Some notes on, about, and toward Turkeys

November is "novel month," which makes for an amusing play on words. There are few months less novel than November. The other principle offender is December. Mind you, January and February never feel especially new either, in spite of the calendars they require us to buy.

All the same, November is the month during which we are asked not only to stomach a lack of novelty, but also to issue forth novels of our own. I was working in the local café today and noticed a sign advertising something called "national novel month." The plan is for everyone (!) to write a 50,000 word narrative within a single month. The design here is less to advance the progress of literary history than to promote bookish loitering in places such as cafés and bookstores. Needless to say, I'm utterly in favor.

Yet this announcement prompted some uneasy reflections on the blog format. Although the proposition of writing a "food" novel on this blog was fleetingly entertained, the parties responsible have been silenced. And besides, it's impossible. The temporality is all backward. There's simply no way to read it in order. Chapter one, no sooner written, would be treampled underfoot by chapter two. Chapter three, in turn, would spread itself leisurely atop chapter two, only to await the inevitable heft of its successor. And chapter four, flush in the prime of its creation, would have but a brief tenure before it, too, bent its head in deference to chapter five. And so forth, into obscurity.

This temporal difficulty goes beyond the novel form. A similar problem arises any time one attempts to pursue an older line of inquiry: last week, I began speculating about Thanksgiving menus, only to grow distracted. Rather than postponing the post indefinately, I cut bait, and posted it. And there it lies, half-baked, yet fully formed. To continue the same line of inquiry is impossible. I was trying to make some plans for Thanksgiving dinner. But now the whole proposition seens unsettled.

I'm wondering if the same kinds of tricks can be played on Thanksgiving itself. We'ere having friends over, so the sky's the limit. Why not tinker with the whole danged meal, and not simply tackle the turkey problem I was so concerned with last week?

Here's a possible menu:

Starter:
Turkey roulades: braised turkey thighs rolled with sausage/chestnut stuffing and cranberry sauce. Served sliced on a bed of dandelion greens?

Next:
Trio of autumnal soups, served in, you know, precious little cups of some kind:
1) white: turnip and leek soup
2) orange: squash bisque
3) red: borscht

After that:
Sweet potato soufflé with roasted brussels sprouts

And, to conclude, perhaps it's best to keep dessert last. So cheeses, naturally, and pumpkin pies or custards.

This is all just a fanciful thought, but I'm just sick, sick, sick of brown food at Thanksgiving.

Now, there's a whole other line of inquiry to pursue, here, which would involve swinging the doors in the other direction and make things much more, er, colonial. Open fires, lots of roasting, things cooked in coals.

So many decisions to make. So many decisions. And so much time.

This is why it's never too early to think about Thanksgiving.

It's Never Too Early...

It's never too early to start planning for Thanksgiving. With the holiday just over a month away, October 25 seems comically late. Imagine if one waited until this point before deciding to breed or even to fatten a turkey. Or to dry some corn. No dice. The whole thing would be a wash.

We lack, of course, the means to breed a turkey, and our back yard has no room for corn. We are humble consumers, and not farmers. And so such decisions regarding when and how to plan the harvest do not fall on us. Our greatest concerns are more banal: whether the bird has defrosted in time, or whether the meal should include soup.

Much of the colonial New England desperation implicit in this holiday meal is thus, frankly, lost on us. One year we spiced things up considerably by deep-frying the turkey outside. With a gas flame raging under a pot of hot oil, we felt, if only fleetingly, a shiver of Pilgrim fear.

More interesting still would be a thanksgiving dinner cooked and eaten entirely out of doors, with guest huddled together on the frosty ground. This wouldn't necessarily be authentic— the Pilgrims did, after all, have houses— but it would certainly feel old-fashioned. Such a plan would work better, though, if Thanksgiving were celebrated at its proper time: that is, in mid October, when the harvest occurs, and not in late November, when it's already winter.

This year I want to focus on the menu rather than on the danger. Thanksgiving dinner is rarely anything more than a buffet, a fatigue-inducing assortment of brown foods. Must this be the case? Might it be possible to choreograph the meal a bit further without losing sight of the seasonal ingredients, most of which are, it should be said, either brown, or roots, or both.

