The Man Who Ate Everything - Jeffrey Steingarten [201]
Quickly calculating that we had enough gasoline to keep the car’s heater running for two weeks, we forsook the ambition of reaching upstate New York and, using the Swiss Army knife and Sierra cups without which we never traveled more than a few feet from our apartment in those days, made quick and thankful work of the pies, bread, and Scotch. A brief nap followed. We awoke to find our snowdrift enfolded in a calm and cloudless evening rich with tow trucks, gas stations, and detailed instructions for driving back to the safety of Manhattan, just in time for a late supper at one of its excellent restaurants.
One happy feature of my second-favorite Thanksgiving dinner is that it was turkeyless. The Oxford English Dictionary defines turkey as “a well-known, large gallinaceous bird … now valued as a table fowl in all civilized lands.” I couldn’t disagree more. We eat turkey on Thanksgiving because turkey is an edible symbol, not because it is a valued contender at the table. It stands for the discovery of the foodstuffs of the New World and the brotherhood offered by Native Americans to those who would soon displace them. Edible symbols are rarely gastronomically rewarding, though I did once eat a superb dark-chocolate Eiffel Tower and a swan molded from first-rate chopped liver. If turkeys were not a symbol, we would never eat as many of them as we do. Their meat is nearly always bland and stringy, and their shape is entirely incorrect.
The best part of a roast turkey is its skin. Modern turkey breeders, responding to an apparent demand for more white and less dark meat, have developed a bird consisting mainly of a huge, nearly spherical breast and short, skinny legs and thighs. Yet the breast of the bird is surely its least savory part, and its spherical shape is surely a mistake. Remember what we learned in high school about spheres? Of all geometric figures, the sphere has the lowest ratio of surface to volume; a spherical turkey, therefore, has the lowest ratio of skin to meat. How much more gastronomically delightful would be to breed modern turkey in the shape, say, of a two-foot pizza with little wings and legs at the circumference and two broad surfaces of delicious, crackling, savory, golden-russet skin with very little meat inside!
Even as a symbol, the turkey falls short in at least four ways:
1. The Pilgrims probably did not eat turkey at the first Thanksgiving dinner in 1621. The only firsthand account of the feast, reprinted in the Plimouth Plantation’s Thanksgiving Primer, does not mention turkey. According to Evan Jones in American Food (Overlook), the Pilgrims dined on venison, roast duck, roast goose, clams, eels, corn, beans, wheat and corn breads, leeks, watercress, wild plums, and homemade wine. It is doubtful that the banqueters even had thanksgiving in mind.
2. The Indians did not purposefully feed the Pilgrims or even introduce them to terrific New World foodstuffs in their devastating first year on these shores. According to Waverley Root and Richard de Rochemont, Native Americans did feed the colonists in Virginia, thus saving their lives, but those in Massachusetts were more suspicious. “It was an Indian habit to stow away caches of long-lasting foods in various places where they might one day be needed; it was the Pilgrims’ good luck to stumble on one of these caches, which kept them alive (some of them) over their first terrible winter,” they write in Eating in America.
3. Even if the Pilgrims did eat turkey at the first “Thanksgiving dinner” in 1621, they surely had tasted much finer turkey back home in England. The turkey, of course, originated not in Turkey