Learning the Bird

My first mother-in-law taught me how to make a Thanksgiving turkey when I was in my teens. I paid attention and learned well. When I followed her steps to make my first turkey dinner, I discovered that her recipe was ghastly. Instead of broth or butter, she used melted Crisco in her stuffing.

The next time I cooked turkey would have been in the Fall of 1982, when I decided to make Thanksgiving dinner. I invited my parents over to the corner of Skidmore and Haight, where I lived with my second husband and our wee baby girl. She was only three and a half months old. I securely wedged her little plastic baby chair in another chair, and she watched as I cooked. With my bright eyed audience, I put together a turkey dinner with all the trimmings, served it up, and felt like I knew what I was doing. No Crisco was involved.

We soon began the tradition of going up to my in-laws for that holiday. My second mother-in-law was quite vain about her cooking, but her method resulted in a bone dry bird every single time. She played fast and loose with the gin and tonics on the big day. That might have been part of it. Or maybe it was the constant stream of menthol cigarettes mucking with her tastebuds. Or how she played fast and loose with the rules of food safety, which meant she roasted the hell out of an empty bird in the wee hours of the morning and left it on the table for hours while she cooked everything else.

I liked gathering at my in-laws, but I did not like her turkey. I decided to make my own at Christmas, a holiday we celebrated at our own home. And I did it my way. I liked my results.

Buying the Bird

During my early years of being a young mother, I developed parasocial relationships with several of the checkers at our local Fred Meyer. I wrote about this in The Iris Files, as I wrote about so many of my experiences in Iris:

I’m on a first name basis with all the grocery store checkers. They call out to me as I approach with my cart full of milk and cereal, macaroni and cheese, apples, peanut butter. “Hey Iris!” They like me at the store, they jockey for the privilege of ringing me up, they make me feel funny and popular and special.

And yes, I am aware of how pathetic this is.

As part of this attachment to my local checkers, I bonded with one whose husband was Black. This sometimes happened as I went through the checkout line with my little rainbow of mixed-race daughters. A checker would shyly let me know that her husband was not white, and we would talk about how her future children might look. This was every bit as sweet as it sounds.

This young woman’s husband might have also worked at Fred Meyer—the details are lost to time—but I encountered him a few times. He was friendly to me. I’m not sure where he was from originally. He was a lovely man with a lovely way of speaking that sounded like Elmer Fudd with a French accent. Once as he was going through her line in front of me, he saw I had a turkey and exhorted me to get a turkey bag. Like I said, he sounded like Elmer Fudd with a French accent, so it sounded like “twooky-bag “when he said it.

This stuck, and my daughter and I would joke about Twooky Bags for years after.

Refining the Bird

At some point, I was divorced again, and my former mother-in-law had smoked her last Tareyton Menthol. A turkey was in order for Thanksgiving. My oldest daughter had taken over the planning and much of the execution of the feast, but she was getting her cooking tips from upscale cooking blogs. She was baffled that Safeway didn’t have canned whole chestnuts. The inability to acquire freshly tapped maple sap was another disappointment. She made do.

Our Thanksgiving celebrations quickly grew to epic proportions, partly because my daughter is such a good cook, and partly because going to someone else’s home on Thanksgiving is a fantastic luxury. We joked about Twooky Bags each year as we circled the gigantic birds we bought, preparing to roast them into submission. We were only joking, because we would never use something like that for our important meal. Wouldn’t the turkey be…wrong? Unbrowned? Weird? No turkey bags for us!

She decided that for the bird itself, she preferred Martha Stewart’s cheesecloth and white wine method. We had trouble finding cheesecloth, so we sacrificed a clean white dish towel every year. And the turkeys were good, but they cooked all day. The whole house smelled like turkey from about 6AM on. By the time that bird came out of the oven, I wanted nothing to do with it. 

And it was never quite clear when the turkey would emerge. There seemed to be no rhyme or reason as to how long it might take to cook the bird, no accurate formula for poundage to oven time, no pop-out thermometer or wiggled turkey leg that could be trusted. We could have a crowd of hungry people circling the kitchen like vultures while it finished. Or it could finish early, and sit there getting cold while I worried about food poisoning in the body cavity stuffing.

Transforming the Bird

So the first year that my daughter no longer lived at home, the bird was my responsibility again. I bought a turkey bag. The instructions were clear and easy. I seasoned the bird, buttered the skin, popped it in the bag, and roasted it empty. It came out perfectly browned, nice and juicy, and right on time. I have never cooked a turkey without a turkey bag since. 

But no turkey bag for me this year. No turkey, either. I’m bringing side dishes over to my middle daughter’s home. Like I said, going to Thanksgiving dinner at someone else’s home is a fantastic holiday luxury.

Happy Thanksgiving to you and yours. May your day be happy and your turkey perfectly browned. And if you’re vegetarian, I wish you an edible Tofurkey.