It’s been 20 years now since I first tried to cook an entire Thanksgiving dinner by myself, armed with a probe thermometer and a set of china from my wedding registry, an Alton Brown recipe for brined turkey, and a grease-stained cookbook I’d taken from my childhood home.
It actually all turned out OK. We didn’t eat until about three hours after I’d planned, but I sent my mom out for cheese and crackers, and we all survived.
Now, I’m 20 years older and only potentially somewhat wiser, but I definitely know how to cook a Thanksgiving meal after many years of trial and error. I do almost everything in advance – the cranberry sauce and sweet potatoes get made on Tuesday, with the sweet potatoes reheated just before we eat; the dressing and soup and Brussels sprouts and pies are finished on Wednesday. On Thursday, all I have left is turkey, mashed potatoes, gravy, and bread, and by 4 p.m., we are all usually watching football and/or reading mystery novels in the bathtub.
What I don’t have, really, is a sense of tradition.
Yes, I know how to cook my Thanksgiving dinner. I always keep it simple, and I always make the same things: pumpkin and black bean soup, sourdough bread, cranberry sauce with orange zest and brown sugar, dressing with sage and celery and onions, sweet potatoes with lots of butter and bourbon, Brussels sprouts with bacon and lemon and Parmesan, mashed potatoes with sour cream, turkey with herbs, and sour cherry and pumpkin pies with tons of real whipped cream.
But I don’t have Aunt Linda’s Deviled Eggs or Grandma Sadie’s Giblet Gravy or Uncle Tommy’s Baked Macaroni and Cheese.
I get sort of sad when my friends start waxing poetic about their attempts to re-create family recipes because … I absolutely do not have that. Neither my Southern nor my Midwestern relatives have recipes that were handed down. (One time my mom attempted to recapture the tomato aspic of her Wisconsin youth, but I do not want to duplicate that, ever.)
What hold on to, though, is the hope that I can one day hand down my recipes to my own kids, even if they are cobbled together from the internet and that one grease-stained cookbook I took when I left for college.
If you have treasured family recipes you’re willing to share, please send them my way at evekiddcrawford@gmail.com.
