The Man Who Ate Everything (58 page)

Big Bird

My second-favorite Thanksgiving dinner took place eighteen years ago inside a midsize maroon rent-a-car. The sun had never shone more brightly than on that Thursday morning as the three of us set off from Manhattan for our friends’ farm in upstate New York. But two hours later, in a blinding blizzard made of snowflakes the size of dinner plates, our car involuntarily left the highway and hurtled, headlights first, into a snowdrift big enough to hide a small suburban house. We ransacked the car for a shovel but could find nothing beyond the plum pie, the pumpkin pie, apple pie, two loaves of bread, and the quart of ancient Scotch that were to have been our contribution to the Thanksgiving feast.

Quickly calculating that we had enough gasoline to keep the car’s heater running for two weeks, we forsook the ambition of reaching upstate New York and, using the Swiss Army knife and Sierra cups without which we never traveled more than a few feet from our apartment in those days, made quick and thankful work of the pies, bread, and Scotch. A brief nap followed. We awoke to find our snowdrift enfolded in a calm and cloudless evening rich with tow trucks, gas stations, and detailed instructions for driving back to the safety of Manhattan, just in time for a late supper at one of its excellent restaurants.

One happy feature of my second-favorite Thanksgiving dinner is that it was turkeyless.
The Oxford English Dictionary
defines
turkey as “a well-known, large gallinaceous bird … now valued as a table fowl in all civilized lands.” I couldn’t disagree more. We eat turkey on Thanksgiving because turkey is an edible symbol, not because it is a valued contender at the table. It stands for the discovery of the foodstuffs of the New World and the brotherhood offered by Native Americans to those who would soon displace them. Edible symbols are rarely gastronomically rewarding, though I did once eat a superb dark-chocolate Eiffel Tower and a swan molded from first-rate chopped liver. If turkeys were not a symbol, we would never eat as many of them as we do. Their meat is nearly always bland and stringy, and their shape is entirely incorrect.

The best part of a roast turkey is its skin. Modern turkey breeders, responding to an apparent demand for more white and less dark meat, have developed a bird consisting mainly of a huge, nearly spherical breast and short, skinny legs and thighs. Yet the breast of the bird is surely its least savory part, and its spherical shape is surely a mistake. Remember what we learned in high school about spheres? Of all geometric figures, the sphere has the lowest ratio of surface to volume; a spherical turkey, therefore, has the lowest ratio of skin to meat. How much more gastronomically delightful would be to breed modern turkey in the shape, say, of a two-foot pizza with little wings and legs at the circumference and two broad surfaces of delicious, crackling, savory, golden-russet skin with very little meat inside!

Even as a symbol, the turkey falls short in at least four ways:

1. The Pilgrims probably did not eat turkey at the first Thanksgiving dinner in 1621. The only firsthand account of the feast, reprinted in the Plimouth Plantation’s
Thanksgiving Primer,
does not mention turkey. According to Evan Jones in
American Food
(Overlook), the Pilgrims dined on venison, roast duck, roast goose, clams, eels, corn, beans, wheat and corn breads, leeks, watercress, wild plums, and homemade wine. It is doubtful that the banqueters even had thanksgiving in mind.

2.
The Indians did not purposefully feed the Pilgrims or even introduce them to terrific New World foodstuffs in their devastating first year on these shores. According to Waverley Root and Richard de Rochemont, Native Americans did feed the colonists in Virginia, thus saving their lives, but those in Massachusetts were more suspicious. “It was an Indian habit to stow away caches of long-lasting foods in various places where they might one day be needed; it was the Pilgrims’ good luck to stumble on one of these caches, which kept them alive (some of them) over their first terrible winter,” they write in
Eating in America.

