Sweet potatoes and cranberry sauce.
For many years after I left home, that was all I ever had to make for our extended family’s Thanksgiving meal.
Among my parents’ six children, I was known as the one who could not/would not cook. So, my mother gave me the two assignments she thought I could handle.
For cranberry sauce, I followed the directions on the bag of fresh cranberries. (Put sugar, cranberries and water in a pot, then boil.)
Mom provided step-by-step guidance on how to make old-fashioned sweet potatoes. (Peel and boil the potatoes; add lots of brown sugar, butter and a little salt; bake.)
Easy-peasy, but I knew I was still capable of messing it up.
My dad was the arbiter of whether the Thanksgiving spread passed muster, and it was obvious how much he cared. Usually health-conscious, he was a different man on Thanksgiving. He’d heap his plate to an improbable height, then go back for seconds and thirds. Dessert was one of everything.
Every year, I was jittery until my red and orange food made it onto his fork and down his gullet. He usually complimented my efforts, but I always imagined I would become The Daughter Who Ruined Thanksgiving.
I didn’t actually do that until after his death. But more on that later.
As happens in the passage of life, eventually my mother could no longer manage the big meal and crowd. My home was large enough to handle a mediumsized horde and centrally located. Instead of traveling over the river and through the woods to my parents’ house, we moved the celebration to my home in the suburbs.
All the taste buds in the family rebelled at the thought of losing my mom’s turkey, giblet gravy and old-timey sage dressing, so my sister, Kathy, took over that job. She lived down the street from me and used her oven to create a stuffed bird just like my mom’s. Every year, my brother-in-law carried it to our door just in time for my husband to carve it up and place it on a platter surrounded by potluck side dishes.
As our younger generation moved into adulthood and acquired significant others, we needed two turkeys. I promised to take care of one and ordered a smoked turkey to join Kathy’s masterpiece. It was love at first wishbone, and we’ve had smoked turkey almost every year since. More on that later.
Sweet potatoes and cranberry sauce stayed in my wheelhouse, but I added special chocolate chip cookies (from a recipe in a decades-old De Soto schoolteachers’ cookbook) and Cowboy Bread, a recipe culled from the Daily News Democrat, circa 1980.
Those embellishments became family favorites: Look at that, the kiddos were making new traditions.
My dad died in 2009 and Thanksgiving hasn’t been the same since. I miss seeing his teetering tower of food, his appreciation of the family traditions, his overall delight in the day of gluttony. But a tiny little sliver of my brain doesn’t miss the pressure I felt to make it all perfect.
It sure wasn’t perfect in 2010. That’s the year Kathy celebrated the day elsewhere and didn’t deliver her turkey. I thought I had ordered a smoked turkey – a 20-pounder, our biggest ever – but didn’t realize until just before meal time that the bird I had driven 45 minutes to pick up and then store in my fridge was a raw turkey that had to be cooked instead of just warmed up.
The menu that day was sweet potatoes, cranberry sauce, the side dishes and desserts others had brought, and … lunch meat.
We had another memorable Thanksgiving in 2013. Our daughter-in-law generously brought baby Clark to town two days before the holiday to provide bonding time with Grandma and Grandpa. Ten-month- old Clark seemed uncharacteristically fussy. His mother thought he must be extra hungry after his long car ride, so she fed him to the gills before he demonstrated, quite graphically, that he’d caught a potent stomach virus.
Twenty-four hours later, Clark seemed to feel much better, but Sara and I sure didn’t. Eventually, every human who had entered our door needed a bucket and a clear path to the bathroom. The moaning and groaning was laced with laughter, though, as we all found the humor in an absurdly awful holiday.
“Another one is going down! Get out of his/her way!”
A real smoked turkey was waiting in the fridge that Thanksgiving, but no one felt like getting him out, let alone eating him.
When people could use their stomachs again, a couple of days later, it was time for them to go home. We divided the turkey into multiple take-home containers, and packed plenty of sweet potatoes and cranberry sauce on the side.
