It’s four days before Thanksgiving, and I have a real problem. It’s about what I’m serving, and it’s a moral choice, and I think I know the answer. But let me tell you about it anyway.
Right now there’s a turkey sitting in my refrigerator. It’s a very good one, about the best you can find: a Bell & Evans young turkey, air dried. I was planning on making it, despite the fact that, as I’ve written so often, I hate turkey, and resent even the one time a year that I’m forced to cook it. On the other hand, people look to me as the feeder, the cook, the meat man, and it gives me bone-deep gratification to deliver. On the other hand, the turkey is still going to suck. Don’t get me wrong; I know what I’m doing. I demo the cooking on Rachael’s Ehow channel here; and I’ve even done a video on carving. But whether stood on end, confited, deep-fried, barbecued, or simply roasted in the traditional way, turkey isn’t that good.
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With one exception. Rich Torrisi and Mario Carbone have a tiny restaurant in Little Italy called Torrisi Italian Specialties. Everything there is great, and the place is a secret to nobody, but of all their culinary miracles these two young bucks deliver, surely the greatest is their turkey. So astounding is this feat that I heralded it in TIME; I go there and get the turkey by itself on a plate, without even a bun or any dressing. It’s really a miracle. And this year, the boys are doing turkeys to take home, ready to go Torrisi kits that require only a glaze application and a few minutes in the oven. Can you see where I’m going with this? I have to choose between giving my wife and my friends something great, or something I made myself.
It’s not an obvious choice. If I cook the turkey myself, I’m sacrificing their pleasure for my own ego. Or maybe it’s not my own ego. Maybe it’s devotion, or principle, or an ideal. Whatever! The result is the same. They get less pleasure. On the other hand, there’s something profoundly wrong, I think, about buying Thanksgiving dinner. On this one day, anyway, you are supposed to cook - cook something hard, something that’s bigger than you’re used to dealing with, that’s hard to handle and difficult to carve. The Torrisi turkey is a perfectl oval boneless breast; you slice it up and every one is the same. The leftover slices will make heavenly sandwiches. And then there is my bird: wretchedly dry, no matter what I do, with two different kinds of meat that cook at two different rates, each guaranteed to ruin the other, and with bones and sinew and gristle and skin and fat causing all kinds of trouble.
I thought about it a long time. And then I decided to make the turkey. Part of it was ego; I couldn’t just serve someone else’s dish, especially one that regular civilians can get. But a bigger part of it was my need to do the right thing by the turkey itself. You see, I couldn’t just leave it in the refrigerator. Yes, I could make it over the weekend and make a sandwich harvest over it, but that’s now why it lived and died. It’s the last big thing we cook for each other; the sole survivor of big families, meaningful celebrations, dramatic centerpieces, and all the other sad and distant remnants of the times when meals mattered and history clung. My wife and I live alone; my parents are dead and hers live in Dallas, which is almost as bad. We are not expecting many guests, if the truth be told. But the fact that we have any means they deserve my making a turkey, even if it is a bad one. The day before Thanksgiving, I’ll eat just the cap of the ribeye cap just the crusts of a potato gratin, listening to Macaulay on my ipod while I text with three friends. But Thanksgiving asks something more of me. And, alas for my guests, I’m going to provide it.