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Sunday, November 19, 2000 By Suzanne Martinson, Post-Gazette Food Editor
I was lucky -- or luckless -- enough to have the "Thanksgiving birthday" in our farm family. My brother, Jon, and my sister, Roxann, each shared birthdays with an older cousin. I shared mine with a turkey.
All family festivities centered on food, so we were used to sharing the spotlight. What I hated was having my picture taken with the turkey before he became dinner. I was afraid Tom was going to peck my eyes out.
In my lifetime, we've had turkeys so fresh they cackled. We've also had them frozen and roasted, baked in a brown paper bag and baked in a plastic Reynolds bag. We've had them grilled, and, yes, deep-fried. Our most recent turkey bathed in brine the night before the big bash.
Looking back at our Thanksgivings on the farm, I wonder how we survived. It wasn't the wrath of the luckless turkey (he never laid a beak on me), but the amazing, even reckless things we did to get ready.
Food safety? Get out! Methods that today would be considered sins never even gave us Turkey Day "flu." Today, we have a battery of rules. Then, we had the collective wisdom of Gram and Aunt Norma.
Because I arrived on Nov. 25, Mother inherited Thanksgiving dinner. She did what Aunt Norma, her more experienced sister-in-law, told her to do. "I was just a young bride trying to please everybody," she says.
My parents always purchased a live turkey from their friends Elmer and Mary Haines, whose small farm supplied our Vassar, Mich., community. Mother's Brownie Reflex was poised to record the day. Family albums chronicle a long string of Lefty-with-turkey photos. I look as though I am terrified to touch a feather.
No wonder. It was a 25-pounder. Today's turkeys have breasts so big they can hardly stand upright. In my childhood, a turkey could make a run for it, and that's why somebody always had to hold tight to the lead rope.
I don't remember making any kind of emotional connection with Tom Turkey because, unlike our dairy cattle and horses, the dinner-to-be didn't grow up with us. City people are probably puzzled by the pragmatic attitude of the 1 1/2 percent of American families who raise food for the rest of us to eat. We were farmers, and we ate what we or our neighbors grew.
As a cub reporter, I wrote a story about a woman from Cancun, Mexico, who had an unusual recipe for turkey. Before she revealed her secret, she stressed that her method was not a "Mexican recipe" but was common only to her family. She explained: "Two weeks before the holiday, we choose the turkey, and then every day we'd go out to our back yard and give it tequila to drink. It makes the meat moist and pink."
"But how can you bear to eat the turkey after you've drunk with it?" a fellow reporter wondered.
On our farm, the dirty work of dressing Tom for the party was done while I was at our one-room country school. This is the part of the story that my co-worker, Barbara Vancheri, suggests that the queasy might skip.
This is what had to be done (I'm glad I missed it): My dad chopped off the turkey's head. The turkey was hung upside down on the clothesline to bleed out. Meanwhile, Aunt Norma and Mom boiled lots of water. To remove the feathers, the carcass was dunked into a galvanized steel washtub filled with boiling water. "The better it boiled, the easier the feathers came off," Mom recalls. "Aunt Norma wouldn't leave a single feather."
The tiny pinfeathers that remained were blasted off with a blowtorch. And you thought Martha Stewart was ahead of the curve.
The turkey's raw heart, liver and gizzard were ground up for the dressing. (We never called it "stuffing.") "If you put in too much, the blood turned the dressing pink," Mom says. She hated that.
Now the fun really started. Mom stuffed the dressing into the bird, which was stored overnight in the cold garage. Even if it was an unseasonably warm night, the food safety police never came.
At 4 a.m., Mom arose to put the turkey in the oven. In my view, any birthday worth its cake ought to be accompanied by the wonderful smell of sage dressing when you get out of bed.
The turkey wouldn't be served until 1 p.m. Nine hours for a turkey? "Aunt Norma told me to," Mother says. Ah, the ways of family tradition.
The leftover turkey and dressing lay on the dining table until supper, and we nibbled all day long. (We never refrigerated the pumpkin pie, either.)
When I was 13 or 14, I asked Mom where the photo would be shot, and she said, almost sheepishly, "You can buy a turkey at the supermarket for half the price -- and certainly half the work."
The first turkey I cooked was senior year in our college apartment. Mom had switched to ready-to-roast, and so did I.
Later, as a newlywed, I worked on a weekly newspaper in Gresham, Ore.
At first, I happily ground giblets for the dressing, and I bought a speckled black roaster, though not as huge as my mother's, which had to go into her oven diagonally in order to fit.
The first thing to go were the giblets. Though I remembered Mom laying out white Rainbow bread on the cupboard to dry for the dressing, then soaking the bread in water and squeezing it dry, mine usually rotted before it dried (the moist Oregon winters?). I switched methods and toasted the bread for my dressing, though I still baked it in the bird.
I cooked the turkey, covered, in my roaster and, as the recipe said, basted it with butter every 15 minutes. (My mother had gone back to bed at 4 a.m. and never chained herself to the 25-pound bird, but I was a believer in recipes.)
Then I met Estelle Sullivan, a member of an Oregon theater group, who turned me on to the Brown Paper Bag Method. Baste the turkey with butter, salt and pepper, pop it in a bag -- a clean one, she told me pointedly -- and roast it breast side down for 20 minutes per pound (25 minutes for a stuffed turkey). Crumple up open end of bag to seal.
