A Turkey Triumph

The greatest labor of love comes from the acceptance of each other's traditions.

This year, we feel as round as the bird we roasted. But, doesn’t love make us all a little more well-rounded?

The only day my husband comes home from work early is when we celebrate Thanksgiving.

At the start of our marriage, around 7:30pm every night, I used to set a pot of water on the stove, and wait for it to boil for pasta. I’d call my husband about twenty minutes later, and ask him if I could “buttare la pasta,” so that it could be ready to eat by the time he got home. Sometimes he’d answer, sometimes not, while the water kept boiling, each bubble mocking me as it rose to the surface and popped. Often, by the time he called back to tell me to toss in the pasta, the water had evaporated.

I call it The Boiling Pot Syndrome, a condition from which I still suffer. Not much has changed over the years, as his hour of coming home gets later and later. The boiling pot of evaporating water is a metaphor for how much time I spend waiting – for a meal, for a future posting, for answers to what’s next. In that waiting time, I aspire for life, and dinner, to be al dente, but sometimes it, inevitably, turns to mush.

However, when it comes to the day in which all Americans give thanks, my husband knows he’ll be shot with the same rifle used to kill the turkey if he is not home early. He strolls home from the office around 2pm, and exchanges his coat and tie for his personalized chef’s jacket with an Italian-tricolored collar, a gift from a Californian chef.

Prepping the beast with our sous-chef.

After every year in which he waves his culinary wand on the third Thursday of November, I am moved by his expression of solidarity towards my favorite American holiday. In a labor of love, he’s the one who makes the stuffing, stuffs the turkey, sews up its cavities, and then shoehorns it into the oven. His mastering of my homeland’s holiday menu shows me that those you love can change or adapt in adopting foreign traditions. You can teach an old dog new tricks, as long as you train together.

Our gravy container, whose backside comes off like a piggy bank’s, sometimes holds the cranberry sauce instead.

My husband did not grow up celebrating Thanksgiving. He had roasted many a chicken but never a turkey. And certainly never one that weighed as much as a super-sized newborn (the average turkey we prepare, by now, usually weighs anywhere from 10-12 kilos). In renovating our apartment in Rome ten years ago, we shopped furiously for an oven big enough to house plump poultry (after one year in which we had to chop off the bird’s legs in order to squeeze it inside a once smaller oven). After an electronics’ salesman told us Rome’s Canadian Embassy had recently purchased a Smeg model big enough for an eagle, we were sold on it, too.

In a month’s time, we will celebrate our 20th wedding anniversary. In the time we have been married, we have lived outside of Italy more than we have lived in it. Every year, wherever we are living, we have celebrated Thanksgiving, using my family’s American recipes with my husband’s Italian touch. When you live overseas most of the time, your friends become your family. Because we are more often posted far away from our respective families than near them, our every Thanksgiving is a Friendsgiving. It is not only a feast for friends but also that one day of the year where we showcase America instead of Italy in the kitchen.

Because when you’re American, you collect embroidered turkey napkins.

Out comes the Thanksgiving gear we haul around the world and treat with as much reverence as our Christmas ornaments. There is the Portuguese ceramic platter deep enough to make the turkey look as if it’s floating in a baby pool. There’s the stitching-stuffing-needle the length of an epidural which I bought at a Roman shop that only sells buttons and other sewing accessories. Often we rummage through kitchen drawers for cooking brine which we rarely find and have substituted with dental floss (unflavored) over the years. This year we had to retire our supersonic turkey thermometer from A Sharper Image for our market-bought injector from Campo de’ Fiori. We iron the embroidered turkey napkins, and shine up the tin plates suited for meals served mensa-style. And the centerpiece is always the orange-and-white ceramic turkey gravy bowl with its neck turned around towards its tail, perilously resembling a chicken with its head almost cut off.

