By Grace Acosta
My childhood Thanksgiving memories aren’t exactly Norman Rockwell; they’re more like Picasso’s “Guernica,” without all the violence. My family celebrated Thanksgiving just like everyone else, but our version was a bit jumbled and off-kilter, like John Kerry trying to tell a joke, or Tom Cruise jumping on Oprah’s couch.
Let me start right off with the turkey: Every year, it was drier than the Sahara, which is why my father claimed the drumstick before anyone else. My mother or aunt prepared the annual bird, and neither one knew how to cook it thoroughly, yet keep it moist at the same time. It didn’t help that turkey was unknown to the two sisters until they arrived in this country as adults, and my mother never liked it to begin with. She was also deathly afraid of contamination, having heard of such risks in roasting a turkey, so she baked every last microbe out of that poor creature, then served it with lots of gravy, which, by the way, contained soy sauce as a flavoring agent.
Besides the turkey and gravy, we had stuffing, rolls, mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes and plain white rice - the menu Dr. Atkins would have been served if he had gone directly to hell when he died. We liked stuffing, but what we required was rice, the single most important element in any family meal, regardless of the main dish. My mother cooked rice even when we had spaghetti for dinner. Personally, I enjoyed rice with the canned peas my aunt served when it was Thanksgiving at her house. My mother never bought canned peas, so I considered them to be something of a treat. Peas in a can were salty, mushy and so dull and lifeless a green to be virtually brown. A mouthful of those beauties tasted sublime with another mouthful of soft, sticky rice, for me anyway. I’m not proud; I’m just saying.
Dessert was pie: normal apple, normal custard or normal pumpkin. Dessert was purchased at a bakery because no one in my family really likes to bake or really likes desserts. The one time my mother made an apple pie, she took half the sugar out of the recipe because she was so fearful of the pie turning out too sweet. I think even she realized that if you harbor that kind of hostility toward sucrose, you might as well avoid baking your own pies.
My father never carved the turkey. Serving food was plainly women’s work. He also never ate with the adults if he could possibly help it. With the exception of when my sister and I were little, he insisted on sitting separately, with the children. (The irony of that didn’t dawn on me until much later, and to remember it now just cracks me up.) Seated at some impossibly low table with a couple of toddlers, my dad would bark at my mother in the kitchen to fetch more food and drink for his dinner companions, as they chit-chatted about stuffed animals and vivid dreams. The children never noticed the dry poultry, and my dad had his drumstick. Another successful Thanksgiving, at least by our standards.
