By Julia Stacey
Thanksgiving and Christmas will soon be here and we’re looking forward to our extended families getting together for traditional holiday festivities. I imagine the holiday table festooned with fancy china, silver, and glassware atop a holiday-patterned linen tablecloth. Serving dishes of steaming hot stuffing, yams, vegetable casseroles, and gravy crowd the center of the table. A hush befalls the family as a perfectly roasted turkey is placed on the table in front of the patriarch who applies his expert skills to carving and serving the bird.
This magical moment pictured in my mind lived many decades ago (or may never have happened at all). The next generation of holiday hosting has adopted buffet-style serving and throwaway dishes and utensils. We’ve gone so far as to bring our own wine glasses or give a set as a gift, just so we don’t have to drink fine wine out of plastic cups.
My mother-in-law regularly cooked for a family of seven with an occasional live-in grandparent, so she was well-acclimated to feeding a hungry horde. The fact that she’s been roasting holiday turkeys for almost 70 years is a feat in itself. When she moved to a smaller home, the Thanksgiving gathering moved to our brother-in-law’s house located nearby. For reasons unknown to the rational mind, it was decided that Mother-in-law would continue to cook the meal in her kitchen and, with help from offspring, transport it to Brother-in-law’s place.
We arrive by car from out of state at about lunchtime to find our 90-year-old caterer working in high gear. An oversized turkey is roasting in an under-sized pan, casserole dishes of vegetables line the countertop, and Sister-in-law has made a beautiful tray of deviled eggs. Years of experience in the kitchen have paid off and the chefs have truly outdone themselves. Not until it’s time to deliver the food that we begin to see the wrinkle in the plan.
Hot pots and pans overflowing with gooey sauces and gravy now need to be loaded into the cars for the trip to Brother-in-law’s house and no one has thought to bring bins or boxes. Mother-in-law tries to be helpful by retrieving a 30-year-old Macy’s shirt box from her bedroom. I try to stay out of the fray and let the alphas duke it out, but I had to speak up when the 26-pound turkey, sitting in 2 inches of drippings in a 3-inch-deep pan is about to be loaded into the back of my SUV. Husband to the rescue locates some large boxes and plastic bags from the garage and readies the turkey for safe transport.
While the food couriers are distractedly fussing over the pots and pans in the kitchen, a helpful family member has taken a tray of deviled eggs out to the garage. Realizing that the car is locked, and he doesn’t have a key, he places the tray on top of the sloped car trunk and returns to the kitchen completely unaware that he has set a food tragedy in motion. The tray slowly slides off the edge of the trunk and the deviled eggs fall to the cement floor like lemmings diving off a cliff. Seeing all those hand-crafted beauties lying broken and dirty on the garage floor is a holiday food nightmare come to life.
Having finished our task of transporting the food to Brother-in-law’s house, it’s time to relax with a glass of wine. California Brother-in-law has brought a special Napa wine from the Rutherford appellation for us to taste. A prestigious winemaker of Rutherford, Andre Tchelistcheff, coined the term “Rutherford dust” meaning certain characteristics of the terroir create specific aromas and flavors in the wine, particularly Cabernet Sauvignon. We’re all excited to experience “Rutherford dust” for ourselves. As we gather around the bar in the den, we find a variety of plastic cups readily available but no wine glasses. It seems a shame to drink this special and expensive wine that has traveled all the way from California in a plastic cup. More searching underneath the bar yields a few nice big-bowled red wine glasses. As California Brother-in-law takes a glass and begins to pour, I notice that the glass is very dusty, having not been used in a long while. Stop pouring! We need to rinse the glasses first! The small amount of wine mixed with dust is officially dubbed “Long Island dust”.
While Thanksgiving is hosted by our Long Island brother-in-law, featuring Mom’s turkey, our Westchester brother-in-law has his own ideas for the Christmas turkey. I’m not exactly sure how I first heard of such a thing as deep-fried turkey. It may have been from our family’s contingent of southern in-laws or maybe on a cooking show. Somehow, Westchester brother-in-law tasted it and became hooked. The very next time he hosted Christmas presented him with the opportunity to try to convert us to worshipers of deep-fried bird.
The first tool needed for making a deep-fried turkey is a fryer that’s large enough for a 25-pound turkey. Armed with an ice-cold turkey and plenty of cooking oil, Brother-in-law heads outside to the patio where the fryer is set up for cooking. Place the turkey in the fryer, cover with oil, party with guests for three hours, and presto, deep-fried turkey. Or not.
If you have a bit of cooking experience, you’re probably wondering if I forgot to mention heating the oil to temperature before dropping in the bird. I didn’t, and he didn’t, and dinner was a few hours late. Deep-fried turkey lesson number one: heat the cooking oil before placing the bird in the fryer.
The following holiday, Brother-in-law is reminded to heat the cooking oil before dropping the turkey in it. The fryer is filled to the brim with oil, and as the turkey is placed into the hot oil, it begins overflowing the fryer. Deep-fried turkey lesson number two: account for displacement.
With two deep-fried turkey semi-disasters under his belt, Brother-in-law is confident that the third time will be a charm. The oil is measured for displacement and pre-heated, and while the turkey cooks on autopilot, the merriment begins. Many bottles of wine and many karaoke songs later, the neglected turkey has been fried into oblivion resulting in great gift ideas for Brother-in-law: a thermometer and a timer.
For turkey attempt number four, cooking oil was poured into the fryer for heating. An hour later, it was discovered that all the oil had leaked out because the stopper on the bottom had not been reset after the last cleaning. Being that it was a holiday and most of the stores were closed, my husband was the unlucky “volunteer” who had to go out to buy eight small bottles of oil at a convenience store. Deep-fried turkey lesson number four: check the stopper on the fryer.
By now you’re probably asking why Brother-in-law hasn’t given up on the deep-fried turkey idea, but the failures and mishaps have only strengthened his resolve. It was something in the man that responded to the challenge of cooking the perfect turkey that was driving him to conquer, to achieve, and to win! This Christmas Eve will be the year of the fried bird! Things were going fairly well for turkey number five until someone inadvertently kicked the power cord out of the fryer.
Each year after the holidays, Brother-in-law writes a few personal notes about the season’s events on a piece of paper that he stows away with the Christmas decorations. As he took out the paper to add a few notes for this year, he read what he had written last year…
Don’t cook a fried turkey.
