For my mother, Thanksgiving was the Big Event -- the Academy Awards, the World Series and the Super Bowl all rolled into one. Each year, she took on a second job as she created a menu and prepared a behemoth of a meal that included appetizers, a main course starring two mammoth turkeys, and more than a dozen made-from-scratch cakes. It was not unusual for 50 guests to spread out between the dining room and living room, where we would set-up banquet length tables and chairs borrowed from the local firehouse.
The next Thanksgiving, my mother always dreamed, the weather would be chilly and she could serve spiced apple cider or mulled wine next to a crackling fire. This was in deep southeast Georgia, 50 or so miles from the Florida line, so the wish was probably completely unrealistic, but we all loved to imagine the scene anyway. In reality, by the time the meal was over most years, we had stripped off our autumnal sweaters and were perspiring in our shirtsleeves.
My mother also loved to peruse her women’s magazines, looking for the one dish or table decoration that would make the next holiday the best ever. She and her first cousin Sylvia even tried making glazed fruit one year. That resulted in a lot of laughter and funny stories for future years even if the centerpiece wasn’t a total success.
Planning for the next year always began Thanksgiving night as Mama scrutinized the refrigerator, noting which items were almost gone and which had produced large containers of leftovers. Baking usually started in the summer, a slower time for her real job at the clothing store she and my father owned. She would make layers for the dozen or more cakes she would serve at Thanksgiving and put them, meticulously wrapped and labeled, in the outside freezer.
By Labor Day, preparations were in full gear. With my mother’s master list, Potty, our much-more-than-housekeeper, started creating the side dishes. Those also went into the freezer – casseroles of squash or asparagus or mushrooms or peas, or whatever Southern Living magazine had featured in the past year. On fall afternoons, when I got home from school, I would watch Potty cook and frequently assist her. My favorites were dishes like the sweet-and-sour meatball appetizer because my efforts were rewarded with a taste before the dish was banished to the freezer. (Even now, when I make dinner, I often hear Potty’s sweet voice in my head, reminding me to check one dish or to add pepper to another).
On most Sundays during the year, we would travel an hour northwest to visit my maternal grandparents and other relatives. In November, however, Mama stayed home every Sunday to work on her special dishes, usually more of the cakes she baked with scientific precision. Every cup or teaspoon had to be packed and leveled off. There was no pinch of this or dash of that in her kitchen. I often helped her, even when I was a teenager, because I loved to cook and enjoyed being around her when she was having so much fun.
As mid-November approached, the kitchen was a madhouse. As soon as I was out of school for the Thanksgiving vacation, I had a list of jobs. Some, like tossing coconut on the sides of the iced layer cake, began before I could see over the counter. Others, like stuffing and baking gigantic mushrooms, didn’t come into play until I brought the recipe home from college. Even as an adult, I arranged my vacation schedule so I could spent Thanksgiving week at my parents’ house as long as they hosted the big meal.
As a result, I usually was around for the final stretch. That was when my mother made gelatin molds (remember, we’re primarily talking about the 1950s into the 1980s) and Potty made chopped liver. Both efforts took the planning of a mini-Olympic game.
Every mold had its own shape, ingredients and gelatin flavor, and there usually were at least four. The fruit had to perfectly fit the indentions in the Della Robbia mold, for example, and I often found myself elbow deep in a large can of pears looking for just the right ones. My favorite was the star-shaped mold with cranberries and celery. Something about the tartness and crunch melded perfectly with the sweet gelatin. The morning of Thanksgiving always featured heart stopping drama as each gelatin mixture was unmolded; most came out beautifully and were shimmering works of art. And, if they didn’t, my sister Susan was called in to design the plate. With her artistic flair, well-placed lettuce could hide anything.
The chopped liver, which went through an old-fashioned food grinder, was a different set of challenges. It began with chicken livers, which always created controversy among the aunts and great-aunts who tended to be proponents of beef or calves liver. Then, there was a large pot of hard-boiled eggs, onions, celery and a good dollop of bright yellow chicken fat. The aroma was pungent and long lasting; even the cooking turkeys didn’t totally obliterate it. Potty would feed the ingredients through the grinder and they would come out in unappetizing round ribbons. Like magic, though, once mixed together, they transformed into a delicious spread that you couldn’t stop eating. On Thanksgiving morning, Susan had to repeatedly smooth the chopped liver and redecorate because someone had sneaked a taste before it was put out for serving.
