My favorite holiday in the United States is Thanksgiving – by far. It’s like Christmas, only without the insane pressure to be full of cheer and buy stuff you don’t need with money you don’t have (notwithstanding the insidious invention of Black Friday). Basically, for Thanksgiving, you get an automatic four-day weekend during which you can spend time with family and friends, watch football and gorge.
As an American living abroad, I’ve probably spent as many Thanksgivings outside the States as within. Over time, I got used to more or less ignoring the holiday. But in Italy, any excuse for an extravagant meal with family and friends is welcome.
Ode to the turkey – the wild turkey, that is
Some years I’d be invited to another American’s house for a traditional turkey dinner and party. But I have to confess something that may come across as blasphemous in the States: I don’t particularly like turkey. When it’s cooked well, with a good stuffing and drowned in gravy, it can be tasty. Especially the juicy dark meat. But too often the white meat is just dry. It’s as if that Thanksgiving turkey we’ve come love (at least on the table) were genetically modified to produce leftovers that will last at least into the following Monday. And let’s face it, have you ever looked at a live turkey? They have to be the single ugliest birds in creation. Bred so as not to fly. And as a general rule of thumb, I don’t trust birds that can’t fly. Something must have happened. Just saying.
(A tidbit of history: Benjamin Franklin is said to have wanted to make the turkey America’s national bird rather than the eagle, which he felt had a bad moral character. “The turkey is a much more respectable bird,” he wrote, and “a true original native of America.” But he meant the wild turkey, which is light years from our more common butterball variety.)
Long live the local butcher
So one mid-November day I was walking past my local butcher shop (they still exist in Italy) and saw a work of art in his window display: a plucked whole duck barded with slices of pancetta. Tied fast amid the pancetta were thin orange slices, sage leaves and stalks of rosemary.
That was when the idea came to me. Thanksgiving dinner for family and friends with birds other than turkey – birds actually closer to the one Ben Franklin had been so enamored with.
That first Thanksgiving at my home I asked him to wrap me a duck just like the one I saw in the window. I explained my problem with turkeys to him and he threw in a couple of guinea fowls all barded with pancetta the same way. “You know guinea fowls are the closest thing to wild turkey we have in Europe,” he informed me.
The butcher told me the specific cooking times and temperatures for each bird (in my experience most Italian butchers are also great cooks) and pulled out a lemon from under the counter (don’t ask what the lemon was doing there). “And if you really want flavor?” he said, “stick this inside.” “Inside the duck?” I asked, intrigued. “All the way in,” he insisted. “Give it a few pokes with a skewer so the juices flow. Maybe even two lemons. Then, while the duck is roasting, bathe it first in white wine. Then later bathe it with a glass of fresh squeezed orange juice. Maybe even two… Trust me.”
I trusted my butcher, and he didn’t let me down. Those birds were out of this world! Better than any turkey I’d ever tasted.
A worthy bird deserves special stuffing
Over the years I’ve made Thanksgiving dinners with a goose, a pheasant, and even little quails. It’s hard to go wrong when a good bird is dripping its fatty juices – replete with memories of flying through the clouds – and swimming in a pool of citrusy white-wine delight.
For stuffing – not actual stuffing (because there would already be a lemon inside bird) but a sort of absorbent side dish to soak up all that dripping fat – I’d make what I call “kasha alla gricia.” Basically, I cook whole buckwheat (kasha is the word for toasted buckwheat groats very familiar to Jews, Eastern Europeans and New Yorkers), then make a classic pasta alla gricia without the pasta (my take on a gluten-free meal btw). I fry a ton of guanciale, then let the cooked buckwheat fry a little in the pan full of fat, sprinkle heaps of Pecorino Romano and pepper, and it’s done.
If you want kasha all’amatriciana just add tomato passata or some canned peeled tomatoes to the frying guanciale. But this is better for another dish. If you have a baking pan full of simmering goose drippings in lemon, orange and wine, you’ll want to soak it all up unadulterated by any tomato (the citrus already has enough acid to counterbalance the fat).
As for the rest of the meal, we pretty much follow Italian tradition. Antipasto of salumi and cheeses. Since pumpkin and other squashes are everywhere in November, the first course is usually my favorite pumpkin ravioli in butter and sage with a little sprinkle of cinnamon or maybe even crumbled amaretti cookies. Side dishes are often pan-fried brussels sprouts or grilled veggies, whatever’s there.
Back in the US of A
After World War I, there was a song about American veterans: “How ya gonna keep ’em down on the farm after they’ve seen Paree?” In a sense – at least when it comes to food – living in Italy, as an American, is like a Midwestern farm boy discovering the Paris of 1918. It never ceases to blow you away. And Thanksgiving for me, after Italy, will never be the same.
Now, when I happen to be stateside for Thanksgiving, I go straight for the dark meat. Drumstick please.
Still, there are so many aspects of Thanksgiving that I definitely miss. Cranberry sauce, for instance, is very hard to find in Italy. And pumpkin pie is a rarity, which is why I go for sweet pumpkin ravioli, Mantua-style, as a first course. And then there’s that comforting feeling of picking at the carcass. I recommend frying the dry leftover white meat a little with onions in extra-virgin olive oil, then deglazing with a few splashes of white wine.
But if you have to spend Thanksgiving anywhere outside the U.S., you might as well do it in Italy, where many meals throughout the course of the year are like Thanksgiving.
And to those purists who insist that only a “traditional” turkey can grace our American tables on Thanksgiving, I have two words: gobble, gobble!
