anything, and what she doesn’t find she grows. We were in countdown mode when Naomi Duguid, the Canadian food scholar and cookbook writer I had got to know on assignment last year, e-mailed to say that she was flying to Italy that week. I invited her to Thanksgiving and, of course, gave her the rest of my shopping list. She arrived at night, on August 5th, and emptied a suitcase full of rapidly defrosting cranberries on my kitchen table, along with a sack of pecans, two jars of chipotles, three cans of organic pumpkin, and homemade crackers for the cooks. Dinner was pasta al pesto (my basil pots) and salad (my garden) tossed with oil from my olive trees, and it left me thinking how much simpler life would be if the Pilgrims had been Italian.
The next morning, we drove to a farmers’ market for spinach and dandelion greens, and then to my favorite Todi salumeria to discuss with the salumerista’s wife the pros and cons of faro or chestnut flour for my stuffing bread. It was our festa del ringraziamento, I told her, only a little early. She considered my problem for a minute, disappeared into the stockroom, and emerged with a two-pound sack of local cornmeal, stamped “To be eaten by June 21, 2009,” which she had been saving for herself. (“Of course you can use it,” she said.) By lunchtime, I had started a pumpkin purée, and Naomi, having discovered three plum trees on the hill behind my kitchen door, had managed to bake two plum cakes and a loaf of bread and to produce a mysteriously spiced and soured cranberry sauce, which, she assured me, was much prized in its original incarnation as a sour-plum sauce in Georgia (the republic, not the state). Lunch was salami, prosciutto, creamy Campania mozzarella, garden tomatoes, and cucumber salad; it emptied the fridge. The afternoon meant corn bread. The recipe I had found, tearing through cookbooks, seemed a little off—six eggs, for one thing—but it looked easy, and, more to the point, it was the only one without buttermilk. I should have known better. When Bruce and Joanna crossed the mountain that afternoon with maple syrup for my purée, giblets for my gravy, fenugreek seeds for Naomi’s cranberries, and fresh pumpkin for Bruce’s pies, they found us crumbling burnt cornmeal goo onto a cookie sheet to dry.
Eggi is a walled medieval village tucked into one of the Apennine foothills, with a road that winds up to the church and then turns into a path—which is to say that to get to the Rossgates’ house you walk. We were three people, a very large dog, my grandmother’s turkey roaster, which I had carried on a plane from New York ten years earlier (turn-of-the-twentieth-century pans were made to last), and six big and extremely heavy Le Creuset pots, bought on the last day of a going-out-of-business sale in Todi and one of them filled with what was left of my gravy stock, which had splashed and splattered all over the back of the car by the time we parked. Ullie, the dog, licked up the gravy. The climb, pot by pot, in the August sun, took twenty minutes. The first thing I saw, walking up the steep stone steps to the Rossgates’ house, was a fiendish circle of flames leaping out of the enormous mouth of the pizza oven, and Bruce, with a bottle of cold white wine and a pair of long iron tongs, waiting for me in a deck chair.
I fled up to the house, where Naomi was already at work, doctoring our greens with spices from Joanna’s larder, and Joanna herself, an inspired cook, was slipping a paste of pancetta, garlic, and rosemary under the skin of a perfect turkey that covered most of her kitchen table. Her mother had just arrived, bearing a case of prosecco, and she and her husband were sitting in the garden, filling glasses for the first guests. They came, like Indians, with offerings—everything from caponata and olives to platters and decorations. Big cardboard turkeys were soon perched on the garden tables, their tails unfolding into a kaleidoscope of crêpe-paper pleats. The trees were draped with the Rossgates’ Christmas lights, and a string of big gold letters—“HAPPY THANKSGIVING”—was dangling between two pergola poles, waiting for a breeze.
The bricks turned white by the end of the afternoon. The turkey slid into the oven. Bruce covered the mouth with an iron sheet, to seal in the heat, and the two of us settled into the deck chairs, poured some wine, and told Thanksgiving stories. (I have to admit that Bruce’s were better, given that in the past five years he and Joanna had managed to pull off credible Thanksgiving dinners in Mexico, Vietnam, and Argentina and were planning to do it again this year in Laos.) From time to time, he would pull on the thickest mitts I had ever seen, lift the sheet with his tongs, prod the roasting pan into a half-turn, and, from a safe distance, fling some wine over the bird to baste it. People drifted down from the garden, watched for a while, and disappeared back up the garden steps. It has to be said that I was not much use that evening as a sous-chef. My one attempt at flinging wine into the fiery maw of the pizza oven fell at least a foot short of the roasting pan. On the other hand, Bruce was spared all my Thanksgiving-in-New York anxieties: should the bird be lying on its back in the pan, or upside down, or on one side and then the other? Should it be falling apart from “slow cooking,” or turning crisp from a quick run, legs and wings akimbo, under a blast of electric heat? Should it be basted with butter, or wrapped in a cloak of wet cheesecloth, or left to smolder under a paper bag? Our eighteen-pounder—roasting, by Bruce’s calculations, at somewhere between seven hundred and eight hundred degrees—was golden-brown, tender, and on its platter in not much more than an hour. The pots of pumpkin purée and doctored stuffing went into the oven to reheat. I poured some bourbon into the roaster. It sizzled into a juicy sauce, which brought my gravy pot close to brimming, and ready to carry upstairs.
It turned into a fine night. A soft breeze blew in from across the Spoleto valley and set the “HAPPY THANKSGIVING” fluttering; the chimes in the garden trees came to life. I forgot the work of the past few weeks and joined the party. The best thing about Thanksgiving is that it is always worth it. Everyone agreed on that. In fact, we decided to do it again, next summer. We toasted Thanksgiving at midnight with what was left of the wine and a bottle of Jack Daniel’s that the Rossgates had stashed for the occasion. I fell asleep in the car and dreamed of leftovers, going home. ♦