Out come the American recipes, to which my husband adds his Midas touch. Mashed potatoes are replaced by a cauliflower puree’ with nutmeg. My mom’s stuffing recipe of apples, onions, celery, sausage, prunes soaked in Sherry, and spices calls for breadcrumbs which we crumble out of Italian focaccia. Brussel sprouts are decorated with maple syrup, apple vinegar and walnuts. A heaping round of ricotta is splattered against a plate with persimmon's sauce dripping over it. We serve butternut squash soup in espresso cups. My son labors over perfecting his father’s tiramisu’ recipe. I bake homemade zucchini bread and plum tarts but secretly can’t wait to devour the Monte Bianco from the local pastry shop that I can’t survive the autumnal season without (see my last year’s Thanksgiving missive for more details). For vegetarians, we throw in a pesto lasagna and a spinach salad with pears, walnuts, and gorgonzola. To make the turkey feel like The Beauty Queen, we wrap her in a sash of guanciale. And then there’s the cranberry sauce — the only store-bought menu item that comes from a can — which my husband heats up with cinnamon sticks and Marsala, fooling everyone to believe that it’s homemade.

He’s horrified that I reveal this kitchen secret about the cranberry sauce but here’s why:

My father’s family owned, ran, and eventually sold S.S. Pierce, a Bostonian canned-goods company. Canned lasagna was among one its bestsellers (next to creamed salmon and peas or creamed finnan haddie). It wasn’t far from the SpaghettiOs on which I was raised by our beloved after-school babysitter that was considered blasphemous to my husband (who ate homemade gnocchi prepared by his babysitter which piped hot out of his Thermos next to his classmates’ soggy sandwiches).

For years, my mother has been collecting S.S. Pierce paraphernalia as its milk jugs, teabag containers, and nut jars are great kitchen kitsch with sentimental value. In one of her E-bay searches, she found leftover packets of “S.S. Pierce Canned Lasagna” labels for sale. She ordered them immediately, and plastered 14 on a poster-size canvas to make an Andy Warhol-esque pop art of a dish she knew would make my husband’s blood boil.

Family heirloom of E-bay pop art.

Just before we married, she gave him her homemade work of art, and said, “Congratulations, you’re marrying the Fallen Countess of Canned Lasagna.” The artwork is the centerpiece of every kitchen we have lived in, a reminder of where my taste buds originally descend.

So, the cranberry sauce out of a can is in honor of my American heritage. (Just as one dear American friend recognized that the perfect house gift to our Friendsgiving in Rome was a jar of peanut butter — which she “chicified” by delivering to me in a Thanksgiving-Orange Hermes bag.)

Europe meets America in Thanksgiving-Orange.

In many American households, a Thanksgiving dinner is often prefaced with a morning run in a so-called Turkey Trot. In others, it is concluded with a nap while watching American football on the living room couch. This year, we didn’t even saunter around the block, let alone watch Italian soccer.

Instead, we devoured the last two episodes of Apple TV’s final season of Ted Lasso, a fantastic series on which we have binged exclusively as a family. In the final forty minutes of the last episode, a beautiful conversation takes place among a group of male friends, and one of them poses a simple but profound question about humans, their behavior, and perfection:

“Can we change?” he asks.

All respond, offering a variety of contrasting opinions. The words of the man who spoke the deepest truth have stayed with me:

“Human beings are never going to be perfect,” he says. “The best we can do is keep asking for help, and accepting it when we can. And, if you keep on doing that, you’ll always be moving towards better.”

Thanksgiving, for me, is a patchwork quilt of perfection in its imperfection. Every year, there’s something we burn, something we undercook, something we didn’t make enough of, something we forgot to include, and something that’s new to the old. And it’s precisely in its imperfection that I think of it as the perfect holiday. Every year, it gets better and better. Every year, we help each other in assembling the meal which, in turn, creates our community of friends. There’s no commercialism and no religion wrapped around the day. It’s all about inclusion, from the stragglers to the strangers, from the familiar to the unfamiliar.

My Italian husband embraces an American Thanksgiving — in its hodge-podge of recipes, flavors, and guests, and in its spirit of offering gratitude through a bounty of food — in a way that moves me to thank him, and all those friends who left us with no leftovers, for making the most perfect meal during imperfect times.