The pan that savoured Christmas dinner
It was won at a service station raffle in the 1950s and hasn’t cooked a bad turkey since then
The turkey pan was even older than me, and I have lived a bit. I played checkers with men who beat back the Hun in the Hurtgen forest and sang “Uncloudy Day” with old women who would trade all the shiny automobiles on this earth for one well-tempered mule. I guess what I am trying to say is: I have not been shiny and new for quite some time, and neither has that pan. But, like most things with magic in them, the older it got, the stronger and more wonderful that vessel seemed.
It did not belong to us but was lent to us by kinfolk on my momma’s side, season after season. It materialized on our kitchen table as the last sugar highs of Halloween had dwindled into an uneasy calm and just before the constructionpaper cut-outs of pilgrims began to appear in the windows of the public schools.
The pan was roughly the size of a No. 2 washtub and, in time, was burnished almost gold by the rendering fat of so many slowly roasting, lovely birds. It was a rich folks’ pan, we believed, because it had an aluminum shine, an adjustable vent, and it would fit in our tiny, secondhand General Electric only if you took out one of the oven racks and leaned it against the wall. Rich folks, we figured, had big, walk-in ovens in which you could roast a pterodactyl.
It was a lucky pan almost from the beginning. My Aunt Jo and Uncle John won it in a raffle at Newsome’s Service Station on Highway 21, just north of Jacksonville, Alabama, in a time of tail fins.
I remember that the man who sold them the ticket was called Popcorn, because he liked to eat popcorn, but this is unimportant to our story, I suppose. Still, he remains the only man in my experience named for grain.
The pan would always be lucky, or, as my Pentecostal relations believed, blessed. Across half of the past century and 17 years into the new one, its scorched and battered lid had never been lifted to reveal a poor result, at Thanksgiving, or Christmas, or the odd new year. There was never a dry turkey, or a tough one, or one of bland or questionable flavour, or — and I hate to even mention it — one that was underdone. As a culture, we have a horror of undercooked poultry and believe that if we consume it, we would curl up in a tight little ball and die. We cook our turkeys like we are mad at them and snatch them from the heat at the last possible second.
I was not in attendance at the pan’s first holiday, its inauguration, so am forced to take the word of its early legacy from kinfolk who were there — my maternal uncles, mostly, who were prone to lie for profit, when trading cars, guns, knives and dogs, but sometimes just for sport. But no one in my family would ever be so evil as to give voice to a lie about the magic pan. It might bring bad luck and break the spell, or possibly even anger God.
The second-most anticipated dish was a huge pot of pinto beans, cooked all morning with a hambone and slabs of ham, fat and skin, so that a clear broth — I call it the elixir — formed on top when they were ready to eat. We had a slab of corn bread dressing as big as a desktop, crispy and shining with fat and butter on top, smooth and creamy underneath, redolent with onion and celery and the perfect amount of sage. There were hot biscuits and mounds of mashed potatoes, coloured yellow by butter and cream; and cranberry sauce shaken from a can, as God intended; coleslaw made from orange carrots and red cabbage and just enough mayonnaise; and creamy macaroni and cheese; and green beans from the dirt right outside, canned in my momma’s kitchen. I cannot go on without hurting myself. But mostly, there was the turkey. It began as a marble-hard bowling ball of poultry procured from the A&P, or Piggly Wiggly, or Johnson’s Giant Food, and took much of the month of November to thaw. Preparation, after the defrosting, was relatively simple. There was never, ever, stuffing.
The seasonings atop the bird were simple — just a lot of butter, salt and sometimes a little more — and then she placed the magic lid on the magic pan so the alchemy could begin.
My mother, who is 81 now, does not believe she has ever roasted a fine turkey. She apologizes, year by year, even as we lift that lid and the steam and aroma waft out, and the golden skin shines in the dim light of the small kitchen. “May not be fit to eat,” my mother says. So it is the pan, then. The pan, I suppose.