The central problem— as every cookbook will tell us— is the turkey. The fact is, I'm indifferent to it, finding the roast bird utterly humdrum and, what's more, a caricature of Early Modern cuisine. Yet the idea of matching savory roast fowl with rich forcemeats and spiced confectionery is deeply appealing. The problem is that the regal turkey has been propelled beyond its means. The dressings are now afterthoughts, or ornaments. This hubris has, for me, proven fatal: the bird, bloated from additives and adulation, can no longer soar to the heights to which it aspires. Bulky and swollen, falsely tenderized by a lifetime of captivity, it has little more appeal than a 15-pound potato.

Here, then, is the first thing to revise. Why not bring back the chestnuts, the citrus peel, the cranberries, and the forcemeat as the key elements of the presentation? Turkey is, after all, a game bird, not an institution. I've usually sneered at "alternative" preparations, as they tend to address the problem of tenderness (i.e., how do we avoid the dryness of roasting) rather than the dullness of the breed itself. I, for one, enjoy a good roast.

I love the image of a dozen or so small, scrawny wild turkeys roasting on a spit: this would necessitate the myriad flavoring agents and tenderizers used to mediate the strong flavors of the game. But this just isn't practical.

Here are two possible alternatives: the first is a recipe from the Dean & DeLuca cookbook for stuffed drumsticks with bacon, brandy, and thyme: this dish maintains the roasted flavor and dark, complementary richness of game, but in microcosm.
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This is where this post left off, about a week ago. Nothing earth-shattering; the ending simply never came to pass. What was that second alternative? I don't even remember.

It seems it's never to early to stop thinking about Thanksgiving.

A Note on Carrot Jam

Much of our cooking these days has been rushed off the stove, short-order style. After a while this becomes depressing: some of our recent meals, stretching into last week, have been decidedly monochromatic. A warm French potato salad with bacon and red onion. Tasty, sure, in moderation. But it's a side dish. So when there's nothing else to accompany it, it grows tedious P.D.Q. A bowl of potatoes can only take you so far.

So it was with no small relief that we broke out of our funk this past weekend and made a few things.

I even invented a recipe. This may be a first.

The dish even has a name. It's called "Pork with Carrot Confit." (Pork with Carrot Jam sounds peculiar, after all). The idea began with the details for a "Breakfast in Cairo" from Rozanne Gold's Recipes 1-2-3 Menu Cookbook, which is perhaps the most minimalist cookbook I've ever come across. Every dish uses only three ingredients, save salt and pepper. Pretty remarkable, especially since this allows plenty of room for experimentation.

Along with strained yogurt and Ful Madammas, beakfast in Cairo included a carrot jam: this is essentially a marmalade made from grated carrots, lemon, and sugar.

We now have a jar of it in our fridge.

For the pork recipe, I braised 4 pork ribs in carrot juice and garlic: first browning the ribs on all sides in a little olive oil, and then adding two cloves of chopped garlic and about two cups of carrot juice to deglaze the pan. I kept the temperature very low so as not to scorch the juice. The meat simmered, covered, for two hours or so.

Meanwhile, I made the jam by combining 2 pounds of grated carrots with six cups of sugar, two cups of water, and the juice of three lemons (to make 1/2 cup of lemon juice). This simmers for about an hour and a half, until the liquid thickens.

I then added about half a cup of the jam to the simmering pork chops; I also added a few whole miniature carrots, which were peeled. (The carrots had arrived with our farm share, and consisted of a mix of sizes and shapes. The tiniest were annoying enough to peel, and simply impossible to grate. So I tossed 'em in whole).

The addition of the jam makes the pork rather sweet, so one is advised to be judicious at this point. I wanted to be bold, but found that the pork could handle more jam than I'd suspected. I finished the dish by reducing the braising liquid to a fairly thick consistency and adding about a 1/2 tablespoon of sherry vinegar.

To complement the glazed pork I served it with tomato rice and some swiss chard sautéed with raisins and pine nuts; the chard added a useful note of bitterness to the plate.

All in all, not bad. Some ginger might have complemented the carrots nicely, and I wonder how else I might have finished the dish; in concept, the whole thing wasn't far off from many of the meat recipes in the Silver Palate cookbook, which make ready use of jams, jellies and compotes.

And now the next question is how best to use a jar of carrot jam.

Nostalgia-Free Cookies

First of all, there's no such thing.

