Because I Said So

Why do we eat what we eat at Thanksgiving?

I really like to eat. I mean really! I like to eat! Food tastes good to me, and it makes me feel good - if I don’t eat too much all at once! I like Thanksgiving, because we get to eat food we normally do not prepare during the rest of the year - except maybe at Christmas. Which doesn’t really make much sense - turkey is an inexpensive and healthy meat, and it isn’t hard to cook. 

But some of the foods puzzle me - I wonder how we got on the tradition of eating things that we would never eat at any other time of year. On a recent TV show, they reviewed how cranberry sauce is made. Why cranberry sauce? Why not blueberry sauce, or grape jelly? The most popular type of fruit spread to go with peanut butter is grape - not cranberry. The rest of the year we serve our dinner rolls with butter or perhaps honey, but not cranberry. It only comes out of the can for Thanksgiving and Christmas.  At least some people make fresh cranberry and orange sauce, but then you are left trying to decide - is it a salad or a spread?

Marshmallows on top of sweet potatoes? What is that - cheap s’mores?

And dressing/stuffing?  How did this get started? If I get too much mayo on my sandwich bread and it gets soggy, I won’t eat it.  Why do we eat cooked bread, soaked in broth and who-knows-what-else, and then cover it with more liquid, in the form of gravy?  And what do you call it anyway? Dressing? Stuffing?  And people put all kinds of stuff in it - oysters, rice, nuts….we wouldn’t get away with it any other time of year.

My mother-in-law made dressing from bread and other stuff, and then put lots of chili powder in it. She got the recipe from a neighbor in New Mexico when my husband was young. My brother spent one Thanksgiving with us, and hasn’t stopped talking about it yet.

I have my mother’s recipe for dressing, written in her own handwriting on a scrap of paper. It has measurements for all the ingredients, but at the bottom she has written a note, “I think this is about right. I’ve never made it that you kids weren’t in the kitchen bothering me with all kinds of things, so I just guessed at the everything.”  I really cherish that paper every year when I get it out to make the dressing for my turkey.

I love most every food we have at Thanksgiving - and especially love when I have lots of family around the table to share it. And, I love the leftovers of the feast, which is more than I can say for food any other time of the year!