The varieties of stuffing, called “dressing” in the South, were made the night before also. We always had a sage-scented toasted white bread dressing pulled from a magazine in the 1950s. The second type of dressing changed over the years as did the overall Thanksgiving menus, although some dishes were perennials. That was both to satisfy my mother’s desire to try something new and to meet the current proclivities of the guests.
Many of her new efforts were successes and became part of the regular rotation of dishes, but there were a few missteps. One year, she found a recipe that called for apple jack brandy. My father and I were dispatched to Savannah, 60 miles away, to locate a bottle. We finally found one in a liquor store in a very sketchy neighborhood; a few disheveled patrons gazed wistfully at the bottle as the clerk put it into the brown paper sack. (We had not known that apple jack, made since the days of Colonial America, was a very inexpensive liquor popular with winos.) We dashed to the car, locked the doors and never looked back. As it turned out, my mother misread the recipe and put too much brandy in the apple dish; a few of the guests got a bit tipsy and she never made the dish again. I’m sure the partially-used bottle of apple jack was still in the liquor cabinet when my sister Linda and her husband Saul packed my parents to move to South Carolina in 1996.
For some years, pickled shrimp, purchased off a shrimp boat on the Georgia coast 30 miles away, and oyster dressing were served. Later, when several families in my generation began keeping kosher, the shellfish was removed from the menu and my mother kept special cookware to prepare kosher turkeys and the fixings. She and Potty always were a bit indignant about the kosher turkeys because they were too small and had too many pinfeathers to be removed.
The tradition was that one turkey was roasted overnight and kept warm while the other was put into the oven predawn Thanksgiving morning to be ready for the early afternoon meal. A third turkey would then be roasted for Potty and her family to have for their Thanksgiving, celebrated that evening. Beef roast also was on the menu to accommodate relatives who had childhood trauma from raising chickens and did not eat poultry.
I usually accompanied my mother to the grocery store for her final of dozens of trips in preparation for the holiday. That was partly because she had to pick up the massive turkeys, chosen because they were large enough to roast overnight without drying out. The butcher, who ordered the gargantuan birds for my mother each fall, kept them in his walk-in cooler until she need them. We each had a cart, and I helped her load the three birds in one. That left room for little else, so we began filling up the second with last-minute items like crackers and salad fixings.
Chopping up and dressing the salad eventually became my job also. I now own the giant wooden bowl that was rubbed with garlic cloves before adding iceberg lettuce, green peppers, cucumbers and tomatoes and then dressing it all with a mixture of Wesson oil, lemon juice, oregano, salt and pepper. The ingredients were very simple but, again through some Thanksgiving magic, it ended up being an addictive salad that you could not stop eating.
The secret to my mother’s roast turkey was a generous amount of pickling spice encased in a fabric bag and slipped into the bird’s cavity. You can imagine the tantalizing fragrance about 3 a.m. The salivating made it hard to sleep, even though you knew the next day was going to be a busy one.
Not long after my mother arose in darkness to take out the first turkey and put in the second one, the rest of the family sleepwalked into the kitchen. It is a little known fact that steaming hot turkey picked from the carcass makes an excellent breakfast.
Then, the division of labor began. My father rounded up the male relatives, including his sons-in-law Larry and Saul, to go get the tables and chairs from the fire station. Susan did the decorations and Linda usually was in charge of table setting with me as her able, if not particularly willing, assistant. The shiny wooden dining room table was spread with a tablecloth embroidered by our Bubbie and set with Mama’s good Wedgewood china and the silverware Sylvia had painstakingly polished. The farther you got from the head of that table, the more hodge podge the settings became. Somewhere in the living room, we switched to our mother’s second best china, which had pink and brown swirls, and, by the foot of the lengthy table, where I often sat with the younger relations, you might sometimes see the everyday melamine.
During the last minute preparations, the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade would be playing on the television in the living room. All work would stop as each Broadway number was announced, and everyone would gather briefly to watch the singing and dancing on the streets of New York before rushing back to their tasks.
Our father and his helpers would drag the wooden bar from the den to a more centrally located position, and we would set up a card table nearby for the appetizers. That table usually featured my mother’s silver fish forks, which she gave to me as part of the set. I kashered the silver many years ago with a pot of boiling water and a fiery hot stone, and now use those same forks for gefilte fish at Rosh Hashana.
