Our guests came over in the afternoon to hang out in the kitchen and inhale while everything roasted and braised. We had given away some of our harvested Bourbon Reds, but Mr. Thanksgiving had been chosen while still on his feet, headed all his life for this appointment with our table. He weighed eighteen pounds, even without the mega-breast the Broad-Breasted Whites push around. Historic breeds tend to have proportionally more dark meat, and true to type, this guy made up for his narrower chest with a lot of leg, thigh, and overall heft. His color and texture were so different from the standard turkey, it’s hard to compare them. He was a pleasure to cook, remaining exceptionally moist and tender. Thanks to a thin layer of egg-yolk-colored fat under the skin of the breast, the meat seemed to baste itself and gained a delicate aroma and flavor reminiscent, I swear, of lobster. The prices these birds earn on the specialty market are deserved. Taste is the reason for the success of Slow Food USA’s turkey project, through which customers sign up in springtime for heritage-breed turkeys delivered by farmers at Thanksgiving. This Bourbon Red, we and our friends agreed when we bit into him, was the richest, most complex-flavored turkey we had eaten.
But a perfect turkey is no more important than any other part of this ritual: lighting the candles, passing the gravy, telling some of the same stories every time. Eating until you swear you are miserable, and then happily eating dessert too. In addition to the pumpkin pies, our friend Maruśa brought a strudel she had learned to make as a young girl in Slovenia. She apologized for its shape, explaining that for holidays it was supposed to be turned like a horseshoe but she didn’t have the right pan. Everyone told her, of course, that it didn’t matter, it would taste the same. But I understood her longing to re-create in every detail a comestible memory. It’s why we’d needed the cranberries for the tart, pinky tinge that oozes into the gravy and makes everything Thanksgiving. It’s why we go to the trouble to make a meal with more vegetable courses than many people consume in a week, and way more bird than anyone needs at one sitting.
Having more than enough, whether it came from the garden or the grocery, is the agenda of this holiday. In most cases it may only be a pageant, but holidays are symbolic anyway, providing the dotted lines on the social-contract treasure map we’ve drawn up for our families and nations. As pageantry goes, what could go more to the heart of things than this story of need, a dread of starvation, and salvation arriving through the unexpected blessing of harvest? Even feigning surprise, pretending it was unexpected and saying a ritual thanks, is surely wiser than just expecting everything so carelessly. Wake up now, look alive, for here is a day off work just to praise Creation: the turkey, the squash, and the corn, these things that ate and drank sunshine, grass, mud, and rain, and then in the shortening days laid down their lives for our welfare and onward resolve. There’s the miracle for you, the absolute sacrifice that still holds back seeds: a germ of promise to do the whole thing again, another time.
Oh, yes, I know the Squanto story, we replayed it to death in our primitive grade-school pageantry (“Pilgrim friends! Bury one fish beneath each corn plant!”). But that hopeful affiliation ended so badly, I hate to keep bringing it up. Bygones are what they are. In my household credo, Thanksgiving is Creation’s birthday party. Praise harvest, a pause and sigh on the breath of immortality.
Snow fell on our garden in December, leaving the dried corn stalks and withered tomato vines standing black on white like a pen-and-ink drawing titled Rest. I postponed looking at seed catalogs for awhile. Those of us who give body and soul to projects that never seem to end—child rearing, housecleaning, gardening—know the value of the occasional closed door. We need our moments of declared truce.
The farmers’ market closed for the year. We paid our last call to the vendors there, taking phone numbers and promising to keep in touch for all kinds of reasons: we would miss our regular chats; we would need advice about the Icelandic sheep we were getting in the spring; we might drive out sometimes to get winter greens from their cold frames. We stocked up on enough frozen meat to see us through winter, including a hefty leg of lamb for one of our holiday dinners.
The tunnel of winter had settled over our lives, ushered in by that great official Hoodwink, the end of daylight saving time. Personally I would vote for one more hour of light on winter evenings instead of the sudden, extra-early blackout. Whose idea was it to jilt us this way, leaving us in cold November with our unsaved remnants of daylight petering out before the workday ends? In my childhood, as early as that, I remember observing the same despair every autumn: the feeling that sunshine, summertime, and probably life itself had passed me by before I’d even finished a halfway decent tree fort. But mine is not to question those who command the springing forward and the falling back. I only vow each winter to try harder to live like a potato, with its tacit understanding that time is time, no matter what any clock might say. I get through the hibernation months by hovering as close as possible to the woodstove without actual self-immolation, and catching up on my reading, cheered at regular intervals by the excess of holidays that collect in a festive logjam at the outflow end of our calendar.
We are a household of mixed spiritual backgrounds, and some of the major holidays are not ours, including any that commands its faithful to buy stuff nobody needs. But we celebrate plenty. We give away our salsas and chutneys as gifts, and make special meals for family and friends: turkey and stuffing. Leg of lamb with mint jelly and roasted root vegetables tossed with rosemary and olive oil. For New Year’s Day, the traditional southern black-eyed peas and rice, for good luck. Always in the background, not waiting for a special occasion, is the businesslike whir of the bread-machine paddles followed by the aroma of Steven’s bread-of-the-day filling the whole house. We have our ways of making these indoor months a more agreeable internment.
