The Reporter's Kitchen

by Jane Kramer

  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 spend 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 sexual 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, while writing about a group of Communist peasants with a dairy cooperative (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 cornbread 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 grown-ups hovering with p
otholders 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 fieldwork 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 Mama, 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 dietary 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 AA.) 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 marvelous 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 seventeen 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 teenage 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 cornbread) 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 ensure 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 chopsticks with an alcohol wipe between courses, and I remember a Thanksgiving in Umbria where the same neighbors who had chucked the noodles I once served with rabbit paled when I handed them pumpkin ravioli and turkey on the same plate. 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 cot
ta. 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 another 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.