The 1980s:  An “Amreekan Holiday”

As a child, I often asked my mother what we were eating for Thanksgiving.

“Food,” she replied matter-of-factly.

“Are we eating a turkey?” I asked.

“No, only Amreekans eat turkey.”

Any immigrant or child of immigrants understands that “Amreekan” is a code word for “the mainstream,” which really means “white people.” In addition to celebrating Thanksgiving with a turkey, here are some other things we learned only “Amreekans” do:

• Wear shoes inside the home
• Receive “time out” as a valid form of punishment for unruly behavior
• Talk back to elders
• Have sex before marriage
• Put grandparents in senior homes
• Sleep over at friends’ homes
• Tattoos
• Christmas trees
• Cable television
• Shop at stores other than Ross, K-Mart, outlet stores, Marshalls and Mervyns (RIP)

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Eric drove up to Julie’s the night before Thanksgiving to cook. An obsessed chef, Eric had spent a week planning the menu with his siblings. “I’m making my sweet potato casserole,” I said to Eric as he made a grocery list, “with mini marshmallows on top.” I sensed disappointment, a Campbell’s Soup casserole stuck out among toasted almond haricot vert and saffron-infused stuffed turkey, a recipe that involved coriander, cumin, cranberries and couscous. My mother roasted a turkey every year and we were lucky if she remembered to take the giblets out. “You don’t have to make anything,” Eric said. But alas, I insisted.

I drove the two hours to Julie’s house in Vermont on Thanksgiving Day, sweet potatoes on the passenger seat next to me. I imagined what I would say when I met Eric’s large family. Painfully shy, I needed to rehearse.

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Thanks to Wall Street Occupier Jesse LaGreca, who didn't only show up the Fox reporter sent to embarrass occupiers, but also managed to get the OWS message across on a Sunday political chat show, which is essentially unheard of. So thanks to you, for bringing up economic justice to the ancient panel of crusty establishmentarians on "Meet on Press."

Thanks to Scott Olsen, the Iraq vet and victim of brutal police overreaction at Occupy Oakland, for showing the many forms that fighting for one's country can take. We're especially thankful that he's recovering from the coma induced by a tear gas canister fired directly at his head, and is well enough to give public statements.

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In keeping with American tendencies, Thanksgiving is a bastard holiday, cobbled together from homegrown traditions and the hokey imaginings of 19th century writers, along with actual historical facts. The facts are thus: The “first American Thanksgiving” was probably observed in the South, not at Plymouth, and it would have been a day devoted to prayer, not pie. As for the famous Plymouth pilgrims? The settlers that staggered off the Mayflower to strike up a miserable township on the rocky shore did not call themselves pilgrims. At the time, they were known by cagier names: separatists (religious idealists) and strangers (various dreamy and desperate characters the separatists had recruited in order to swell their meager ranks and coffers). The settlers wore colorful clothing and did not favor buckles, though they did sport the tall broad-brimmed hats, which you may remember from your elementary school days.

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On one hand, the act of gathering around a dinner table with loved ones, taking stock of our lives and giving thanks, isn't just one of our nation's most staid traditions; it's also a fundamentally humble act that harks back to the collectivist underpinnings of America's founding myth. Consistent with that ethos, giving has become the order of the day; and each November, millions of Americans do.

It's no small irony, then, that this modest yearly ritual is followed by Black Friday -- the high holiday of conspicuous consumption.

Economists may quibble over whether we're still in an official recession, but for millions of jobless Americans the answer is clear. Occupy Wall Street has drawn much-needed attention to the specter of income inequality and helped to reinvigorate the national dialogue about social safety nets. But whatever future improvements the movement might yield, there remain many, many people across the country who need help now. Forty-six million Americans currently live below the poverty line, the largest number in a half-century.

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Weighing 1,200 pounds, a single bale feeds half a dozen cows for roughly a week, depending on the weather. The colder it gets, the more they eat. There’s always a celebration among the big girls whenever I bring them a new one. Spontaneous head-butting matches, that kind of thing. The horses too start running and bucking when they hear my neighbor’s tractor coming to lift a new bale out of the barn and over the fence.

