From our homes to yours
The airfares to Europe are really good this November. I thought I’d mention that because I’ve been spending a certain amount of time thinking about Thanksgiving week in Tuscany, where I could be drinking Brunello and eating wild boar chops instead of stuffing sage leaves under the puckery skin of a bird. In Pienza they’ve never heard of Thanksgiving, but they can point you to fresh pecorino showered with truffles. The sweet potato casserole with marshmallows can wait. 2017 has been a tough year for everyone in America. It is useless to deny it. But I won’t be going to Italy this week, and neither will you. We will bake our pumpkin pies and dry bread for our stuffing and wonder whether to go with something from Sonoma or an Alsatian Pinot Gris. We will resign ourselves to making half the Brussels sprouts vegan because that’s how some of the family rolls. We will put buttermilk in the mashed potatoes and caramelized onions in the green beans. We will contemplate making fresh Parker House rolls but probably will end up glazing store-bought ones with extra butter instead.
Because when you are the cook at Thanksgiving, no matter where your sentiments may lie, family and friends are drawn toward the center of your world, a calm, fragrant place where the wine is well-chilled, the Lions game is on in the den, and the mulling spices in the cranberries are the same from year to year to year. You will make turkey, whether Filipino-style adobo, Cuban-style with garlic and lemon, with tomato gravy and relajo the way Salvadoran friends usually do — or the way your grandmother learned to do it from her grandmother. You will let someone else fuss with the green salad, the flowers and the playlist. You will wish you had three ovens and 12 burners. You will somehow make do.
Is there chaos in the kitchen? There’s always chaos in the kitchen! But it all gets resolved somehow, even the year when a 3-year-old cranks the oven temperature up to 550 and it is a full half-hour before anybody notices. Does your first-grader think mushrooms are the most disgusting things in the world? Chop them a little and she won’t notice them in the stuffing. Do two guests snipe like Joan Crawford and Bette Davis when they both bring the same pie? Proclaim both of them delicious. If you’re lucky, it will all be forgotten by the second glass of Scotch.