Animal, Vegetable, Miracle_ A Year of Food Life - Barbara Kingsolver [143]
We started the evening before, baking several loaves of bread and checking the progress of our thawing bird. I also hacked a Queensland Blue handily to pieces (ten minutes flat—revenge is sweet) to cook down for pumpkin pies. Lily helped roll out the dough. Both girls have always helped with Thanksgiving dinner, since they were tall enough to stand on a chair and mix the stuffing with their hands like a splendid mud pie. One year earlier, at ages eight and seventeen, they had taken responsibility for an entire holiday meal when I was sidelined with a broken leg. With some heavy-lifting help from Steven they pulled it off beautifully: turkey, pies and all. Cooking is 80 percent confidence, a skill best acquired starting from when the apron strings wrap around you twice.
On Thursday morning we baked the pies. In the afternoon we roasted sweet potatoes, braised winter squash, sautéed green beans with chestnuts, boiled and mashed the potatoes, all while keeping a faithful eye on Mr. T. By herself, Lily cracked half a dozen eggs into a bowl (subtract $1.25 from the I.O. Mama column) and made the corn pudding, using corn we’d cut from the cob and frozen in summer. Our garden provided everything, with one exception. Cranberries mostly grow farther north. I’d planted a small experimental cranberry patch but had nothing yet to show for my efforts. We discussed a cranberryless Thanksgiving, and agreed that would be like kissing through a screen door. Who needs it?
Did we need it—was it essential that this feast be 100 percent pure Hoppsolver-grown? Personal quests do have a way of taking on lives of their own, even when nobody else knows or cares: recreational runners push themselves another mile, Scrabblers keep making bigger words. Our locavore project nudged us constantly toward new personal bests. But it always remained fascination, not fanaticism. We still ate out at restaurants with friends sometimes, and happily accepted invitations to dine at their homes. People who knew about our project would get flustered sometimes about inviting us, or when seeing us in a restaurant would behave as if they’d caught the cat eating the canary. We always explained, “We’re converts in progress, not preachers. No stone tablets.” Our Thanksgiving dinner would include a little California olive oil, a pinch of African nutmeg, and some Virginia flour that likely contained wheat from Pennsylvania and points north. Heeding the imperatives of tradition, we also bought a bag of lipstick-colored organic cranberries from Wisconsin. As the first store-bought fruit or vegetable to enter our house in many months, they looked wildly exotic lounging on our counter, dressed in their revealing cellophane bag. All of us, I think, secretly fondled them before Camille cooked them into a gingery sauce.
Our guests came over in the afternoon to hang out in the kitchen and inhale while everything roasted and braised. We had given away some of our harvested Bourbon Reds, but Mr. Thanksgiving had been chosen while still on his feet, headed all his life for this appointment with our table. He weighed eighteen pounds, even without the mega-breast the Broad-Breasted Whites push around. Historic breeds tend to have proportionally more dark meat, and true to type, this guy made up for his narrower chest with a lot of leg, thigh, and overall heft. His color and texture were so different from the standard turkey, it’s hard to compare them. He was a pleasure to cook, remaining exceptionally moist and tender. Thanks to a