In Twilight Regalia

Day 1 Thinking About Thanksgiving

A disturbing thing has happened.  I don’t know if it’s a life borne of good fortune that has caused it, or a hedonism pushed past the breaking point, or age doing a number on my phermones or hormones or endorphins or whatever, but Something is making me unduly disinterested in the daily joys I used to experience while eating, preparing, cooking, experimenting with, or even looking at, food.  

How can this happen to me???

I can’t eat or cook with any real interest any more. I never would have believed it would happen to me — ME!  Me that developed from a kid who couldn’t even open a soup can at age 12 to a complimented provider of ethnic or homespun feasts at 30?  Me that loved food so much that even saltines and lemonade were something to be savored while watching cartoons.  Me, that people used to say “Where does she put it?” about after a good meal when seconds disappeared from my plate.  

I heard of this happening to women who cook for years and years. It happened to my mom, but I’d always assumed that was because she had the culinary chops of an accountant on meth with only a flamethrower where the stove should have been.  My grandmother actually supplemented the family incoming baking for local restaurants and was county-famous, but later in her years she just “forgot how.”  Alzheimer’s?  Nope, before that.  Long before that.  They just got…. bored.  Just … before Valley Speak happened, “so Done with this.”

I should feel like fall, like Thanksgiving, like YAY I’m going to go to another city and cook for my friends.  

I’m so not feeling… anything.  PANIC.

Day 2 Thinking About Thanksgiving

How can it happen to Me?

This is a situation that creates trivial problems and real problems both. 

Trivially speaking, it makes me nervous since I’ve been asked to cook my usual Thanksgiving dinner for a couple of friends at holiday time, in an unfamiliar kitchen.  It’s been how many years since I did Thanksgiving for a group??? At least five.  

I am dreading it now.  I can see the near future: me trying to sweep the mental cobwebs away from the order in which I used to make all the side dishes, trying to remember all the stuffing ingredients while actually AT the grocery instead of going back three times for forgotten crucial items.  

THEN, braving a kitchen where I’m basically going to be playing a game of What’s behind door number 3? with each cabinet.  Oh what have we here?. Another almost-empty bachelor cupboard with some tea, or some condiments, or some mismatched bowls in it.  It will be a vast wasteland of jelly jars and three year old half-eaten boxes of granola and maybe an errant can of clams, where I’ll desperately be trying to prepare my miracle.  Roasting pan?  HAH!  Breadcrumbs?  ummmmm, well there’s some frozen rolls in the freezer maybe (nervous grin from my clueless host).  Spatula?  Um, he used to have one of those… Oi I need a strategy.  I can’t think about this now. 

Day 3 Thinking About Thanksgiving

But wait. 

I pause.  

Actually, I can do this.  Even without my memory.  I just remembered.  No one cares.

I’m going to have to do the short form.  Something I dread, but I suddenly realize now will be just fine in their eyes, because, the truth is, they don’t know Thanksgiving like I knew it.  No one’s the same anymore anyway.  They’d all be fine with sushi and some sort of protein replacement tofu burger in the stuffing, they could care less.  It’s like the beginning of Home for the Holidays where you’re panning through an airport terminal just before a busy Thanksgiving weekend and some beleaguered enormously tall black guy is whining into the payphone, “Mom!  Mom!!!  You don’t…. Mom, I can’t eat that stuff anymore!” 

It will be the edited Jenny Craig version:  Which kind of grilling technique in the barbecue would it be instead of how many butter-basted hours.  Too much fat!  Which kind of fresh steamed green instead of the au gratin green beans or baked spinach! Too rich!; No one will want the homemade cranberry orange-zested cinnamon sauce I used to make.  Too much sugar. Which kind of braised squash instead of the garlic and double-cheese-baked potatoes! Good God no!~; what kind of quick frozen bought yogurt pie they would consider eating, not my fantabulous overly spiced gingery pie with vanilla honey ice cream. Too much sugar.   No one will care that I didn’t make piecrust.  No one will care there are no cream brioche rolls.  No one will KNOW it isn’t Thanksgiving. 

Now if I can just hide behind this handkerchief and convince myself we should all just skip it and go to Pinkberry.

Day 4 Thinking About Thanksgiving

But WAIT!!!  NOOOOOOOO!!!! I can’t!!!  I CAN’t.  

I owe it to Madine and her legacy of culinary nirvana. 

Oh god, Madine.  Can’t forget her.  My tastebuds can’t.

I studied your work with such admiration.  It was you who did it, the first black woman who ever invited me into her home and let me know with no ifs ands or buts that they Cared About Their Cooking.  She cooked for my friends’ rooming house at college, and she was an EXpert.  EXtra everything.  Her house at Thanksgiving was a shrine to food.  I had never laid eyes on such a spread, ever, anywhere, not in any church-given Christmas feast, not at any wealthy relative’s house, not at any party I had ever been to.  

Not only was it all amazing to look at, it was all the most superbly flavored and interesting spin on regular dinner fare I’d ever had.  And not one item of it was store-bought; she had baked and cooked everything.  The sauces, the breads dusted with crunchy seeds, the gravies (two kinds!), the piecrust hand-fluted, the au jus steaming, the toppings, the flaky fluffy rolls, Macaroni and cheese? Wow!  not like any I’d had!  The herbed butter, the awesome chew of the cookies, the cake with its buttercream sweetness, the pies - a cloud of meringue and a savory mousse-like sweet potato, and some apple with gorgeous latticework top, it was unbelievable. The honey-glazed salty-ham shank, the amazing roasted chestnut turkey, the quintessentially perfect mashed garlic potatoes.    Lasagna??? When did she find time??  I have never been astounded by anyone’s cooking but twice in my life, and this was the first time. The second was famous and French.  And Madine’s Thanksgiving dinner beat it out, on only a couple minutes’ deliberation.  

She will not go unforgotten, and I’m sure her grandbabies are all grown up now and I really sincerely hope they are not eating sushi on Thanksgiving.  Because at least one day of the year, your Grandmomma would like to know that you knew what GOOD was. 

Madine, I promise, they are at very least, not getting away without your double-baked potatoes.  Honestly.  Salut!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 12th, 2008 at 8:45 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.