I'm not having Thanksgiving with my extended family this year, which means two things:
One, I'm not forced into politely eating at least a bite of turkey, and
Two, I am missing the inevitable and lengthy after-dinner diatribes about the culinary oddities my overburdened mother inflicted on us.
Turkey. Overcooked and with its endless variations of leftovers, it was the longest-lasting culinary disaster my mom inflicted on us.
Now that you've enjoyed your meal and are contemplating leftovers of your own, sit back and enjoy the culinary tales of a kid who grew up during the advent of packaged and processed foods.
I was a hungry kid. There was literally nothing....nothing...to eat when I got home from first grade except a few scoops of dehydrated mashed potato flakes stolen out of a box that I would cement-mix in my mouth with water when I was really hungry and thought Mom wouldn’t notice. We weren't "starving"-- we had a roof over our heads and regular meals. But variety of food was always in limited supply, and snacks of any kind non-existent. The brown paper sack lunch I carried to parochial school held a baloney sandwich (except on Fridays, when it was cat food-grade tuna and mayo) and nothing more.
For someone who had eight kids my mother was markedly non-maternal and almost wholly indifferent to food. The advances in culinary science of the early 60’s delighted her no end. If it came frozen or in a cardboard box; if all she had to do was add water or defrost it, the more remotely it resembled actual food the better she liked serving it to her kids.
While real potatoes may have been cheaper she loved the boxed ones best -- scalloped potatoes, potatoes au gratin and mashed potato buds. We ate canned corned beef hash, boxed macaroni and cheese and Spam. Lots of Spam. Hot dogs were another favorite protein and were served with canned beans or split open, stuffed with Velveeta and melted under the broiler, to the degree Velveeta could be said to actually melt. For breakfast we ate sugary cereals like Lucky Charms, with its little dehydrated colored marshmallows, and Cap’n Crunch, which ripped the hide right off the roof of my mouth. Just from all that Wonder Bread alone I probably have an internal shelf life of 100 years.
Mom could prepare actual food, though she apparently lived in fear of anything undercooked. Pork chops were fried until their dried edges curled up and touched in the middle. Vegetables, usually canned, were cooked to colorless mush. Never again will I touch a lima bean after what she did to them. I mashed them into a grayish paste and spread them around the plate, tucking the rest of them under my seat cushion or dropping them into the bowl of plastic fruit (we never had real fruit like people actually eat, just the plastic stuff for show). The only thing she didn’t overcook was fried eggs, which came out famously runny and, to me, inedible.
She did make a festively weird meatloaf with overly hard-boiled eggs planted in the middle, so that when you sliced it open you were treated to the unlikely sight of a green-rimmed slice of egg embedded in the hard, crusty meat. And her egg(shell) salad sandwiches always had that extra little crunch to them.
Mom also had a talent for dressing up ordinary food with exotic titles. Ground beef with tomato sauce and elbow macaroni was "Goulash." Gristly, cheap cuts of beef stewed with canned tomatoes became "Swiss Steak." Ground beef rolled up in a ball and cooked in a brownish mystery sauce was "Swedish Meatballs." None of us was fooled by these taxonomies.
Dessert was unheard of, with the occasional exception of Imitation Ice Milk. Now, think about that. Isn’t ice milk travesty enough without also going for imitation?
It’s understandable a parent would take shortcuts feeding that many kids. What was maddening, however, was the way she and Dad did not share our dinner table or our repast. They ate later, at the coffee table while watching Walter Cronkite. They had the good stuff. Filet mignon. Baked potatoes with sour cream and chives. Artichokes. Salad, with iceberg lettuce and 1000 Island dressing. A jelly-like soup called consommé.
Like a puppy I’d crawl around under the coffee table and beg for scraps. "Just one biiiiiiite," I’d whine, and would occasionally be rewarded with a juicy nugget of steak. It was so unlike the pork chops or "Swiss Steak" she cooked us kids because I could actually chew it until it was gone, without having to extract grayish wads of gristle from my mouth and sneak them under the seat cushion. Mom wore dentures and didn’t always scrape the artichoke leaves clean and under cover of offering to take her plate to the kitchen for her I’d re-scrape as many leaves as I could. They’d been dipped in butter and even when I got nothing but fibers between my teeth they were delicious. I couldn’t wait to grow up and eat adult food.
But the worst of all was Thanksgiving, a day I came to dread. At eight in the morning Mom began by rasselling a truly huge turkey, it could have been 75 pounds, into the sink and yanking unsavory-looking bits and pieces out of its gullet and tossing them into a saucepan. I kept track of where that saucepan was to make sure I didn’t eat anything that came out of there, no matter how hungry I was. I had some standards, after all. This turkey then cooked all morning and into the afternoon and evening, growing more dessicated by the hour. Without the addition of the questionable gravy it was practically turkey jerky. She really was an indifferent cook (I did, however, adore Mom’s lumpy mashed potatoes, made from actual spuds. Smooth mashed potatoes seem so lacking in character now after her richly textured ones).
One day of hideous turkey was bad enough, but then came the leftovers. Weeks of leftovers. Turkey hot, turkey cold, turkey soup, turkey salad, turkey ala King. (I just now, in a fit of suspicion, googled Turkey ala King, and sure enough it bears no resemblance to the "Turkey ala King" of my post-Thanksgiving childhood). The daily bologna sandwich was replaced with, well, you know. If I complained I was hungry I was told there was plenty of leftover turkey that those poor starving children in China would love to have. I would have loved for them to have it, too.
And the hits just kept coming -- turkey casseroles, turkey tetrazzini (I’m not even going to bother googling that one), turkey pot pie, turkey on toast, turkey on a stick. About the time the carcass was finally down to the bones it was Christmas and time for yet another freakin’ turkey that lasted us until Easter, at which point we had the meatloaf with the greenish hard-boiled eggs inside. The only break from this relentless parade of turkey dishes was, since we were at least nominally Catholic, fish on Fridays, as in frozen fish sticks with frozen Tater Tots.
By the time I was a teen-aged precocious reader I swore that as God was my witness I would never eat turkey as an adult again, a promise I’ve mostly kept. Oh, I’m polite to my hardworking hosts and hostesses and take a single slice onto my plate, having learned that to refuse turkey on Thanksgiving is akin to refusing champagne at a wedding – it just invites too many questions and stares.
Then, when no one’s looking, I slip it under the seat cushion.