and warning me about her fiery leghorn peppers, named for a chicken’s ankle. As I carried home my market basket of bok choy and bitter melon, Kroger’s carrots and tiny strawberries, I could almost feel my grandmother’s hand in mine.
My mom had slipped her copy of The Joy of Cooking into one of our moving boxes and when I unpacked this unexpected gift it greeted me like an old friend. As a teenager I’d tucked it into my book bag to read like a novel when I should have been studying. All through college, when I’d felt lost or homesick, I’d turned to cookbooks to soothe and entertain.
And cookbooks, too, had introduced me to agriculture’s environmental issues back when I had been a graduate student living in a shared house, cooking with friends. Diet for a Small Planet and The Moosewood Cookbook had been our Bibles of food awakening. Fueled by nicotine and cheap wine, we’d lingered for hours at our table, an old door propped on cinder-block legs, discussing farm issues and claiming “the personal is political”—talking over Cesar Chavez and workers’ rights, Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, the dangers of Alar and DDT.
So, as I sat at the table my brother had built for our first Minneapolis kitchen, turning those sticky, dog-eared pages, I began to feel more at home. Beneath a cookbook’s lists of ingredients and steps to follow lie tales as rich and deep as any to be found in fiction. They are forays into families’ homes and glimpses into far-off lands redolent of garlic and rosemary, saffron and cardamom. Recipes are stories with happy endings, of being sated and cared for in a way that feels gentle. I’d even suggest that the intentions of a cookbook author are the same as those of a novelist: to use both creativity and format to transmit an experience to the reader. As I revisited the old Joy, I realized I wanted to learn this language and translate the sounds, scents, and tastes of cooking onto the page, just as a composer writes out a score. I’ve always been happiest in the kitchen—chopping, sizzling, stirring—creating beautiful, flavorful food that nourishes and delights. As a reader of cookbooks, I loved the instructions that helped me imagine a meal. I wanted to know how to document such steps to pleasure, to both capture and share them. And I hoped such work would guide my search for the hearth, the heart of the home.
Despite all my reading, however, I had never stepped into a farmer’s field. At the Minneapolis market, I could finally get answers directly from working growers about what it takes to cultivate delicious, bright-green lettuce and why the local varieties I used in my salad cost more than the pale heads sold in grocery stores. I began to understand local food.
Innocent and ambitious, I wanted to share with my family these new discoveries when they arrived in town. Hosting Thanksgiving for the first time is a rite of passage for any cook. Like that first bike ride without training wheels, it is both daunting and liberating. I got to choose which traditional foods to serve and which to scratch. I wanted to showcase those carrots—as well as ruffled kale, cranberries, sweet potatoes, and a small free-range turkey—and I wanted to make all the pies, bake all the bread, and create all the condiments by myself.
We didn’t have a single table big enough to seat everyone, so I simply duct-taped together three different tables and smoothed my grandmother’s lace tablecloth over the odd assembly. My dad told me over the phone that he’d ordered special cheese to be delivered and that he planned to bring the “good carving knife.” I could picture this bone-handled beauty, snuggled in its velvet-lined, rosewood case and folded into his suitcase for a trip into an unknown place so far from my family’s comfortable home.
It’s not that our traditional Thanksgiving fare was all that special. Sometimes the gravy was gloppy or the turkey dry. But in my parents’ sprawling dining room we’d always played out our vision of what a family might be if we didn’t have to live with each other all the time. No uncle’s divorce, no cousin’s odd girlfriend, not even differing views on the Vietnam War could spoil the fun. We were open, joyful. The lights of Thanksgiving past would glow warmly as my father held court at the head of the table. Having sliced the breast meat to the bone with exquisite thinness, he would raise his glass to toast the guests and the bounty before us. More than any other day, Thanksgiving brought out the essential nature of my dad. He showed us that one could live both loud and gentle, both hungry and whole.
So now, with that Joy of Cooking spine cracked flat open on the counter, I rolled pie dough, kneaded bread, and scored and roasted chestnuts for stuffing. I scrubbed the counters and floors, ironed napkins, polished silver, and, as fatigue set in, began to wonder why I’d thought this was such a great idea.
The night my family flew in, the Twin Cities were hit with the season’s first storm of wet, sloppy snow. My family was delayed several hours in Chicago and it was near midnight by the time I picked them up. The driving had been slow, the roads treacherous.
After heartfelt airport hugs, all six of us, sitting on luggage, squeezed into my Datsun and crept onto the highway. Icy clumps pummeled the roof and glazed the windshield, making it difficult to see as freight trucks barreled by. The giddiness of our reunion soon congealed into uncomfortable silence. I missed our exit, circled up over the highway, and retraced our route, not once but twice, and on the third try, as we passed the grain silos on Hiawatha Avenue . . . my father could hold back no longer and asked me in a whisper, thin with impatience, “Beth, do you know where you are?”
What I knew was that change is hard. But while I realized that this was going to be a different Thanksgiving in location as well as food, I was naively unprepared for its emotional impact. Applying my grandmother’s early lessons and my understanding of Rachel Carson to the fresh, beautiful food from my new local market just wasn’t playing out quite as planned. I had a lot to learn.
Thanksgiving morning my mother, looking askance, asked, “No creamed onions?” Even though none of us had ever actually eaten the Birds Eye Pearl Onions in a Real Cream Sauce, they were my absent Aunt Ruth’s favorite. Aunt Ruth adored fake pearls and Scotch and doused herself in Shalimar, and though she was not present, the missing onions seemed like a slight.
“Where’s the big bird?” my dad asked as I trussed the local, organic, free-range, but admittedly undersized turkey. My brother, digging a bag of Cheetos from his backpack, paused long enough to say, “Looks like Beth went with a fat chicken instead.” In our tiny living room, sibling rivalries, unspoken resentments, and secret rages, fueled by the exhaustion of holiday travel, threatened to boil over. “Oh God! Not more weeds and seeds,” moaned my sister as I trimmed the kale. “Eeew,” she said, spotting the yogurt curing on top of the fridge. “Stinky milk!”
My hopes for fluffy mashed potatoes were dashed, for I’d chosen the wrong spuds—waxy yellow Finn and red bliss—a mistake compounded when I tried to whip them up in the food processor and churned out a gluey and gray mass. That little turkey had a teeny lean breast but huge thighs and might have provided delicious dark meat, if it hadn’t been overcooked (no pop-up thermometer).
The kale, however, was a surprising hit, thanks to my friend Atina’s advice to sauté it with garlic and douse it with dark sesame oil. (“Cooked that way, even gravel tastes good,” she quipped.) The gnarled sweet potatoes were wonderfully and naturally brown-sugar sweet, and the Haralson apples for pie were tart, juicy, and crisp. As we peeled and sliced them my mom asked me to ship a box back east. My valiant failures had elicited sympathies and inspired engagement as my brothers and sisters chipped in to help with the meal. Being in the kitchen knitted us together in ways we didn’t know we’d forgotten.
At the rickety makeshift tables, my dad did the best he could to carve the little turkey with the beautiful knife he had bequeathed us. We lit candles as the day darkened and the mood shifted. In the making and partaking of this dinner we’d renewed our relationships, to each other and to a different tradition.
Though