That, at least, is what everyone told me. "The nose," Coach Taylor explained, "is the organ of nostalgia par excellence." Her paramour, whom I'll call A/V, agreed. "Smell and memory are inextricable," he said.

But herein lay my opening. "Nostalgia and memory are not the same thing. Memory has to do with events that actually happened; nostalgia is fictional sentiment."

Across town, my friends P. and J-M concurred. "Nostalgia refers to something that never took place." But then a slight correction: "Or at least, it refers to something that has become fictionalized, even if it was real to start. You turn it into myth."

I was in Philadelphia for two evenings this week, and I used the occasion to bore my friends with a question that had occurred to me as I was reading about the world financial crisis. The crash, as everyone knows, stems from the surfeit of McMansions. And we've all heard, of course, about the real-estate sales ploy of baking cookies in otherwise soulless houses; the smell of baking was designed to counteract this. Fanned throughout the empty husk of home model A, this smell induced a sense of homeyness that prompted potential home-buyers to ferret out desperate mortgages they could not afford. The smell of cookies drives us homeward; yet in driving madly homeward, we arrive to find little more than fumes.

This may seem more prosaic than any Proustian involuntary memory, but for a spell it was a whole lot more profitable. Until now, of course. No superabundance of cookies can offset global panic.

All the same, it comes back to cookies. If you ask me, the global financial crisis has to do with the unfortunate bond between cookies and nostalgia. (What a sad fate for such an unassuming pastry. First it was heart attacks, and now this. It simply isn't fair!) But since there are fat-free cookies, might it not be possible to develop nostalgia-free cookies as well?

This was the idea.

For Coach T. and A/V, who are marvelously rational people, the proposition would call for a massive shift in cookie composition. The olfactory agents would have to change entirely. What is it we smell when we bake cookies? The caramelization of sugar; the browning of butter; the melting of cocoa butter. These elements— so fundamental to our sense of the familiar— would have to go. Cookies could be made instead from savory ingredients. "Why not meat?" A/V offered. But by this time it was becoming clear that my inquiry had overstayed its welcome: it was, after all, time for dinner. And attention was turning toward meatier things.

For the ever tactful P. and J-M, the question soon shifted into a discussion of nostalgia itself; this spared me the embarassment of conversational overkill. Was nostalgia purely a fiction? Or could it refer to something specific? To put the question another way: do realtors bake cookies in order that the smell remind homebuyers of their actual homes, or only that it remind them of an idea or ideal of home they carry around with them?

I'm no Des Esseintes; but I'm wondering all the same whether the whole emotional register of cookie baking might be pried open entirely. Why limit the exploration of scent to the narrow margin between memory and nostalgia, when the whole range of sentiment can provide a terrain for exploration. Might it be possible to bake cookies whose scent made everyone sad, or eager, or triumphant? What about a batch of brownies that reduced one's guests to speculation, or to uneasiness?

We're straying ever closer to molecular gastronomy here. But this is not simply a matter of synthesizing olfactory effects. If a batch of cookies were to give off the odor of tobacco, or of burning leaves, would this alter their ties to nostalgia? Or would it be simply a different nostalgia? The real question— kidding aside— is whether the activation of our sense of smell is tied simply to memories (whether "real" or imaginary), or whether, like tastes, it's possible to access other forms of cognition, whether conscious or unconscious. Are there smells to which we might react in terms of danger, for instance?

Imagine what "danger cookies" might taste like.

Or perhaps realtors have been baking danger cookies all along, and we simply haven't learned to react to them properly.

Easy Targets

One of the great autumnal pleasures— other than raking leaves, which comes later in the season— is staying up late to make tomato sauce. I'm now on my third batch. Two weeks ago, as batch #2 simmered happily away, I suddenly realized that time had escaped my grasp: it was 2:30 in the morning. And on a work night! My mind must have been wandering.

What snapped me to attention— and what directed this attention, in turn, to the lateness of the hour— was the cavalcade of sirens wailing down the street outside. One of the houses nearby was on fire. The house had been an 1870s miracle, a Queen Anne stone mansion whose fate now hangs on the scales of the insurance companies.

