November 17, 2023
Thanksgiving is one of my favorite holidays. It’s tradition-filled but not as pressure-packed as Christmas. There are all kinds of good food, but not usually as much drunken carousing as New Year’s. It’s quieter than the Fourth of July. Families get together, but it’s just for one meal. Everyone eats to excess, but that usually leaves them too sated to argue. What’s not to love?
The only hard part of Thanksgiving is deciding what to fix. It used to be easier. When Grandma cooked, we had roast turkey with stuffing, mashed potatoes and gravy, and homemade rolls. Dessert was invariably pumpkin pie. A few sides filled out the menu. Green bean casserole, marshmallow yams, and cranberry sauce were the usual ones, but it really didn’t matter since nobody much cared for any of them anyway.
Nowadays, it’s harder. There are vegetarians and vegans, lactose and glucose intolerant, not to mention the foodies who want locally grown produce and turn up their noses at canned cranberries. What’s a poor Grandma to do?
Maybe because I’m a genealogist, I cling to tradition. I still want to bring out the silver that accompanied every holiday meal of my childhood. My mother-in-law’s English china takes pride of place on our table. We always have turkey on Thanksgiving, even though my youngest son has never particularly liked it. He doesn’t eat much of it, but he agrees that it just wouldn’t be Thanksgiving without a turkey.
I make mashed potatoes and gravy just like my mother did – with lots of butter and cream. Thanksgiving is the one day of the year healthy eating takes a break. The stuffing (or dressing as it was always called when I was a child) is the same kind my grandmothers made – dried bread, onions and celery seasoned with poultry seasoning and moistened with milk and water. No nouveau ingredients like sausage or corn bread for us.
The sides are traditional too, although we’ve tweaked them a bit over the years. We’ve given up on canned yams with marshmallows in favor of my husband’s family’s candied sweet potatoes. The Jersey sweet potatoes he remembers are firmer and less mushy than canned yams. My husband sautes them in butter and brown sugar just the way his New Jersey grandmother did. Unlike those yam casseroles, everyone eats these candied sweets.
Green bean casserole bit the dust at my house years ago. Nobody ever ate it anyway. We now have my brother-in-law’s Aunt May’s salad. It’s an ambrosia-type fruit salad with pineapple, mandarin oranges, and coconut.
Dessert is always two kinds of pie – pumpkin and lemon topped with home-whipped cream. The only change we’ve made to my grandmother’s recipes is that we grow our own pumpkins in the garden. In the fall I roast them and stash the puree in the freezer. We’ve upgraded my grandmothers’ lemon pie a bit too. My grandmothers used Jello pudding mix for the filling. My son makes his from scratch with fresh lemon juice.
My Thanksgiving menu is basically the same as my grandmothers and great grandmothers made. We’ve added and updated a few things as the family has grown and brought in new traditions. One of these days I’ll pass along the Thanksgiving baton to a younger family member. Maybe they’ll completely change the menu. That will be fine, but, for now, we’ll stick with the old favorites plus a few newer ones.
Happy Thanksgiving however you serve it.
Carol Stetser
Researcher