OUR ANNUAL COOK’S HOLIDAY

BY AMY SCATTERGOOD Thanksgiving is the annual demonstration of what food means to us all, as a culture, a community, a family or a jigsawed collection of friends. As such, it’s a metaphor as much as it is dinner.

That’s a lot of weight for one meal to carry. And it’s why people can get very particular about their holiday food traditions, what goes on that table, who comes to dinner and who cooks it. On Nov. 26, you might be preparing a dish just as your grandmother did it 50 years ago. Or you might be making something up for your kids that might somehow last for the next 50.

Because the best Thanksgiving meals allow for both long-held practices and the introduction of the new. The idea is to collect, to cook — one person’s well-wrought, dry-brined bird; another’s Tolstoy-invoking recipe for stuffing — to eat and, in so doing, to celebrate.

This year, we’ve collected a series of recipes that might continue some traditions — or establish new ones. Even though you can go rogue and cook crazy things for Thanksgiving, many of us secretly think of this meal as comfort food writ large. Very large, if you consider how big the bird can get, how many people you’ll be having over, how much people anticipate mounds of mashed potatoes or how many just want to get to dessert.

Thanksgiving is a cook’s holiday, but it belongs to us all, regardless of how we come down on the important issues: turducken and the Detroit Lions, Kobe Bryant’s future and cranberry sauce in a can. So prepare to refill the glasses, reload the plates and maybe remember that, whatever happens, you can probably make an excellent cassoulet with what’s left of your feast.