3. Even if the Pilgrims did eat turkey at the first “Thanksgiving dinner” in 1621, they surely had tasted much finer turkey back home in England. The turkey, of course, originated not in Turkey but in the New World, where there were several related species; the Mexican version had long been domesticated by the Aztecs when the Spanish conquistadores discovered Mexico in 1518; they brought the Mexican turkey back to Europe, where it was soon raised commercially. In a cookbook of 1615,
The English Hus-wife,
turkey appears nearly as often as chicken; it was surely familiar to the Pilgrims when they arrived here and found the Eastern wild turkey, a species inferior to the domesticated Mexican but a turkey all the same.

Between the time they landed in December of 1620 and their feast nearly a year later, the Pilgrims undoubtedly ate wild turkey, even if they forwent the large gallinaceous fowl at the famous feast itself. Wild game was so plentiful in North America that some writers attribute the success of colonization to its availability. Others believe that the inexhaustible plentitude of wild game, including turkeys, gave rise to the American obsession with meat, which, according to Waverley Root, astonished European visitors for two centuries.

So the turkey really symbolizes unbridled carnivorous behavior and the cardiac problems that that brings. The true meaning of the Thanksgiving menu lies in the garnishes, not in the main course—in the uniquely New World cranberry, pumpkin, sweet potatoes, corn, beans, and other treasures the Europeans found growing here. That’s why I consider it a quasi-religious duty to
consume a generous range and amount of chocolate on this holiday. You can’t give thanks without it.

4. The turkey got its silly name through two or three mistakes. You might guess that the name stemmed from a mistaken belief that Columbus had landed in Asia. You would be wrong. When the Spanish brought the turkey back home only twenty-six years after Columbus’s first voyage, Europeans confused it with the guinea fowl, a distinct bird of African origin known to Aristotle and Pliny, and assigned to it the name they already applied to the guinea fowl. For the English, this name was “turkey” because they believed that the African bird had come to Europe through lands controlled by the Turks; now the Aztec bird became a “turkey,” too. The Germans called both the old African and new Mexican fowl
kalekuttisch hun,
or “Calcutta hen” (similar to the Dutch
kalkoen),
and the French named it
coq d’inde
or simply
d’inde,
which then became the modern
dinde—
all of these meaning “bird of India.” To the Europeans, Turkey and India were more or less in the same neighborhood.

All of this is, of course, a futile exercise in ornithology. The turkey, however imperfect in taste and texture, however sloppy as a national symbol, however misnamed, is gastronomically inevitable, if not on every Thanksgiving then on most of them. The savory and educational garnishes do go quite well with a bland and golden bird; we derive communal pleasure both from splitting up one gigantic object among eight or fifteen people and from eating the same thing as everybody else in the nation; and when properly roasted, the crisp, rendered, intensely flavored skin of a turkey is bested only by that of a roast suckling pig.

And that is why my first-favorite Thanksgiving dinner is a Thompson’s Turkey. The problem is that I’ve never eaten a properly prepared Thompson’s Turkey—even though I’ve followed Thompson’s instructions with slavish and obsessive care on several occasions.

Morton Thompson was a newspaperman in the 1930s and 1940s with columns in the
New York Journal
and the
Hollywood
Citizen-News
(though he is more famous for his best-selling novel,
Not as a Stranger,
published in 1954 and later made into a movie). Sometimes Thompson devoted his column to food, and one November in the mid-1930s he gave an elaborate recipe for turkey, one that has often been republished in the years that followed, turning up in pamphlets and in the popular press every ten or fifteen years since his death. You might say that followers of Thompson’s Turkey constitute something of a cult (albeit a small and benign cult) whose members differ from the population at large only in their eagerness to expend eight or ten hours of backbreaking labor to prepare an exceptional, a uniquely savory, turkey.

Thompson’s Turkey has become such a tradition in one branch of my wife’s family that the
Nashville Banner
ran a story twelve years ago about her cousin Bonnie Lloyd (the former Miss Utah); her husband, Bill; their six children, Ivey, Tiffany, Sheffy, Marty, Westy, and Merrilee; and their Thompson’s Turkey. It was Bill who first offered me a glimpse of Thompson’s Turkey with a torn and tattered article from a 1957
Gourmet
magazine and a quote from Robert Benchley:

Several years ago I ate a turkey prepared and roasted by Morton Thompson. I didn’t eat the whole turkey, but that wasn’t my fault. There were outsiders present who ganged up on me. … I will just say that I decided at that time that Morton Thompson was the greatest man since [Brillat-]Savarin, and for all I know, Savarin wasn’t as good as Morton Thompson.

