Animal, Vegetable, Miracle_ A Year of Food Life - Barbara Kingsolver [142]
“But you’ll still be earning real money from all your other customers,” I pointed out. “You’ll be opening a bank account before you know it. And everybody’s going to need extra eggs for our baking, with the holidays coming up.”
Cheered by the prospect of holiday baking, the Corporate Executive Officer took the situation in hand. As far as I know, the workforce was never apprised of the crisis.
Of all holidays we celebrate in the United States, few come with food traditions that are really our own. Most of the holy days and bank holidays on our calendar have come from other cultures, some of them ancient, others too modern to have settled yet into having their own menus. The only red-blooded American holiday food customs, it seems to me, arrive on the Fourth of July and Thanksgiving.
They couldn’t be more different. The first is all about charring things on a grill, burgers and hot dogs and the like, washed down with plenty of beer or soda, the purpose being to stay outdoors for a long afternoon culminating at dusk in elaborate explosions of gunpowder. Aside from the flagpole that may be somewhere in the scene, there is nothing about this picnic that’s really rooted in our land. The pyrotechnics are Chinese, technically, and the rest of the deal is as packaged as food can be. That might even be what’s most American about it. At the end of a Fourth of July party, if asked to name the sources of what we’d consumed, we’d be hard pressed to muster an ingredient list.
The other holiday is all about what North America has to offer at the end of a good growing season. Thanksgiving is my favorite, and always has been, I suppose because as a child of the farmlands I appreciate how it honestly belongs to us. On Saint Patrick’s Day every beer-drinking soul and his brother is suddenly Irish. Christmas music fills our ears with tales of a Palestinian miracle birth, a generous Turkish saint whom the Dutch dressed in a red suit, and a Druid ceremonial tree…I think. But Turkey Day belongs to my people. Turkeys have walked wild on this continent since the last ice age, whereas Old Europe was quite turkeyless. (That fact alone scored them nearly enough votes to become our national bird, but in the end, I guess, looks do matter.) Corn pudding may be the oldest New World comfort food; pumpkins and cranberries, too, are exclusively ours. It’s all American, the right stuff at the right time.
To this tasty native assembly add a cohort of female relatives sharing work and gossip in the kitchen, kids flopped on the living room floor watching behemoth cartoon characters float down a New York thoroughfare on TV, and men out in the yard pretending they still have the upper-body strength for lateral passes, and that is a perfect American day. If we need a better excuse to focus a whole day on preparing one meal, eating it, then groaning about it with smiles on our faces, just add a dash of humility and hallelujah. Praise the harvest. We made it through one more turn of the seasons.
In modern times it’s mostly pageantry, of course, this rejoicing over harvest and having made it to winter’s doorstep with enough food. But at our house this year, the harvest was real and the relief literal. Also, for the first time since we’d begun our local-food experiment, we approached a big dining event for which the script was already written. Local turkey? We had some whose lives began in the palms of our hands and ended twelve steps from the back door. Pumpkin pies, mashed potatoes, corn pudding, sweet potatoes, green beans, celery and chestnuts for the stuffing—how could it be this easy? On our continent, this party plans itself.
I had no complaint about celebrating Thanksgiving twice, this time carnivorously. Any excuse to spend a day with friends and my husband and kids is good with me,