Anyway, here’s the deal: Due to the terrible Texas drought, buyers have been all over Arkansas paying upwards of $75 to $100 a bale. Flatbed trucks loaded with hay are a familiar sight headed westward on I-30 and I-40 toward Dallas and Oklahoma City. That’s a "save the ranch and pray" price. Nobody can pay anything like that amount to feed livestock and hope to make money. The alternative is to liquidate the herd—too painful to contemplate.

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But as soon as I reached O'Hare, as soon as I stepped outside in Chicago, I knew the real world still existed, that it had gone on while I drifted and aged. It was hard coming back. It was like the end of the summer, after eight weeks at camp, when I walked the house, marveling at how small it had all become. "Good God, it must be inhabited by the Lilliputians! My father could dance in the palm of my hand."

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There were other American holidays -- school vacations like Veterans Day and July 4, and, of course, my favorite, Halloween. But Halloween wasn't long for my family, because it is really a pagan holiday that religious Jews don't celebrate for fear of participating in idol worship. I know this because when my mother moved us out of my father's house and to Brooklyn, N.Y., she started on what ultimately became a very fast journey toward ultra-Orthodoxy. Full-on kosher home, sending us to yeshiva, skirts instead of pants, wigs when she eventually remarried, Sabbath spent in solitude as she withdrew from nicotine over the course of 25 hours.

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At the moment his body should have been hitting my windshield and exploding like a grotesque feather pillow, he flew back a few paces and I whizzed by without hitting him. "Stupid turkey!" I groused. "You almost got yourself killed!"

A few weeks later, on Thanksgiving Day, I did something almost as stupid. I wasn't as careful as I should have been when handling the turkey (you know -- wash your hands frequently, use a designated cutting board, disinfect surfaces ...) and I spent the night singing whale songs into the deep, mysterious hole at the bottom of the toilet. The next morning, I was in the emergency room.

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For one, your parents and their friends will insist on infesting every event with dorky, embarrassing stuff from the old country. Back in my whiny years, all my cool friends from school got to have buttery mashed potatoes and flaky little Parker House rolls at their Thanksgiving tables. And I was stuck with ... plain boiled rice.

"MO-OM! Why do we have to have RICE? I want potatoes!"

"Rice is good," Mom would say. "And Dad wants rice."

End of discussion. (This is another thing Chinese-American kids get to whine about: We never get to have the last word. Ever.)

Thanksgiving, according to my grade-school teachers, was the most American of holidays, a time to celebrate our common heritage by bonding around indigenous American foodstuffs. So I decided it was up to me, as a patriotic native-born American, to protect the sanctity of the holiday from creeping Sinofication.

"You know what Auntie Pat puts in her turkey?" Mom said one night, a week before Thanksgiving, "Naw mai and lop cheung."

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I am a firm believer that Thanksgiving dinner should not be an exercise in discovering your panic attack trial time. And yet, year after year, food magazines and websites flash their neon disaster-porn nudie signs: DON'T JUMP! FINALLY, A STRESS-FREE THANKSGIVING. It's cynical culinary fear-mongering at its worst, and it doesn't mean we're entirely above it here at Salon Food. Because there are, sometimes, occasions to freak out. Like when you drop your pie on the way to the table. I hate to even bring it up, but as someone who 1) was That Guy who slipped on his way to getting a diploma at high school graduation and was also 2) That Guy who celebrated a friend's housewarming by tripping up the stairs and sending my lovingly made pot of homemade hot fudge flying all over the living room, I feel like it's important to have and to share emergency go-tos.

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In many precincts of the South, people show their deep, pot-licking love of hearty greens by cooking the bejeezus out of them in ham hock-y stock, forever and ever, until they nearly melt into the smoky broth. Greens and pot-likker, as the broth is called, are the kind of thing that you will never make as well as someone's momma, but if you're close enough, you might get yourself an engagement ring. (True story.)

