What is everyone thinking about these days? Food. Of course. Holiday traditions, laden tables, houses redolent with sautéed and simmered love.
There’s something cooking in every kitchen in America this time of year, but it’s likely to vary a little from place to place. After all, in those early Thanksgiving days, people pretty much ate what was at hand. They weren’t shipping kiwis in from Australia and whatnot. So traditions developed and that’s what we’re talking ’bout.
Our guest writer is my favorite iconoclast and editor, David Bailey. He writes, he edits, he’s a line cook and serious eater. He writes about barbecue and other stuff—like going from editor to dishwasher to cook—on his blog, My Pie Hole. Oh yeah, he’s also a scholar in ancient Latin and Greek. He does all this in Greensboro, North Carolina and with a southern drawl like honeyed molasses.
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Corned ham as a Thanksgiving essential. Photo by David Bailey.
In pork-loving Piedmont North Carolina where it’s common to have bacon for breakfast, barbecue for lunch and ham for dinner, serving roast pork for Thanksgiving is a hallowed tradition.
For the past several years, I’ve corned a ham for Thanksgiving using a recipe from Chapel Hill’s Crook’s Corner.
It couldn’t be simpler. Ten days before Thanksgiving, buy the largest fresh ham you can find. Salt the outside and slipping a filet knife along the bone, cut slits at the ends of the ham and press in salt. Refrigerate it and recoat with salt every day. On Thanksgiving morning, bright and early, brush off the excess salt and put the ham in the oven at about 325 degrees. It’s ready when your house smells good enough to eat.
The first year, my folks quite literally ate every smidgeon. I even spied my littlest nephew out in the back yard sucking on a ham bone. –David
Heron with a side of cranberry bog. Photo courtesy of Harmonica Pete via Flickr (Creative Commons license).
I refuse to get bogged down in a debate about it: I like canned jellied cranberry sauce. I always thought it was a holdover from my 1970s suburban upbringing but, really, it’s probably something in my home state’s water. (Could there be a market for filtered bog water?) While Wisconsin is responsible for most of the cranberries that sit around jellied or cooked down or tarted up or whatever on most Thanksgiving tables around America, I’m proud to say that the Garden State contributes its fair share to the feast. They are the “Jewel of the Pine Barrens.”–Jenna
The dog gets a walk, I get pecans. Photo by Sophia Dembling
I’ve decided that as the second largest pecan-producing state (after Georgia), Texas may dictate the proper pronunciation of the buttery nut: It’s pah-KAHNS, not PEE-cans, as I said in my Yankee days, when I was more of a walnut girl. Pecan trees bear fruit roughly every other year, and on good years like this one, the trees spill forth bounty and I can fill my pockets while walking the dog ‘round the neighborhood. (I don’t steal from people’s yards, I just filch from the sidewalk.) Here in Texas, it ain’t Thanksgiving without pecan pie. Tom and I like ‘em in our stuffing, too. And they’re real good snackin’.–Sophia
[...] says pecans. I, of course, say corned ham. Sophie’s friend says canned cranberry sauce: http://readflyoveramerica.com/2009/11/20/thanksgiving-different-tastes-for-different-states/ Possibly related posts: (automatically generated)Writers on [...]
No shame in liking canned cranberry jelly – it’s the only cranberry confection I eat at Thanksgiving! My favorite dish though would have to sweet potato cassarole (with plenty of nutty, brown sugar goodness). If it’s not on the table at Thanksgiving I’m not a happy camper!!!
Jennifer — Any marshmallows on that casserole? And–one of my true favorites–1970s-style green bean casserole. I’m a modern girl in so many ways but I really like a disco-era Thanksgiving.
We were always yam purists. Baked, with butter and salt. I do like those green bean casseroles with crunchy stuff on top, though they were never a family tradition. My mom served pearl onions but I can’t remember how she cooked them. I like creamed spinach on my Thanksgiving table.
I’m a sweet potato purist the other 364 days. Our regular day family sweet potato tradition: yams on the grill and cooked until the outside turns into a hard blackened inedible shell. Crack those suckers open and, inside, butta.
It seems my mind has been holding onto a sweet potato casserole that hasn’t hit our table in years. Did the food shopping with my Mom today and bought bags and bags of sweets to make Mickeys on the grill (was a Bronx thing–need to find out why they’re called that)–and suddenly it struck me that we haven’t done the marshmallow thing in forever. Odd. But the canned cranberry sauce and the string bean casserole ingredients are at the ready in the pantry!
I absolutely love sweet potato casserole with the little marshmallows on top! I had a great-aunt who always made it for Thanksgiving.
I also like the cranberry sauce from a can. There’s something about the perfectly round discs of cranberry goodness that just screams Thanksgiving dinner.
And there is something very festive about the wibbly wobbly dance the cranberry sauce does when you release it from its can. A Thanksgiving dance of joy.
that’s “pih-kahns” for us, and we fix our pecan pie with about 3 TBS of Godiva Chocolate liqueur.
Other required traditions: Broccoli salad (red onions, raisins, bacon, etc.); Oyster casserole; Frozen Cranberry Treats (cranberry sauce, Kool Whip, cream cheese, pecans); and there’s turkey and cornbread dressing involved, too.
Mmm, I’m all over that chocolate liqueur idea. And very intrigued by the broccoli salad…
I had to be schooled in the difference between stuffing and dressing. I’d only known the former in my Yankee days.
Where are you, Steve?
Yes, Steve, where are you? Cause if we’re all going to hit your table for Thanksgiving, we need to start planning our drives now.
Sounds like you set a mighty tasty table.
Sophie — Maybe we need to have a post Thanksgiving meet-up for all these fine folks? We can all bring our leftovers. Ah, hell, I’ll go big! I’ll bring a brand new unopened can of cranberry sauce.
I bet a dollar Steve’s in the South. He pronounces it “pih-kahns” which is clearly the only correct way, plus he said he was going to “fix” his pecan pie.
Would you be persuaded to leave the jelly quvering for a cranberry port sauce? There can never be too much port that day. My new tradition is sweet potato parsnip puree with a touch of brown sugar and ginger. It’s the best baby food you’ve ever had and even the fogey kids clean their plates. I’ve also done a shiitake mushroom risotto the last few years, which worked great last year when we ditched the turkey for seared duck breast — with a port reduction.
Hm, a little port in the cranberry sauce. I like it! I do like the canned stuff, but prefer making real stove top cranberry sauce.
Instead of leaving the old (and out of fashion) foods behind, I’ll just double up the table with tasty delights that will tantalize both my inner suburban child and my inner modern foodie. (Cause, really, that is what we do around these parts.) And, yes, I know I’ve probably horrified loads of people with my admission of joy over the quivering mass of garnet-colored wobbliness but…I believe I should score extra points for admitting my weaknesses. I am woman. Hear me snore. (It’s going to be a big meal — I’ll need a nap.)
Oh Jim — that recipe for the duck risotto floating around in the world at all? I’d love to cook that up….my my my. If I had to choose just two proteins to live on for the rest of my life: duck and lobster. That would be a nice life, right?