A Thanksgiving Remembrance

Thanksgiving was approaching. I was in my mid-teens – maybe 16 or 17. I remember my mother saying, “I’m not cooking a turkey this year – I’m not going through all that trouble”. What? No! This can’t be.  How can you have Thanksgiving without turkey and oyster dressing? No leftovers to make sandwiches for the week. I asked her, “So what will you cook?” She said that she didn’t know yet. This was just not right. I thought that even if I were to get invited over to friends for dinner, it wouldn’t be the same. Nobody makes oyster dressing like mom, except for my friend Greg*, but I didn’t know him back then.

*Greg uses a whole gallon of oysters and about two pound of pure butter. It is rich and unbelievably delicious! My mother uses Extra Virgin olive oil instead of butter – and hers is pretty unbelievable too.

I finally settled into the program and got used to the idea that it was good to break old habits. That’s when mom announced that she was making lasagna. Lasagna? I thought. That’s regular Sunday dinner. We get that all the time. She could make that in her sleep. But she once again reiterated, “I’m not going through all that trouble”. I guess that was the point. Making a Thanksgiving meal was a lot of work that usually started with shopping the weekend before; buying the turkey and all of the ingredients for the side dishes – peas, sweet potatoes, corn, green beans, and loaves of French bread to let get stale for the stuffing. She would call the fish market about 2 weeks ahead to reserve a sack of salty oysters. Picking them up a couple of days before Thanksgiving, she would come home a shuck the whole sack by herself. I don’t know if it ever crossed her mind to buy the oysters already opened. Maybe you couldn’t buy them like that back then, I don’t know. Maybe they were too expensive already opened…and her Sicilian blood would certainly force her go for the better deal of opening them herself – but not this year. This year she bought peas, sweet potatoes green beans and many of the same ingredients for the side dishes, but for the main course she bought a big box of tomatoes and pasta.

I watched as she blanched the tomatoes, a few at a time, in a big pot of boiling water. Now the skins would easily peel off. Cutting them in half she would remove the seeds from the center, then chop them up. She then chopped and sautéed the onions until they were sweet and transparent. The aroma of just this smelled like a completed meal. She then added more garlic than one would think humanly possible to consume.  She then threw in the tomatoes, cooking them down for the sauce. It was my job to pick fresh oregano, thyme and basil that grew in red clay pots on the back porch. Adding the herbs to the pot, this would cook down for hours.

This whole process would start early on the Tuesday before Thanksgiving. I could not see how this was any less work than if she had made the turkey, but I guess in her mind this was easier. Maybe it was because making lasagna was more familiar to her. Maybe the fact that she only cooked a turkey once or twice a year made it seem special and therefore more work, but making this meal seemed to be just as much work or more. The sauce would cook for the rest of the morning and into the afternoon. After it was done she would let it sit cooling for the rest of the day.

The next morning mom would get out two large glass Pyrex baking dishes. I watched as she covered the bottoms with sauce then added layers of pasta, mozzarella and ricotta cheese, more sauce, parmesan and romano cheese, more pasta, more sauce until it was nice and thick. She then covered the pans with foil and placed them in the refrigerator until the next morning. The rest of the day was spent chopping and prepping for the rest of the meal.

On Thanksgiving morning, after coming home from early mass, the pans of pasta went into the oven and the rest of the dishes were prepared – sweet baby peas cooked with onion, garlic and romano cheese, sweet potatoes cut up in a baking pan with cinnamon and butter and a big green bean casserole. Being his favorite part of the meal, dad’s contribution was a huge delicious green salad with lettuce, fresh tomatoes, onions and radishes. I still pick out the radishes.

The whole family sat down for this wonderful occasion – mom, dad, my two younger brothers who were 12 and 6 at the time, my grandmother and grandfather. By the amount of food you would think there were 20 people or so, but there were just seven of us. Since Thanksgiving and Christmas was the only time we remembered to say grace before a meal, it was always funny for me to watch to see who would forget and start eating before the prayer got started. Usually it was dad.

Half way through this meal I was thinking, ‘Who needs a turkey?” It was not missed. This was truly a meal to be thankful for – especially since mom went through all that trouble.

Brian Stoltz

10/29/07