As only an honorary Southerner, I have yet to truly master greens, but when I moved down to Biloxi, Miss., I had to get with the program right quick if I ever wanted any vegetable matter to enter my body. I'd walk home from the market with a mess of collard or turnip greens so massive I looked like Bill Murray behind plant camouflage in "Caddyshack." I stewed them with pig, and, cooking for non-pig-eating folks, with dried shrimp and shiitake mushrooms, Chinese ingredients I recognized at the local Vietnamese market. The reasons, at first, were practical -- without pork at my disposal, I turned to these ingredients for deep flavor and lingering finish.

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Holidays are all about rituals, and rituals are all about repetition and people around you showing you, teaching you, herding you along. When I was a child, I tried, ever so hard, to bring the ritual of a big, dry, sawdusty bird to our Thanksgiving table, but my immigrant Chinese parents, raised far from turkeys, never quite saw the point. "Why eat something dry just to be like other people, when you could eat something delicious and be happy?" they asked me.

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I make a chorizo, butternut squash and Anaheim chile cornbread stuffing. I make so much of it so that we can have it with a few roasted chickens throughout the winter. I also have started making a sautéed Brussels sprout dish with bacon and caramelized onions. I know, I know, you can't stand Brussels sprouts. I have turned many Brussels sprout haters into lovers with this dish. There is always the traditional mashed potatoes, but the gravy is different each year. Last year's was a chanterelle and port wine gravy with fresh herbs. This year is still up in the air, but I am leaning toward something with bacon. I can't get enough of bacon. Friends already have stated that I have a problem and that there is probably a Help Line for me to call, but I just can't resist bacon. I also still make the cranberry salad that my mother made for years. You know the one, with black cherry jello, cranberries, a whole orange, pineapple, celery and walnuts. It's the only way I eat cranberries. My roommate is a true Southerner, so she is in charge of making the pecan pies. I used to think mine were fabulous, but now I know differently.

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"I think I'll add blue cheese and roasted garlic to the mashed potatoes this year."

"I'll divorce you."

"Really? We can't mix it up a little bit? Break out?"

"This is me, calling an attorney."

There's nothing wrong with mashed potatoes as a carrier for butter and sour cream. Really, I'm all for it, but Thanksgiving without deviation ad infinitum is ad nauseam, and just plain tragic.

It took years of careful negotiation with my family to reach a compromise. Certain items must always appear in their pristine form (mashed potatoes, candied yams, roast turkey, stuffing, rolls, jellied cranberry from a can), but I get to add a couple of interesting dishes to the mix. 

I did score one other, critical win many years ago. There was a time when something called "7-Up Salad" appeared, like clockwork orange, at every Thanksgiving dinner. Were we the victims of a marketing ploy, doomed to product placement by a pimply kid who saved his ass with a nascent notion of the "big idea"? We'll never know, but my husband cajoled someone in the family every year to make this "salad" and it passed from hand to hand around the table without a trace of irony or disgust.

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Life was good at the kid table. What did we care that the grown-ups kept the yucky old oyster pie at their table? It took me a few years to catch on to what they were up to, the sneaks. I was probably 12 or so before I got to taste that masterfully simple creation. The combination of tender oysters in deeply flavored roux gravy, scallions, red pepper and tender pastry helped me decide some things were worth growing up for.

We had a magical connection through food, my grandmother, Miss Alice, and I. Her house was across the street from my grade school and I went there for lunch every day. She worried that I was too thin, too delicate, so she fed me up.

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Dad had gone to high school with (and had dated) the owner at the time, Dolly, who ran the place with her husband, Jack, who'd inherited the place from his father. Eating there was like going to a friend's house for a meal -- a German-influenced meal, that is. Which is not to say the food wasn't first-rate because it was, from fresh-caught trout and whitefish (it was on the Milwaukee River) to more traditional German dishes (veal Oscar and duck with cherries).

I had a sweet tooth back then (still do) and so would order some dish I couldn't or wouldn't finish in order to save room for one of Boder's delicious desserts. Among the highlights was schaum torte with strawberries.

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