The Art of Eating In - Cathy Erway [79]
At holiday gatherings with my family, rarely does cooking cease to be the center of activity. I don’t see this as a strange quirk, or as archaic. Cooking and feeding one another are ways of playing out family roles as much as they are acts of necessity when you are with a big group of family members all at once. They were also an expression of hospitality for our guests. Right then Ellen and Phoebe were asleep in the spare guest room upstairs.
My mom came downstairs.
“What’cha making?” she asked. I had a large saute pan of sliced onions on the stove, which I was in the process of slowly caramelizing before adding them to the eggs.
“A frittata,” I replied.
“A what?” she said.
“This egg thing, sort of like a quiche but without a crust.”
“Oh, yes, do that,” she said. She looked at the clock. “Dad needs to wake up and start the turkey.”
I suddenly remembered one of my favorite Thanksgiving snacks.
“Can we cook the gizzards now?”
“Yes, let’s do that,” said my mom. Nobody loved eating the entrails of the turkey as much as my mother and I. I particularly liked the neck. Boiled for at least an hour in plain water, and sprinkled with just salt, the tender muscles peeled off with a fork in delectable dark-meat shreds. It’s a flavorful part of the bird and tastes a little like braised duck, if you ask me.
After a little while, my father came bumbling down the stairs, eyes bloodshot and darting as if he had just been dragged from a dream.
“Where’s the turkey? Did someone start making the stuffing yet?” he said.
I helped bring the bucket that the turkey was brining in from the porch into the kitchen. My frittata had just gone into the oven, which my dad complained about.
“The turkey needs to go into the oven now if we’re going to eat at three,” he insisted.
“We’re not going to eat at three; we never do. It doesn’t matter anyway. We have plenty of appetizers. Breakfast hasn’t even been served, and it’s already ten,” said my mom.
Indeed, we had a full day’s schedule of food to pass through our mouths, and seemingly not enough time for it all. In anticipation, I started to make my next dish, a turkey liver mousse. I had never made it before, but I followed a recipe that called for chicken livers in a savory pate-like spread.
An hour or so later, the frittata was taken out of the oven, and fruits and croissants were spread out on the kitchen table for breakfast. Everyone else had trickled downstairs in their pajamas, too. Although he loved to eat food, my brother wasn’t terribly inclined to cook it. He was more interested in stealing time on the upright piano whenever he was at our parents’ house.
“That’s Chris’s song,” I said to Ellen, who had joined us in the kitchen for breakfast. “He composed it.”
“It sounds lovely. Play some more,” she shouted into the living room.
After showering and dressing, I went back downstairs to help prepare sides and serve midday appetizers. I copied Sean and Meredith’s baked-Brie-and-mango-spread dish, which turned out to be a huge hit. The turkey liver mousse came out nicely, too. I had sauteed the livers with onions, a fresh rosemary sprig, and a splash of white wine, and then removed the rosemary and blended the mixture with chunks of cold butter. With all the cholesterol naturally in liver, it was a rich and incredibly fattening snack. After snack-time, I was already full, with a couple of hours left till dinner.
As we sat on stools around the kitchen eating Brie and crackers, my aunt began telling me about a self-help book she was reading. Ellen had separated from her husband earlier that year, and she’d recently begun seeing a new guy. The book was called The Five Love Languages, and it described five distinct ways people showed affection for each other in relationships. The point of understanding this, Ellen explained, was to see whether your methods of communication work with, or are appreciated by, your partner. Reading a quiz at the beginning of the book was supposed to show one which “languages” he or she uses most: acts of