The Man Who Ate Everything - Jeffrey Steingarten [202]
Between the time they landed in December of 1620 and their feast nearly a year later, the Pilgrims undoubtedly ate wild turkey, even if they forwent the large gallinaceous fowl at the famous feast itself. Wild game was so plentiful in North America that some writers attribute the success of colonization to its availability. Others believe that the inexhaustible plentitude of wild game, including turkeys, gave rise to the American obsession with meat, which, according to Waverley Root, astonished European visitors for two centuries.
So the turkey really symbolizes unbridled carnivorous behavior and the cardiac problems that that brings. The true meaning of the Thanksgiving menu lies in the garnishes, not in the main course—in the uniquely New World cranberry, pumpkin, sweet potatoes, corn, beans, and other treasures the Europeans found growing here. That’s why I consider it a quasi-religious duty to consume a generous range and amount of chocolate on this holiday. You can’t give thanks without it.
4. The turkey got its silly name through two or three mistakes. You might guess that the name stemmed from a mistaken belief that Columbus had landed in Asia. You would be wrong. When the Spanish brought the turkey back home only twenty-six years after Columbus’s first voyage, Europeans confused it with the guinea fowl, a distinct bird of African origin known to Aristotle and Pliny, and assigned to it the name they already applied to the guinea fowl. For the English, this name was “turkey” because they believed that the African bird had come to Europe through lands controlled by the Turks; now the Aztec bird became a “turkey,” too. The Germans called both the old African and new Mexican fowl kalekuttisch hun, or “Calcutta hen” (similar to the Dutch kalkoen), and the French named it coq d’inde or simply d’inde, which then became the modern dinde—all of these meaning “bird of India.” To the Europeans, Turkey and India were more or less in the same neighborhood.
All of this is, of course, a futile exercise in ornithology. The turkey, however imperfect in taste and texture, however sloppy as a national symbol, however misnamed, is gastronomically inevitable, if not on every Thanksgiving then on most of them. The savory and educational garnishes do go quite well with a bland and golden bird; we derive communal pleasure both from splitting up one gigantic object among eight or fifteen people and from eating the same thing as everybody else in the nation; and when properly roasted, the crisp, rendered, intensely flavored skin of a turkey is bested only by that of a roast suckling pig.
And that is why my first-favorite Thanksgiving dinner is a Thompson’s Turkey. The problem is that I’ve never eaten a properly prepared Thompson’s Turkey—even though I’ve followed Thompson’s instructions with slavish and obsessive care on several occasions.
Morton Thompson was a newspaperman in the 1930s and 1940s with columns in the New York Journal and the Hollywood Citizen-News (though he is more famous for his best-selling novel, Not as a Stranger, published in 1954 and later made into a movie). Sometimes Thompson devoted his column to food, and one November in the mid-1930s he gave an elaborate recipe for turkey, one that has often been republished in the years that followed, turning up in pamphlets and in the popular press every ten or fifteen years since his death. You might say that followers of Thompson’s Turkey constitute something of a cult (albeit a small and benign cult) whose members differ from the population at large