Here's To The Bloody Turkey, A Family Tradition

In preparation for Thanksgiving, I am digging out from under my back copies of Bon Appetit. The pages are frayed and there’s an assortment of unknown food stains …but with the holiday just around the corner, I have to begin the process of poring through years of collected recipes and faded notes left in the margins of my grandmother’s cookbooks. 

There really isn’t a better holiday. It’s all about the food, the smells and the traditions that families have come to expect.  It’s about walking through my very quiet house early in the morning and knowing that each bedroom has a sleeping kid inside.  I love a full house; I love the way it feels.  My oldest son once told me the best part of Thanksgiving was waking up to the smell of turkey roasting and he loved the way I made the house smell.  Maybe I cried a little when he said that.  

There’s no greater pleasure than having my kids make my grandmother’s stuffing recipe because they know it by heart or watching them make desserts that I used to make for them.  I love knowing that years from now, they will be teaching their kids the same.  Not too long ago I told a close friend that I believe ‘food is glue’ because it brings kids to the table long enough to sit and talk.  There is no greater bait for a teenager. 

But funny things happen when you maintain those meaningful traditions that your older kids have come to rely on.  Years of cooking bring back kitchen disasters that can only be described as prize-winning.  My mother in law broiled a pumpkin chiffon pie, and one year I dropped a glass bowl full of stuffing and proceeded to serve it. (The statute of limitations on that accident has been exceeded and I cannot be responsible for the ingestion of any glass whatsoever.) My mother once put peanut butter in the gravy to thicken it. And then there is the story of the bloody bird.

Years ago, my younger sister began hosting Thanksgiving.  Having taken a cooking class on all things Thanksgiving, she was prepared to serve our huge family (and friends) an enormous meal.  You can imagine the pretty food that she learned to make; sweet potato soufflé in orange halves, her own brine for the bird, an herbed butter to spread under the skin of the turkey…it was so Martha Stewart.

Her turkey was brined and seasoned with that special herb butter that had 62 different spices and she had shoved it under the skin so that it looked a bit bloated. She had purchased an enormous syringe (you know the kind you see in the delivery room right before they tell you to push?) to inject some kind of broth into the bird at several prearranged times during the roasting process.

Back at home I had decided to make my own turkey—reference paragraph two where I admit to crying.  I figured we would eat it the day after.  When we arrived at my sister’s late in the afternoon, the bird was out of the oven and it was a work of art.  Seriously, it was like the photos you see on Food Network after Paula Deen has disclosed that she stuffs her bird with mayonnaise. We went to carve it. 

But after she had roasted the turkey for hours, we discovered that it wasn’t cooked.  It was bloody—all the way down to the bone. I thought my sister was going collapse into tears—there were 30 people waiting to eat.  But I had made that turkey at home (now fondly called the “Back Up Turkey”) and it was ready to go. Home and back in 6 minutes.  Dinner was served. 

The sad part is that the story doesn’t end here.  My poor sister has made a bloody bird every year since.  It’s bad juju.  It’s bad poultry karma.  It’s a poultry-geist.  Whatever it is, there are years that we have dashed into her pantry to replace her turkey with what is now referred to as the mandatory emergency turkey.  Once she discovered what we were doing, she just took a bottle of wine and left.  I think one year she achieved pink—just this side of salmonella. But as she reminded me just the other day…it’s not about the food, it’s about the traditions that we pass down to our kids year after year.

Many years ago she bought me a beautiful print that reads, “There are things you do because they feel good, and they make no sense, and they may make no money and it may be the real reason we are here: to love each other and to eat each other’s cooking and say it was good.” 

Happy Thanksgiving.