By Celine Sparks
A centerpiece boasting the most colorful foliage of the season adorns the table atop a lace tablecloth. Autumn candles emit warm fragrances and highlight the kitchen masterpieces tempting impatient palates.
Also . . . there is a cookbook on fire on the stovetop, the brown ‘n serve rolls have turned to black ‘n serve, and there is a side of cranberry sauce which is shaped precisely like a can, including the rows of ridges in the middle of the column.
“It’s 2:15!” people are randomly yelling from the den. “Are we going to eat anytime before the next election? My blood sugar is dropping.”
It’s probably known most places as the finest feast of the year––Thanksgiving dinner––but we have had more than our share of challenges in pulling it off. There’s just no easy way to defrost a turkey when you’re down to six hours before the doorbell rings, and you’re sticking the dough for the rolls in the dishwasher on the “hot air dry” cycle to see if it will rise fast enough. You’re rationalizing with yourself, arguing that manmade traditions aren’t so important, and after all, who doesn’t like hot dogs?
What is it about Thanksgiving that makes us put things in our mouth we wouldn’t dare think of the other 364 days? I’m not even sure I’ve ever even used the word giblet in a sentence, but suddenly the gravy has to have it. And pies are no longer about chocolate and caramel and tall meringue, but nutmeg and cinnamon. The salad has adopted something called Waldorf, and all the potatoes are sweet.
There’s a lot to love about Thanksgiving. First of all, the very name itself implies that it is a time of giving thanks for the bountiful blessings we enjoy. Second, it is a time of family, and togetherness that, if just for the day, is a rare privilege to be cherished. These should be the themes of our gatherings, but if our special occasion was named each November, I fear it might receive the title, “Great Cooking Disasters of the Twenty-First Century.”
Through the years, I have been known, at Thanksgiving or any other day, for creating new dishes, not really from scratch, but more like from “scratch your head (and say, “What is this?”). Here are a few of the culinary departments I’ve explored:
Interesting Texture
Store hours are not extremely convenient on holidays, so that when you find you’re out of one of those peripheral pantry items such as, you know, flour or something like that, you desperately start searching the cookbook for cookie recipes which do not demand the key ingredient. I thought I had hit the jackpot when I found “Cornmeal Cookies” on page 49. The rest of the family was not so enthusiastic, but I convinced them saying, “It’s in a national cookbook. How bad could it be?” That was the first mistake in my line of logic, but it gets worse.
This is not entirely my fault. I mean, who can really tell the difference between cornmeal and grits when they are poured in unlabeled containers? When my guests had earlier commented that they enjoyed trying things from Southern Living, they now added, “I didn’t mean that Southern!”
Mystery Menu
The store had a cart with dinged-up cans that were a fraction of the price of the ones on the shelves. Some of the cans were merely missing their labels, and one of these was a dime, so I thought I couldn’t go wrong with that. I shook it enough to hear solids sloshing around in liquids and concluded it definitely wasn’t pet food and probably was a vegetable. It was a safe wager.
One night, I decided to have all of the elders and their wives over to get to know them after recently moving to the church. After the usual burning a couple of things, I resorted to scavenging for something, anything edible, which is where the mystery can came back into the equation.
“Whatever it is, it will have to work––corn, beans, peas;” I couldn’t think of a vegetable I didn’t like. That’s because I couldn’t think of beets. I have never even seen beets on a real table up until they were on mine. I know why the label was torn off now; it’s the only way they could sell them. No one at the table had seen beets since they tasted them from a Gerber jar, and they obviously weren’t about to change now.
Operator Error
I have had the greatest number of mishaps when trying to impress guests with homemade ice cream. One such guest was the president of a college, for whom I demonstrated that my education at his fine institution was working out for me. Again, not entirely my fault that the ice cream recipe was not followed by the proper warning: “Hint: Put the paddle in before plugging in the freezer.”
            Another ice cream episode involved hosting a dessert gathering for the small mission church where we encouraged all members to invite friends and family from the entire community. We wanted to make an impression; my ice cream did. I apparently sloshed it around enough in the bucket to get a great amount of salt from the ice surrounding the freezer into the actual ice cream itself. “Try mine, it’s peach.” I was strutting around like I was the next competition for Paula Deen. It was evoking comments like, “Mmmmm, yeah” and “This is peach. You want the rest of mine, honey?”
Not so for Andy, seven and honest as the day. His daddy scooped a hearty helping into his cup which he enthusiastically sipped through snaggleteeth, producing a sudden look of horror and a booming, “Mercy, Daddy! It’s mighty bad!”
Our cooking adventures are a tradition, and they must also be genetic. My own dad’s cutting-edge kitchen experiments have included jellybean fried pies and thickening his Christmas candy with self-rising flour. My mom once simplified the au gratin potatoes by just using those pre-sliced cheese pieces you take out of the plastic wrapper. Only she forgot the “take out of the plastic wrapper” part.
And so as we turn the calendar to November, we envision juicy fat turkeys with moist dressing sitting beside heaps of cranberries in Grandmother’s antique bowl. We envision it that way, but deep inside we know the answer to the question that has puzzled so much of society:
“Why are there so many restaurants open on Thanksgiving these days?”