My sauce, however, bubbled along contentedly, even as I padded barefoot over to the next street, straining to determine which house was burning. The cause of the fire, it turns out, was an electrical malfunction. But it could just as easily have been a kitchen fire— an unwatched stove, say, left burning too far into the night. So I rushed home to turn off my own stove, lest those flames get any wild ideas.

My hope tonight— needless to say— is that the new batch of tomato sauce will bring no such drama, and that the pleasure of late-night sauce-making will be unmarred by disaster or tragedy.

One might even say that the entire home cooking industry shares my hope, or at least bases its marketing upon it. What is a cookbook, after all, other than a bulwark against failure? Why resort to trial and error when a trial can be so trying, and when an error— in a situation wherein high heat, sharp instruments, and perishable foodstuffs are involved— can be dangerous as well as unsatisfying.

So, too, does the technology of the home cook serve a prophylactic function. Whether against waste, or strain, or lost time, or ineptitude, these instruments line our counters and cabinets like enamel soldiers primed for battle. Just look at the young lady on the cover of the Hamilton Beach food mixer cookbook, above; notice how keenly her face radiates pride, and how staunchly her unmarred apron testifies to the machine's efficiency.

Books like this are easy targets; indeed, it's far too easy to snicker at such a portrait of the 1940s domestic goddess, brandishing her cake like a toddler beaming after a successful trip to the potty.

Nor is it any real fun to marvel at the mixer's place in the tableau: how it quietly dominates the scene, a magician soliciting applause for his tireless and lovely assistant. The mixer takes its bow, too; the domestic goddess has distracted us just long enough for the mixer to pull off its sleight-of-hand.

Again, all this is simply too easy. The real pleasure here lies in following these protestations of joy as they change over time. I recently came across a number of such pamphlet-sized cookbooks (or cookbooks-cum-instruction manuals) at a local antique store, shortly after the night of the fire. They were all remarkably cheap, which is why I bought them. And they are remarkable documents. But documents of what?

Of gender, certainly. The calm, smiling grandmother of the 1930s gives way to the eager hausfrau of the 1940s and 1950s, suggesting slight alterations, but no major ones, in the picture of domesticity they present. The womenfolk help the machines cook all that food, and the experts at Syracuse University safely test the recipes.

One cookbook (to the right) offers a slightly different spectacle, depicting a curious hybrid of grandmother and infant, grinning girlishly out at us over her bifocals. She seems to have leapt over adult sexuality altogether. The book is dedicated to "carefree cooking," suggesting that the recipes are simple enough for our quaint little humunculus to prepare the dishes herself— no need for technology here! She holds the cookbook upside down, of course.

Again: easy targets. But there's something more to these little books than their ham-fisted identifications with the pre-war status quo. For other titles are more straightforwardly hortatory, appealing to their readers to "Be Original" or to "Cook with Cheese." Here we have a paean to the aesthetic sensibility that home kitchen products— whether instruments, implements, or condiments— can introduce into our lives. Technology offers more than just efficiency; it can fulfill cooking's appeal to pleasure.

Here, to the left, is a book that became an immediate favorite of mine, a pamphlet put out by the makers of Lea & Perrins Worcestershire sauce sometime during the 1970s. A real marketing gambit, for certain: the versatility of a condiment made from fermented anchovies, raisins, garlic, molasses, and tamarind may not seem immediately apparent. But this obscure condiment, the book claims, can become a vehicle for unfettered creativity.

And I can imagine no vehicle more perfect— and certainly no more original!— than a meat loaf train. Chugging along on its carrot-disk wheels across a landscape of mashed potatoes, it bears a salutary cargo of vegetables to the good little boys and girls around the table.

"Just the dish to enchant the youngsters at any party," the recipe claims.

The dish enchants because it offers us, rather than the perfect dish, an incarnation of the perfect train. Its cargo notwithstanding, the train delivers because it was designed to careen off the tracks, to break into bits, to disappear. Railway accident— normally the stuff of tragedy— becomes a raison d'être, and, in doing so, becomes the stuff of pure entertainment. The meat loaf train, which serves 8-10, titillates the youngsters with its spectacle of immanent consumption, who tear into it like a roomfull of pre-teen de Quinceys running to gape at a fire.

Perhaps this, rather than the more pastoral pleasures of late-night sauce, represents the epitome of home cooking technology: disaster is not so much avoided as embraced, transformed into the very purpose of cooking itself.