“Thanksgiving is not easy,” Sam Sifton warns turkey tyros in his new book “Thanksgiving: How to Cook It Well.” Handily enough, Sifton, who was the restaurant critic at the Times for two years before becoming the paper’s National Editor in 2011 (food + America = Thanksgiving expertise), has produced “a primer on how to face down the Thanksgiving meal… a Thanksgiving ambulance in book form.” With a quarter century of Thanksgivings at the stove—“I have seen a lot of birds”—and experience manning the Times’s holiday hotline, he boasts, “I can help.”
Until last week, I had never cooked a Thanksgiving dinner. I didn’t really get the appeal. My mother is a Christmas person: beef filet wrapped in fat and herbs for twenty-plus guests. For Thanksgiving, she and my stepfather tend to crash a friend’s party or flee the country. My father and stepmother, who have settled in various Wasp enclaves along the Eastern seaboard—Greenwich, Naples, Princeton—often choose to celebrate with a 4 P.M. country-club buffet (which has its merits, including all-you-can-eat shrimp cocktail with a clear view of the eighteenth green).
So when I read, “You can go your whole life and then wake up one morning and look in the refrigerator at this animal carcass the size of a toddler and think: I have to cook that today,” it was as if Sifton was speaking to me directly. Or rather, to me, and the twelve-pound, partially defrosted bird that was staring me down, headless though he (or she?) was. Of course, the day wasn’t Thanksgiving proper, but November 4th, which I had dubbed “Fakesgiving.” I had six people coming over to eat Sifton’s “even more simple roast turkey” (stuffed with apple, celery, onion, and thyme), gravy, steamed butternut squash with butter and parsley, green beans, maple-glazed carrots, cranberry sauce, and apple pie.
The plan had been to make the meal for my mother and stepfather, who would be returning from a vacation in Bhutan. The stakes were going to be low—they had been eating rice and lentils for weeks and would no doubt be jetlagged. Also, I suspected that they might have gone a little batty; one e-mail cryptically recounted a visit to a “fertility temple,” where my mother was “blessed by a monk by being tapped on the head with a phallus-shaped object and some other implements.”
Then came Hurricane Sandy. My parents and I were stranded in different boroughs, and so Brooklyn-based reinforcements were called in. This wouldn’t be so hard, I thought. Sifton promised: “You need only cook the meal correctly, and clean up before you go to bed.” Even better, he cheered me on: “You are going to page through this book—read and digest, argue and discuss, make plans and write lists—and then you are going to cook and serve a meal that will bring praise down upon you like a shower of rose petals.”
Before the petal downpour can commence, however, readers must put up with some bullying from Sifton. He is wholly contemptuous of certain crimes against the holiday, among which he counts appetizers (they “take up valuable stomach space” and “are insulting to your own hard work”), salad (“you can have your salad tomorrow”), garlic (“it debases mashed potatoes and brings turkey meat low”), and napkins stuffed into wine glasses (“tragic”).
“Shortcuts are anathema to Thanksgiving,” he scolded me from the page, as I tossed more boxed turkey stock into my shopping cart. “Put plainly, we are going to cook Thanksgiving correctly.” At least “we” could always add more butter. Sifton suggests at least two pounds “for the day.” “Two pounds sends a message,” he writes. “Endorse it.”
I am not used to taking Sifton’s style of heckling in my own kitchen—at times putting up with his condescension (as funny as it often is) can seem an absurd prelude to the advent of snide uncles and pestering aunts. Shouldn’t one be building up one’s defenses? But in the end, Sifton’s signature blend of disparagement and humor is just what the holiday calls for. There is a lot of food to cook. A culinary drill sergeant, barking putdowns as you scorch rather than glaze, is your only hope. And, for the most part, his recipes are easy to follow. If he is abrupt, it is because—have you seen the time?—this is not the day to mess around.
Nevertheless, for me, there remained obstacles ahead. I grated both a produce sticker and part of my pinky finger into the cranberry sauce. I spent hours poking at a Plymouth rock-solid bird that I was too terrified to thaw on the countertop—as my butcher had suggested—because Sifton insisted that “this method offers a fast-track route to bacterial growth and the worst Thanksgiving of your life.” Instead, the turkey got a very long, cold bath in my kitchen sink, like a feverish infant.
Then there were those truly impossible demands that Sifton made when he was swept up by the poetic potential of the day. Of apple pie, he opines, “You want a chilly environment, not a tropical one, so that the dough stays cool as you make it. The kitchen temperature you want for dough is that of a fall morning in New England, the sort where you get out of bed and pad around the house in pajamas, wool socks and a sweater, and the kids ask if you can turn up the heat.” I cracked open my window, letting in a gust of autumnal car exhaust. Hard to say if doing so added to the flavors of allspice and cinnamon a dash “of baseball divinity.”
Nothing about Fakesgiving was less easy than the gravy. According to Sifton, “Confidence is everything. Those who believe their gravy will turn out well will turn out good gravy.” I studied the qualities of fond. I faced myself in the mirror, and delivered a pep talk (“Clear eyes, full heart, great roux”). And then I made two pots of gravy—the first watery and bland, the second lumpy and tasting of flour, while my guests looked on.
But while Sifton argues that “social engineering is as much a part of setting the Thanksgiving table as ironing napkins and polishing silver,” when your table is surrounded by friends, and not warring in-laws and petulant teen-aged cousins, grudges are not held. Lumpy gravy is forgiven (and, by the brave, even consumed). The rest of the food was delicious, especially the squash, and a pleasant precipitation of praise came down, as promised. Of course, it doesn’t hurt to follow Sifton’s rulebook here and have a lot of booze on hand—“A bottle of wine per person present is not at all too much.”
My grandmother told me, when I asked about the Thanksgiving traditions that had preceded me, that when she and her twin sister were growing up in Brazil even the turkeys got drunk on the big day—a bottle of wine was poured down each gullet. “They would run around and around the yard until they keeled over,” she explained. “And then we’d cut their heads off. But at least they had a good time before they went.”
Illustration by Wayne Thiebaud.
