Nov 23, 2020
A new recipe for Thanksgiving 2020
Thanksgiving has long been my favorite holiday, a tradition I insisted on keeping during the decade I lived on a dairy farm in southwest England, where people associated turkey with Christmas rather than a late November feast.
Sure, I’d have to move the gathering to the weekend, because British businesses don’t give one the fourth Thursday in November off, but I was steadfast in my determination to create a piece of home in that small Dorset village. I had to learn to make cranberry sauce from scratch because you couldn’t buy the tins, and I had to figure out what to use to substitute for ingredients that would be on every supermarket shelf here. Still, we gathered around our big farmhouse table in the Bride Valley, American expats and Brits alike.
This year’s Thanksgiving will take the same kind of flexibility and innovation. Instead of hosting the usual large family gathering around that big farmhouse table, which traveled back to the States with me, it will just be three of us.
We moved to a new house in a new town in late September, having decided to bring forward our downsizing plan by seven years due to COVID-related economic uncertainty and the spike in Greenwich real estate prices from families leaving New York City. I’d been looking forward to my daughter coming for Thanksgiving for months, because I haven’t seen her since July and because I wanted her to see and enjoy our new home.
Since last week, when she made the wise and understandable decision to stay put in D.C. rather than risk coming back to CT, I’ve been profoundly sad. I miss my girl so much it’s like a pain in my gut. I miss her so much I got all weepy watching the long embrace between Millie Bobby Brown and Helena Bonham-Carter in Enola Holmes.
I’m angry, too. Angry at the anti-maskers in my old town and around the country, whose idiocy has helped the virus spread. Most of all I’m angry at the Trump Administration’s incompetence and downright evil minimization of the danger from COVID-19. It’s resulted in this epidemic being even worse than it had to be, and caused the deaths of almost 257,000 Americans as of today.
I’ve been so despondent that I couldn’t face the idea of cooking a mini turkey and mini everything else. Then, a few days ago, I saw Brooke Bolander’s tweet, and it gave me an idea. I texted it to my sushi-obsessed son, who didn’t think I was serious.
But I was serious. So serious that this weekend when my son came to visit, I told him and my husband that I didn’t want to have turkey, and that we should agree on something completely different to have for Thanksgiving. I said that we could keep the things from the Thanksgiving meal that we really love, and ditch the rest this year. We all agreed to ditch cranberry sauce. My son voted for stuffing. I suggested cornbread stuffing and he agreed. I will still make my late mother’s Chiffon Pumpkin Pie. But what to do for the main course?
I suggested making a small roast chicken or steak, but then my husband spoke up. Before we met, my husband took some adult education cooking classes. Guys, listen up: you don’t know how sexy it makes you when you know your way around a kitchen. When we were cooking a meal together in the early stages of our relationship, my then boyfriend, now husband, asked: “Should I deglaze the pan?” I almost jumped him right there in the kitchen. A man who not only knows the word deglaze, but can actually do it is seriously hot.
He’s made some of the recipes he learned in that class before, and ever since we’ve been together, he’s taken over cooking the turkey while I make all the sides and desserts, like the team that we are both in and out of the kitchen. But from the time we met until a few months ago I kept a kosher kitchen, so he was never able to make his pièce de résistance—Beef Wellington. You see, that requires filet mignon, which isn’t a kosher cut of meat. The puff pastry also contains butter, a no-no with meat.
Partly because of things not being available during the lockdown and partly because of the downsizing, I decided to give up keeping kosher. I’ve taught my kids how to do it, I’m no longer attending an Orthodox synagogue, and it enabled me to donate a LOT of kitchen items to Goodwill. It also means that after fourteen years together, my husband can finally make Beef Wellington.
So while I’m still sad that we won’t have our extended family sitting around the table like we have in years past, I’m going to enjoy my husband’s cooking and focus on the many things for which I’m grateful.
Things like having a president-elect who actually respects science, and who is a fundamentally decent human being. Like having a smart, outspoken woman of color as our new vice president. Like the fact that my family is healthy. Like that I’m blessed to make a living doing the things I love: writing and teaching.
We end the Passover Seder by saying “Next Year in Jerusalem.” We’ll end our “make the best of it” Thanksgiving meal with “Next Year, Together in Person.”
