T A B L E_ T A L K

Did you have trouble potty training your kids? Share your tips and stories in Table Talk's Mothers area

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R E C E N T L Y

Faraway, so close
By Debra Gwartney
Coming home causes my oldest daughter to withdraw into corners, turn her face and back up toward the door until she can run away again
(11/23/98)

"The Rugrats Movie"
By Andrew Leonard
These babies rule! A 4-year-old and her dad give the new "Rugrats" brand extension a big thumbs-up
(11/20/98)

Second Thoughts: A modest proposal
By Sallie Tisdale
Hurricane Mitch offers U.S. troops the chance not to show force, but to help others -- especially those we've hurt before
(11/19/98)

Dear Socks, Dear Buddy: Kids' Letters to the First Pets
By Hillary Rodham Clinton
What kids want to know about Buddy and Socks
(11/18/98)

Drama Queen Contestants
This won't hurt a bit: This month's Drama Queen candidates tell tales of their most hellish experiences at the gynecologist's office
(11/17/98)

BROWSE THE MOTHERS WHO THINK FEATURE ARCHIVES

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Mamafesto
By Camille Peri
Why it's time
for Mothers Who Think

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-------An old lover taught me the sexiest type of
---------------------Thanksgiving cooking and how to do something
-------------sacrilegious and preposterous to a national symbol.

BY JENNIFER REESE | Some years ago, I found myself in love with a man who said he fried turkeys. At first I thought he was pulling my leg. I was a California girl, and we fry almost nothing out here. He would describe coating whole turkeys with Cajun spices and stringing lamp chain through their cavities. He described the dangerous volcanoes of boiling peanut oil as he carefully lowered the bird into a barrel-size pot set over leaping flames. He boasted of the crackly, spicy skin on his turkeys; the veins of scarlet hot sauce streaking the moist, flavorful meat.

It sounded, I thought, like the sexiest, manliest type of cooking -- a way of doing something really sacrilegious and preposterous to a national symbol. It turned out that frying turkeys was an underground trend among macho Southerners, outdoor cooking taken to its wildest, messiest extreme. I loved the idea.

But this man did not fry turkeys for me. He fried them for his wife and his children and their vast circle of friends. He would call me from his sport utility vehicle as he drove the back roads around his vacation home in the piney woods of East Texas.

Thanksgiving, New Year's, the Fourth of July. I would stand there in my tiny San Francisco studio apartment and imagine the crowds of friends, the bottles of bourbon, the hunting dogs, the wraparound porch, those stupendous, lusty fried turkeys. Twenty-six, 27, 28 -- I was the worst kind of sad little mistress, stuck in a state of chronic longing and jealousy. I wanted all those things he seemed to have in such abundance. I wanted children, I wanted money, security and success, dogs, a house in the loamy swamps of Texas. I wanted big, convivial holidays with fried turkeys. Who wouldn't?

Not a minute too soon, I hooked up with the man who would become my husband, and he did a pretty good job of rescuing me from this benighted condition. Soon I was cooking turkeys of my own. I roasted one for my in-laws on Christmas; I roasted a 20-pound bird for my family at Thanksgiving; I roasted a turkey two weeks before I gave birth to my daughter. I rubbed my birds with butter and stuck them into the oven. I basted them conscientiously with stock from a little saucepan in which I put the giblets and a stick of celery and carrot, like mother always did.

They always came out the same, my turkeys, whether I put them breast side down or breast side up, or turned them over halfway through; whether I stuffed them or didn't, whether I bought an organic turkey or a cheap Zacky hen. They were beautiful, plump, docile birds with oily dark meat and boring, dry white meat. My family liked my turkeys: They knew no better. But I did. No matter how elaborate the Thanksgiving I put on -- and I became famous for wild excesses -- this wasn't the turkey that was branded on my jealous soul. This was not the turkey I longed for.

N E X T_ P A G E: Why not fry one for myself?