No basting. No peeking. No worrying.
The smell wasn't quite as pungent and the browned breast tended to stick to the bag, but the turkey was moist and delicious. And I could be enjoying hors d'oeuvres rather than constantly circling the bird, baster dripping butter.
Then the government stepped in to warn that brown paper bags might have inks or glue that could be dangerous. The warning seemed vague, and I idly wondering if the "rule" had to do with a well-placed campaign contribution from Reynolds Wrap in Midland, Mich., not far from my hometown.
"My brown-bag turkey never killed anyone," I thought, but then I didn't want to start, either.
Once I became a food editor, first at The Pittsburgh Press, then at the Post-Gazette, I got adventuresome.
Though it's hard to find a 25-pound turkey anymore, one thing hasn't changed. I still have a one-oven kitchen.
So taking the action outside was appealing. With a smaller crowd around the table, a turkey on the grill is eminently doable. The Reynolds Turkey Information Line advises it's probably not a good idea to charcoal grill a turkey heavier than 16 pounds.
My husband, Ace, is the man with the Weber at our house. In fact, we bought "Weber No. 2" this year.
His fashion statement for color? Good old black. Again.
Gas? Nope. Charcoal. He's an old-fashioned guy.
He can lay a fire, though. We grill with the indirect method, that is, charcoal around the edges of the grill, the turkey centered in the middle of the grate over a metal drip pan. The turkey is cooked under the grill lid. It is Ace's responsibility.
This method requires sacrifices. I still prefer dressing cooked inside the bird, but this is not recommended when grilling. So this year, if we follow our plan, we may use his mother's stuffing recipe, which is baked outside the bird.
And there's oven room to do it, too.
Ace loves his mother's stuffing recipe, though I don't think it's a bit better than my family recipe. But marriages are built on compromise, right? Fifteen years for my recipe, the others for his mother's (when she was cooking).
There will be no sacrifice on the squash. Or the pumpkin pie. He hates 'em, I love 'em. I win, though our daughter, Jessica, will be home to assuage his longing for apple pie.
Gravy? We haven't worked that out yet.
The idea was too bizarre, too enticing to ignore.
Deep-fried turkey has been a Southern favorite for years. We Northerners have our sage dressing; they have their corn bread stuffing and deep-fried turkey.
Sounded too much fun to pass up.
Ace and I rented equipment from Chujko Bros. Inc. in McKees Rocks, but many of the big home discount stores sell the fryers, too.
It was an amazing experience. That much roiling oil, that much raw meat, that much excitement in one place.
Most exciting: The turkey was absolutely delicious. Not a bit greasy. (You have to make sure the oil is hot enough so that the grease will not be soaked up.)
Our bible on the fine art of sizzling turkey was "The Fearless Frying Cookbook" by Hoppin' John Martin Taylor of Charleston, S.C. This bible was enough to turn an inexperienced turkey-fryer to prayer: "A huge [10-gallon] pot sizzles with lots of oil over a very hot fire. You can't do it indoors ... you don't want to risk setting that much oil on fire inside."
Hot oil? Fire? Brimstone, maybe?
We heated a little too much canola oil -- we bought 5 gallons -- and when we dropped in the turkey, the pot overflowed. Our patio has never been the same.
Monitoring the temperature was the most important point. "As long as the oil is hot, the water leaving the food will instantly vaporize, and as long as steam is coming out, oil can't go in," the book said.
When you try something new, you always learn something. Like this: "Do not put the food on paper towels or on brown paper bags to drain. It will sit in the grease and re-absorb it. Put it on a wire rack and place the rack on a baking sheet and keep it in a low, low-temperature oven."
It is true, what turkey-fryers say. You can get up at 7 a.m., put your turkey in the oven and maybe have it by 1 or 2. Or you can get up at 11, heat your oil and have your turkey by 1 or 2. Sleeping in on Thanksgiving -- what a birthday present!
In 1996, the Association of Food Journalists met in Napa Valley, Calif., where we had a fabulous Thanksgiving feast outdoors on the lawn of a winery. It is my first memory of talk about brining a turkey.
Brining is a simple procedure. You make a salt-water solution and let the turkey take an all-night bath in it.
I must say I was skeptical. How much better could it be, really? But when we tried it on a Jaindl brand fresh turkey that we'd bought at the dear, departed Amarraca near our Ross house, I was converted.
Since then, it seems a step worth taking. On Wednesday night, I'll submerge the bird in my biggest All-Clad pot, and it'll soak the night away. Brine "recipes" vary greatly, but we'll go with this one: Dissolve 2 cups table salt (if you want to use kosher salt, it takes 4 cups) in 2 gallons of water. Remove giblets from neck cavity and soak turkey all night in the brine. If the brine doesn't completely cover the turkey, turn it over midway. Keep turkey between 30 and 40 degrees -- in other words, don't leave it out on the kitchen counter.
On Thanksgiving, we'll fire up the grill, and Ace will go to it. On Christmas Eve, we may try another deep-fried turkey. My brother, Jon, has always wanted to make one. A farmer who raises soybeans, he claims he can get the oil wholesale.
What's next? A little tequila with the turkey?
This Thanksgiving, I'll set up my decorative wooden cut-out turkey, which is attached by a string to a blond Pilgrim whose stringy hair peeps out from her cap. Maybe I'll have my picture taken, for old time's sake. Her wooden turkey doesn't scare me at all.
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