When a brand-new organic corn chip factory opened its doors twenty miles from our house, at least one member of our family took it as a sign that wishes do come true. But finding wheat flour for our bread continued to be our most frustrating pursuit. A historic mill five miles from our house processes corn and other specialty flours, but not whole wheat. So we were excited to discover a wheat-flour mill about an hour’s drive away, a family operation we were happy to support. But the product, frankly, wasn’t what we wanted: bromide-bleached white flour. They also sold a biscuit mix fortified with MSG. We asked if they could process batches of whole wheat or unbleached white flour for us, but we were just one family without enough influence to change even a small company’s program. We needed fellow locavores to add clout to our quest, and in time we’ll have them. For the time being we liberally supplemented the local product with an organic brand made from wheat grown in Vermont. We sometimes made our own pasta, but more commonly were buying that, too, from outside our state. Ditto for breakfast cereals, though the motherlode was a large package of David and Elsie’s amazing oatmeal they sent us as a gift. Some things followed us home from Italy, too, including permanently influenced tastes in wine. But we stuck by our commitment to local meats and produce. In the realm of processed foods, we’d mostly forgotten what’s out there.
We’d long since said good-bye to summer’s fruits, in exchange for some that are bountiful in December: antique apples, whose flavor improves with cold weather; native persimmons, which aren’t edible until after frost hits the tree. It’s also the season of citrus in the Deep South, and if you don’t live there, the transfer of oranges across a few states from Florida or Texas still seems more reasonable than some fruit on walkabout from another hemisphere. Our holiday food splurge was a small crate of tangerines, which we found ridiculously thrilling after an eight-month abstinence from citrus. No matter where I was in the house, that vividly resinous orangey scent woke up my nose whenever anyone peeled one in the kitchen. Lily hugged each one to her chest before undressing it as gently as a doll. Watching her do that as she sat cross-legged on the floor one morning in pink pajamas, with bliss lighting her cheeks, I thought: Lucky i
s the world, to receive this grateful child. Value is not made of money, but a tender balance of expectation and longing.
How to Impress your Wife, Using a Machine
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I know you’ve got one around somewhere: maybe in the closet. Or on the kitchen counter, so dusty nobody remembers it’s there. A bread machine. You can actually use that thing to make some gourmet bread for about 50 cents a loaf, also becoming a hero to your loved ones.
First, get the machine out of the closet (or the box, if it’s still in there). Second, I’m sorry, but you’ll have to read enough of the manual to know how to put together a basic loaf. Then do exactly that: find a basic recipe for the white or whole wheat loaf and make it a few times, to get a feel for it. Use fresh ingredients; throw out that old flour and yeast and start with new flour milled specifically for bread, preferably organic.
Now comes the creative part. Visit your local health food store or grocery and find the flour section. Most will stock what might be called alternative flours; these are the key to your gourmet bread. Among these are wheat varieties like kamut, pumpernickel, durum, and other grains such as spelt, oats, or rye. Other flours are made from rice, soy, buckwheat, millet, corn, potato, and barley. Beyond these are less familiar (and less appreciated) grains such as teff, amaranth, or quinoa, tubers like yams or arrowroot ground into flours, and meals made from nuts or seeds: chickpeas, flaxseeds, or almonds. In some regions you may find mesquite or malanga. Pick a few of these you’d like to try, and stock them with your other ingredients.
When you put together your next loaf of bread, substitute some of your alternatives for the regular flour. Be experimental, but use only a little at first, just ¼ to ? cup—too much nonwheat flour can compromise the texture or rise of the loaf. Flaxseed meal and buckwheat are especially healthy and successful additions. With practice, you’ll find desirable blends, and might be tempted to try out a loaf in your oven. Even the failures will be fresh, warm, and make the house smell great. The successes will become indispensable additions to your good local meals.
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STEVEN L. HOPP
On Boxing Day we had friends over for a no-holds-barred Italian dinner made from our own garden goods (chestnut and winter-squash-stuffed ravioli) combined with some special things we’d brought back from Tuscany: truffles, olive oil, lupini beans. Starting with rolling out and stuffing the ravioli, we proceeded through the cheeses and bread brought by our guests, a stunning bottle of Bordeaux that was a gift from a French colleague, antipasto of our dried Principe Borghese tomatoes, salad greens from generous friends with a greenhouse, and several other courses culminating in a dessert of homemade yogurt, gingered figs, and local honey. We managed to stretch dinner into a five-hour-long social engagement in the Mediterranean fashion. It took ten years for Steven and me to work ourselves up to a vacation in Italy, but from there we were quick studies on how to have dinner.