Just about the time we finished setting up, everything was warming, and the drama of the gelatin molds had ended, cars would start pulling into the driveway. My mother would appear at the door between the kitchen and the dining room, her face flushed from the heat of the ovens, and shout excitedly, “They’re here. They’re here.” It was show time on Ty Ty Street.
Every year, it was quite a production with new cameo appearances. Different cousins -- no one really cared if they were first, second or third -- would show up from year to year. A visit from one of our Philadelphia relatives could make the entire event.
If someone in the extended family had become engaged, the future in-laws were brought along to be evaluated. Sometimes my sisters or I invited friends. One year, I brought the son of a prominent liberal U.S. senator, to the great shock of my extremely conservative uncle.
Even though the dining room was banquet-sized and the adjoining living room was twice that size, the entire area was filled with guests, clinking their drinks and stabbing cocktail franks and meatballs. It was a mob scene until everyone finally took their places at the long table. While I usually served the salad, my mother, sisters, Potty and Potty’s sister-in-law Jeannette began to bring in the turkey, roast beef and side dishes. If, in fact, a table could groan, this one did.
The rooms became strangely quiet during everyone’s first helping. All you could hear was chewing and an occasional “Please pass me…” Then, when the roar of conversation returned, my family started pushing seconds, trying to keep the leftovers to a manageable amount.
As soon as the main meal was finished, we cleared away the farthest tables so the uncles could access the easy chairs and watch the football games. The children went out to play in the yard. Everyone else either sipped coffee or found a corner of a sofa in which to sleep off the tryptophan. Eventually, as the afternoon shadows slipped in, someone would suggest having a slice of one of the cakes that lined the buffet – coconut, chocolate, German chocolate and spice layer cakes, a myriad of pound cakes and cheese cakes as well as the always beloved nut cake. Then the dessert course would begin and continue well after dark as friends from around town would drop by after their own Thanksgiving meals to feast on one of my mother’s cakes.
By 8:30 p.m., all the guests had cleared out and only family was left. We would excavate the turkey from the back of the fridge and assemble turkey sandwiches slathered with mayonnaise. That would be accompanied by leftover cold food – salads, gelatin molds etc. My mother would do the postmortem of that year’s event and begin talking about the next year. We went to bed not long after dinner because the next day, now called Black Friday, was one of the busiest days of the year at the clothing store.
My mother’s Thanksgiving tradition ended by the 1990s. The Parkinson’s Disease that eventually killed my father had progressed by then, and my mother had her own health problems. In 1991, when I announced my engagement to my husband Marc, hosting Thanksgiving was already too much for my parents and I held the event at my house in Atlanta. After that, Marc and I went most years to South Carolina where my parents had moved. My mother died in 2002, five years after my father.
Since then, a series of events, both happy and sad, have made Thanksgiving a bit erratic and, a few times in recent years, I didn’t even see my sisters on Thanksgiving Day. We’re hoping to fix that. The meal will be at Linda’s house next week, and I’m hoping everyone will come to my house in 2011 to celebrate the 20th anniversary of my engagement to Marc (and the last time I hosted the Thanksgiving meal). Maybe that could be the beginning of a rotation involving my two sisters and me.
This year, while we’ll sorely miss the midmorning call from Potty asking us how our cooking is going – she died this past summer – we’re excited that some familiar faces will be joining us at the Thanksgiving table. Several first cousins are planning to join us in South Carolina this year, including some of the Philadelphia contingent who will be on their way to Disney World. Linda will have to pull out the folding tables and chairs to accommodate everyone.
My sisters and I are all contributing dishes to the meal, and we’ll be making some of the old favorites, including the special salad, chopped liver, sage dressing and asparagus-mushroom casserole. The meal also will include some more recent specialties such as my corned bread/kosher sausage dressing, Marc’s molded cranberry sauce, Susan’s warm spiced fruit, Linda’s sweet-and-sour meatballs and just about anything brought by my niece Faith, who is a very creative cook.
Marc and I plan to get to Linda’s house early to help set up and get everything ready. We want to be there for that moment when the cars drive up and someone shouts, “They’re here.” After all, the show must go on.
