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.