Reflections on Thanksgiving

I’ve been thinking about Thanksgiving over the last couple of days.  To start with, I am incredibly thankful for the love and support of my very own true love.  I’m also thankful for all my wonderful friends, neighbors, and family, and for everyone out there who follows my Kilt in the Kitchen ramblings.  I’m thankful for my parents for all the gifts they have given me.

This morning, as I was getting out of bed, I switched on the local news, and the two hosts were both talking about how much they ate the day before and how stuffed and bloated they felt.  After brushing my teeth, I changed the channel to one of the national news networks and the two hosts were both talking about how much they ate the day before and how stuffed and bloated they felt (as were all the other talking heads on the set).  It was almost as if they felt a need to describe their overindulgence as a way of establishing their credibility or to earn a badge of honor of some sort.

Is that what we’ve come to?

This thought has been bubbling in my head for a couple of reasons.  One is because this is the first time I’ve spent Thanksgiving alone.  My true love works in the UK for part of the year and while we usually try to arrange schedules so that she’s home for holidays, it didn’t work out that way this year.  The other is that I’ve just completed binge watching a 36 lecture video course on Food: A Cultural Culinary History with Prof. Ken Albala.  As a side note, the course is part of The Great Courses series and I’ve seen a couple, have enjoyed them greatly, and found them very informative.  Even better, some library systems distribute them free through the Kanopy app, which I’d also recommend.

Part of Dr. Albala’s framework was the connection between changes in cuisine and the role of cuisine in everyday life and the presence of an elite cuisine at court or amongst the wealthiest classes.  Descriptions of the original Greek symposia, or banquets in ancient Rome, the medieval courts, the courts of Spain and Italy in the 16th centuries, the origins of French haute cuisine, and the development of a gastronomic culture in the 19th century all show how the ingredients, techniques, presentation, and context for cuisine has developed over the century.  They also provide a steady narrative of excess and narcissism.  There is not a lot of difference between ancient Greeks lying on couches and eating and drinking themselves into a stupor or the splendor of a banquet in the era of Louis XIV of France.

I have to wonder how much our modern Thanksgiving, which depends on having too much turkey, too many vegetables, too much potato, and too much pie before nodding off while watching too much football differs from these historical antecedents. How did we get from a feast that began as a way of celebrating a community’s avoidance of starvation to a celebration of excess?

I sound grumpy, don’t I?  It’s not all that bad, and for that we go back to my being alone on Thanksgiving.  Despite not having any person to share the day (I do have my parrots and parakeets), I somehow felt obligated to make it special anyway and for me, that meant time in the kitchen.  It turned out to be a lot of time in the kitchen and it was all well-spent.

Item #1 was a big pan of birdie bread.  I regularly bake a special bread loaded with calcium and vitamin A that is the foundation of what we feed our birds.  After getting that in the oven, I started on an Italian vegetable soup that will be my lunch for the next week.  I tried it today for lunch and it turned out much better than I anticipated.  However, those are everyday sort of things, and I still hadn’t started working on my own Thanksgiving dinner.

I felt some obligation to do something special for Thanksgiving.  A turkey was out of the question.  If I got a turkey, I’d have enough to eat for three weeks and I just didn’t want to go there.  I thought about staying in the poultry zone, but the store was out of small birds (except chickens).  Mussels or a nice whole fish were options, but I wanted to cook something a little more elaborate.

Ultimately, a nice beef shank caught my eye and I decided to go that way.  I was fabulous.  Braised in beer for four hours with onions, celery, and carrots, it turned out to be wonderful.  It easily fell off the bone (and the bone marrow dissolved in the gravy) and was full of delicious, deep, complex flavor.  I accompanied it with some turnips, rutabagas, onions, purple potatoes, and carrots that I roasted while the beef was braising. There were a lot of veggies there, but they’ll be used throughout the week as a side to whatever I’m cooking that night.

So I didn’t enjoy the “bounty” that seems to have become a prerequisite for Thanksgiving these days, but I did enjoy a few hours in the kitchen putting together some basic, nutritious food for me and my family of birds alongside a deeply satisfying Thanksgiving dinner for one.

And for that, I’m grateful.