To make a Thompson’s Turkey, you first mix up Thompson’s elaborate stuffing, sew it tightly into a very large turkey, and brown the bird briefly at a very high temperature. Then you paint it with a paste of flour, egg, and onion juice, dry it in the oven, and paint it again, repeating this until the bird is hermetically sealed under a stiff crust. You slowly roast the turkey for five
hours, basting it every fifteen minutes. The bird emerges from the oven with a dead black surface from wing to wing. Why would you want to do all this to a turkey? I’ll let Morton Thompson explain:

Beneath this burnt, harmless, now worthless shell the bird will be golden and dark brown, succulent, giddy-making with wild aromas, crisp and crunchable and crackling. The meat beneath this crazing panorama of lip-wetting skin will be wet, juice will spurt from it in tiny fountains high as the handle of the fork plunged into it; the meat will be white, crammed with mocking flavor, delirious with things that rush over your palate and are drowned and gone as fast as you can swallow; cut a little of it with a spoon, it will spread on bread as eagerly and readily as soft wurst.

You do not have to be a carver to eat this turkey; speak harshly to it and it will fall apart.

This is the end of it. All but the dressing. No pen, unless it were filled with Thompson’s gravy, can describe Thompson’s dressing, and there is not paper enough in the world to contain the thoughts and adjectives it would set down, and not marble enough to serve for its monuments.

On the assumption that you will find these words no less seductive than I did, I will give you Thompson’s detailed recipe as soon as I have finished telling you about it; I have chosen the 1945 version, the one I slavishly followed, at least on the first attempt.

As the stuffing contains twenty-nine ingredients, it took me three hours to get the bird into the oven, and not only because my spice shelf had fallen out of alphabetical order; nearly every spice I possess found its place in Thompson’s stuffing. The completed mixture is reminiscent of no identifiable cuisine; it includes ingredients like crushed pineapple and canned water
chestnuts that daring housewives of fifty years ago put into nearly everything they cooked. And it contains garlic, which was even too daring for most housewives fifty years ago when the American kitchen was still in the thrall of Anglo-German flavor phobias. Made with fresh herbs instead of Thompson’s dried, and with several ambiguities in the shopping list properly resolved, this is the most delicious bread stuffing I have ever tasted.

A turkey is the largest creature that most of us will ever cook, twenty pounds of muscle and bone and another five or so of stuffing. Thompson’s method asks for too much rotating of the turkey, which quickly becomes a hot, slippery, twenty-five-pound bombshell. It was August when I made my first Thompson’s, and although I had all the air conditioners cranked up to maximum to simulate the climate in which the Pilgrims celebrated their first Thanksgiving, I was wearing shorts in the kitchen as I struggled to turn the Thompson’s Turkey to and fro. It slipped from my hands and headed in the direction of the open dishwasher. I lunged forward to catch it. In this I was successful, but not before I had pressed both my shins firmly against the red-hot oven rack. Months later I still bear the scars of this roasting injury. All cookbooks should warn you to wear long pants when you roast.

My Thompson’s Turkey emerged as Thompson had said it would, a flat, ashen black. When cut into, it did not spurt fountains of juice; and the black coating did not readily peel off to expose acres of ultimate skin. But everything else that Thompson and Benchley said about Thompson’s Turkey is absolutely true. The meat of this turkey is the most flavorful and moist that you will ever taste, deeply imbued with the multitudinous perfumes of the stuffing, now mingled and compounded so that none asserts itself over the others. Everyone who has tasted Thompson’s Turkey agrees completely.
It may be the only turkey worth consuming for gastronomic as well as symbolic reasons.