For most people everywhere, surely, food anchors holiday traditions. I probably spent some years denying the good in that, mostly subconsciously—devoutly refusing the Thanksgiving pie, accepting the stigma my culture has attached to celebrating food, especially for women my age. Because of the inscriptions written on our bodies by the children we’ve borne, the slowing of metabolisms and inevitable shape-shifting, we are supposed to pretend if we are strong-willed that food is not all that important. Eat now and pay later, we’re warned. Stand on the scale, roll your eyes, and on New Year’s Day resolve to become a moral person again.
But most of America’s excess pounds were not gained on national holidays. After a certain age we can’t make a habit of pie, certainly, but it’s a soul-killing dogma that says we have to snub it even on Thanksgiving. Good people eat. So do bad people, skinny people, fat people, tall and short ones. Heaven help us, we will never master photosynthesis. Planning complex, beautiful meals and investing one’s heart and time in their preparation is the opposite of self-indulgence. Kitchen-based family gatherings are process-oriented, cooperative, and in the best of worlds, nourishing and soulful. A lot of calories get used up before anyone sits down to consume. But more importantly, a lot of talk happens first, news exchanged, secrets revealed across generations, paths cleared with a touch on the arm. I have given and received some of my life’s most important hugs with those big oven-mitt potholders on both hands.
Holiday gatherings provide a category of cheer I especially need in winter after the depressing Daylight Robbery incident. Fortunately, the first one follows right on the heels of the clock fall-back, at the beginning of November: Dia de los Muertos. I learned to celebrate the Mexican Day of the Dead during many years of living among Mexican-American friends, and brought it with me to a surprisingly receptive community in southwestern Virginia. It seemed too important to leave behind.
The celebration has its roots in Aztec culture, whose Micteca-cihuatl—“Lady of the Dead”—presided over rituals that welcomed dead friends and ancestors back among the living. Spanish priests arriving among the Aztecs were alarmed to find people dancing around with skeletons, making flowery altars, and generally making whoopee with the memory of their deceased. This would never do. The priests tried moving it from midsummer to November 1 and cloaking it in the Roman Catholic aegis of All Saints Day. Surely everyone would get more from this jolly pagan hootenanny if it were renamed and observed with droning in Latin about an endless list of dead saints.
The date is the only part of that plan that stuck. Dia de los Muertos is still an entirely happy ritual of remembering one’s departed loved ones, welcoming them into the living room by means of altars covered with photographs and other treasured things that bring memory into the present. Families also visit cemeteries to dress up the graves. I’ve seen plots adorned not just with flowers but also seashells, coins, toys, the Blessed Virgin, cigarettes, and tequila bottles. (To get everybody back, you do what you have to do.) Then the family members set out a picnic, often directly on top of a grave, and share reminiscences about the full cast of beloved dead, whether lured in by the flowers or the tequila, and it’s the best party of the year. Food is the center of this occasion, especially aromatic dishes that are felt to nourish spiritual presence. The one indispensable food is pan de muerto, bread of the dead, a wonderfully sweet, full-of-eggs concoction that Frida Kahlo raised to an art form. For our own Dia de los Muertos celebration this year we cracked enough eggs to make pan de muerto for thirty. Thus Frida took a personal hand in lifting Lily’s debt.
Anthropologists who write about this holiday always seem surprised by how pleasant the festivals are, despite the obvious connections with morbidity. Most modern lives include very few days penciled onto the calendar for talking and thinking about people we miss because they’ve died. Death is a gulf we rarely broach, much less celebrate joyfully. By coincidence (or actually, because of those priests again), a different, ancient non-Christian holiday from northern Europe is also celebrated at the same time of year. That one is called Hallowe’en and reinforces an opposite tradition, characterizing death as horrifying and grotesque. Far be it from me to critique an opportunity to dress up and beg free candy, but I prefer Dia de los Muertos. It’s not at all spooky. It’s funny and friendly.
Most of what’s known about religious practices in pre-Hispanic Mexico has come to us through a Catholic parish priest named Hernando Ruiz de Alarcón, one of the few who ever became fluent in the Nahuatl language. He spent the 1620s writing his Treatise on the Superstitions and Heathen Customs that Today Live Among the Indians Native to This New Spain. He’d originally meant it to be something of a “field guide to the heathens” to help priests recognize and exterminate indigenous religious rites and their practitioners. In the process of his documentation, though, it’s clear from his writings that Father Ruiz de Alarcón grew sympathetic. He was particularly fascinated with how Nahuatl people celebrated the sacred in ordinary objects, and encouraged living and spirit realities to meet up in the here and now. He noted that the concept o
f “death” as an ending did not exactly exist for them. When Aztec people left their bodies, they were presumed to be on an exciting trip through the ether. It wasn’t something to cry about, except that the living still wanted to visit with them. People’s sadness was not for the departed, but for themselves, and could be addressed through ritual visiting called Xantolo, an ordinary communion between the dead and the living. Mexican tradition still holds that Xantolo is always present in certain places and activities, including wild marigold fields, the cultivation of corn, the preparation of tamales and pan de muerto. Interestingly, farmers’ markets are said to be loaded with Xantolo.
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