Of turkey and tradition - championing traditional Christmas and Thanksgiving holiday food - Column

National Review, Jan 18, 1993 by Linda Bridges

THE distaste my colleague Digby Anderson feels for traditional Anglo-American holiday food [see his "Rescue Hampers" in our last issue] is understandable: he grew up, poor man, in England at a time when its culinary standards, always debatable, had been held under water by years of rationing. These childhood traumas can be hard to overcome.

Mr. Anderson proposes to rescue modern Anglos by converting them to a wonderful tradition--the Mediterranean-which, however, is foreign to them. I propose instead rediscovering our own traditions as they should be.

And we need some rediscovery, even on our side of the Anglo-American connection. Back in the days before Harriet Nelson and June Cleaver gave way to Joan Baez and Betty Friedan, middle-class American children knew the agonizing delight ("Mommy, when will it be done?") of the smell of roasting turkey, mingled with butter and onions and sage, followed by the appearance of the bronze-skinned bird, with a chance, if cook and carver were indulgent, to nobble a bit of the skin while it was at its crispest.

Now, thanks to Yankee ingenuity and technological advance, a substantial portion of that generation's offspring have never known the same joys. First there was that diabolical contraption, the roasting bag, which seemed a godsend to women who cared too much about their housekeeping to let a greasy oven go uncleaned, but were too lazy, or too busy, to clean it directly after Thanksgiving and Christmas. Unfortunately, the bag yields not roast but steamed turkey, its skin damp and pallid, the meat rubbery, and with no nice brown sludge at the bottom of the pan to make gravy of. The other contrivance is the microwave. I'm told the fancier ones have a browning tray, which is meant to make it just as good as an oven. But remember Burnham's Third Law: "Just as good, isn't." Even the authors of microwave columns in newspapers now advise that microwaving ruins the texture of the meat; but by the time the first enthusiastic microwavers discovered that, they were as likely to give up on the turkey as the microwave.

They are abetted in their defection by the food writers who, frantically trying not just to repeat last year's column, encourage their readers to try something new and exciting this holiday season. I remember one such writer brightly suggesting that a whole cod stuffed with brown rice would be as festive as a turkey, while appealing to the vegetarians in your family.

Even if the suggested alternative were more reasonable, this still mistakes one type of art for another--reating for performing. A playwright, a songwriter, a choreographer can only create a particular work once; but if it is a success, the actors, singers, dancers will want to perform it many times. So a chef or a cookbook writer can create (or, in the case of traditional dishes, codify) a work only once, but in his role of cook he will produce it often. Even so sensible a woman as the English food writer Jane Grigson can fall prey to confusion in this regard. In Good Things, she tells how her family set her straight: "As we're not Christmas-pudding eaters, finding it too bulky, too unrefreshing after the turkey course, we've made our own tradition of this cold lemon souffle. I've tried to vary the recipe by adding orange juice and peel, by altering the amount of eggs and cream, but it's no good. Everyone says, "Yes, this is nice, but please next year may we have our proper lemon souffle again?'" Out of the 365 dinners available each year, there is plenty of room to be adventurous without mucking about with the handful of traditional holiday meals.

Not that everyone has to have the same tradition. Apart from individual contrarians-like the Grigsons with their souffle; or a friend of mine who, disliking turkey, started a mini-traditon of serving beef Wellington with TURKEY spelled out in pastry cutouts on the top--there are all the other genuine ethnic traditions. Many of these are rooted in church discipline, even if the churches are no longer strict about such things. The eels of Digby Anderson's adopted Neapolitan Christmas Eve, and the luterisk of my parents' Scandinavian one, are equally rooted in the meatless vigil of a feast day. (By the way, don't believe what you have read about luterisk-- dried cod treated, however improbable it sounds, with lye in the Wall Street Journal. Bob Bartley's childhood trauma is even more understandable than Digby Anderson's, since overcooked luterisk can be nastily slimy. But if cooked properly, and served with lots of melted butter, and accompanied by the heavenly lefse, a griddle bread that's like the apotheosis of a tortilla, it's something that you can happily give 0.3 per cent of your annual dinner allotment to.)

So before the feast day comes the vigil--and after the feast day come: the leftovers. On most questions, it is said, there are two kinds of people in the world, but on this one I detect three. First are those who regard leftovers as a grim duty, and in consequence either settle in for the unpleasantest week of the year or refuse to cook a turkey in the first place, though they will gladly eat it at someone else's house. Second are those who love cold turkey and plan the size of their bird vis-a-vis the size of their holiday dinner party so that the last of the meat is eaten before it starts to dry out. Third are those who, while also fond of cold turkey, are aware that, as the American food writer Michael Field put it, the world's cuisines are full of dishes--"never considered 'leftover' dishes by their creators in the sense in which we disparagingly use the term today"---that "demanded previously cooked food as a base." Having made friends with one item, anyway, of modern technology, the freezer, they can choose a large enough turkey to yield several more dishes in coming months. This is just as well, since turkeys nowadays are bred for bigger breasts, so if you want a reasonable amount of dark meat you can't buy a tiny bird (I find a 14'to'l6pound Tom is about right). Most of the turkey dishes given by Mr. Field in his Classics and Improvisations, like a serene and lovely Turkey Tetrazzini (no relation to the dish of the same name committed by college cafeterias), use only white meat, but dark meat is needed for Mrs. Grigson's Pulled and Devilled Turkey. The dark meat is coated with a devil sauce and then run under the broiler to brown, while the white meat, pulled apart into smallish pieces, is gently reheated in an unthickened cream sauce. With its mustard and Worcestershire sauce and cayenne pepper, this dish might even appeal to Mr. Anderson--and if he still wanted to send a rescue hamper, a spot of Roquefort would go nicely afterward.