by Jane Kramer
Still, it would be my first summer Thanksgiving anywhere. I was determined to cook it. The only summer Thanksgiving I had ever been to, let alone cooked, had taken place in 1974, at Mary McCarthy’s house in Castine, Maine, to celebrate Richard Nixon’s resignation. Mary was a serious hostess and a splendid cook, and more to the point, the only other person I knew who served Thanksgiving dinner out of season. Even her stuffing was splendid, despite the fact that there wasn’t a trace of cornbread in it. On the other hand, she was not given to sharing recipes. (Years later, when we were neighbors in Paris, I ate it again at one of her November Thanksgivings and asked her to write it down. She smiled sweetly and said, “No, I don’t think so.”) But the thing I remember most about her Castine Thanksgiving was how easy she said the marketing had been: she had called a farmer, ordered a sixteen-pounder, and three days later it was there.
The bad thing about good memories is how cheerful and optimistic they can leave you feeling. I was going to find the finest turkey in Italy—or at least a turkey as good as Mary’s—and with that in mind I got in the car, drove two hours from my house to a parking lot under the Borghese Gardens, and made my slow way, by taxi and foot, through Rome to the Via della Maddalena, where I asked Angelo Feroci, arguably the city’s best meat and poultry purveyor, to find me a sixteen-pound turkey for July or August. Feroci looked astonished. “Impossible,” he said. His turkeys were not only Christmas turkeys—“come back in December,” he told me—they were Italian Christmas turkeys, which is to say, “younger and smaller and better” than anything the French ate. Then I remembered: most good butchers in Italy frown on large turkeys; it is a matter of reputation. They call them “poor food,” because birds like that are usually raised in feed yards—not to sixteen pounds but to fifteen or sixteen kilos, which translates as thirty-five pounds of old tom turkey—after which they are sliced thin, packaged, and sold cheaply in supermarkets as petti di tacchino. (Those slices are so ubiquitous that even the peasants who refuse to distinguish between a duck and a goose, at least if they happen to be selling one—or for that matter, who refer to all squash, from pumpkins to zucchini, as zucca—admit that turkey is turkey.) They are the kinds of turkeys my husband remembers from the army, which may be why turkey is not his favorite food. The farmers who supply places like Feroci’s would never raise one; the farmers competing with feed yards to supply my local co-op, in Todi, would never consider anything smaller. Their feeling, which dates from centuries of poverty, is “the bigger the bird, the more people it can feed.” (They feel the same way about vegetables. Last year, I rescued a twenty-inch cucumber from the back of my vegetable garden. I had thought it was a skinny watermelon until our old gardener, now replaced, said, “Cucumber, almost ready to eat.”)
I asked Feroci what he told the Americans in Rome who wanted Thanksgiving turkeys. He told them, laughing, “Invite fewer people, or order two.” He allowed that he had been ordering “Christmas turkeys” for November since the early sixties, when Burt Lancaster, who was filming the interiors for The Leopard at Cinecittà, walked in and asked for one. There was some discussion. Feroci won the first battle—seven pounds, no bigger—but he couldn’t persuade the actor to let him bone the bird and stuff it with, among other good things, prunes and pistachios, ready to be cooked and cut across into “pretty slices, full of colors inside.” Now, he says, his customers get “pretty” or none at all.
That was June. I was still searching for a sixteen-pounder in July, when an old Paris friend and fellow journalist named Merete Baird decided to fly to Italy with her husband for a long weekend. She asked if I needed anything from Paris, and I heard myself saying, “Yes, a turkey.” My husband was horrified, but Merete is Danish—which is to say, exuberant in the face of a challenge—and she said, “Of course.” Her turkey traveled, like Catherine’s oysters, in a thermos bag in the luggage hold, and despite its hours in airport taxis, French security checks, and Italian baggage claims, smelled fine when I unwrapped it. I set the table on the porch for eight people and began to cook. At seven and a half pounds, it just fit into the little oven where I had been doing my roasting for thirteen years, and I had thought to buy a bottle of bourbon for the gravy. Sadly, there were no pumpkins in my garden yet, or even canned pumpkin at the co-op, and, given the refrigerator-life expectancy of a bird that had just emerged from the hold of an Air France jet, there was certainly no time to persuade a dairy farmer to ferment a couple of cups of milk into latte acido, or soured milk, which, I had just discovered, was close enough to buttermilk for a cornbread stuffing.
I searched my memory for the tastes in Mary McCarthy’s stuffing. I spent the morning trying to reconstruct it. It was not a success. But I managed to transform my sweet-potato purée into a carrot purée—there were young carrots in the garden—with molasses that someone had brought from New York years earlier standing in for the maple syrup, red peperoncini for the chipotles, and fresh cream from the dairy for the crème fraîche. I brightened some local spinach with beetroot greens. I made grits, with Sardinian Pecorino—the nearest thing I could find to a sharp Cheddar—using the last bag of stone-ground cornmeal that I had brought from New York, since, for reasons I have never pierced, Umbrians stop cooking with cornmeal at the summer solstice, and it virtually disappears from the market shelves. But I couldn’t claim credit for the apple and frutti di bosco crumble, steeped in maraschino liqueur—my friend Lin Widmann, an Anglo-Argentine painter from a long line of English pudding fanatics, made that—or even for the French turkey, which I have to admit had been born delicious.
Given the success of my little July Thanksgiving—I thought of it as a trial run—I scheduled a big Thanksgiving for my birthday, on August 7. I looked for a new oven. I visited poultry farmers. I tried to negotiate the slaughter of one of the sixteen-pounders I would always see, strutting like teenagers, in their backyards. I held out ridiculous sums of money, but I could not shake the farmers’ conviction that you don’t slaughter a bird that will double in size, and yield, in a matter of four months. Their answer was always the same: “Too small. Not ready.” Marketing is not what I like to do in Umbria. Unless I am off somewhere on a story, I don’t do much of anything that can’t be done within a mile of home. I sit on the porch steps and watch the sun rise. I smile at sunflowers. I sit at my desk and write. Toward the end of the afternoon, I check out my figs and my pots of basil and marjoram—Umbrians love marjoram and will not touch oregano—thyme and parsley, and then I tap my way through the vegetable garden with a big stick (Umbria is viper country) and a basket, and head for the kitchen to chop and slice whatever I’ve carried back. At night I cook it. Once in a while, I will drive north to Todi and pick up a chicken or a guinea fowl at the co-op, or south to Avigliano for mussels or spigola at the local fish store. But if you had asked me in July where in Perugia or Terni to find a big new oven that would fit between the counters that flank my stove, I wouldn’t have been able to say. And if you had asked me where to find a farm-raised sixteen to eighteen-pounder I would probably have cried.
By then, I had exhausted two Italian provinces in my turkey quest. So I crossed the Monti Martani (a massif best known as the epicenter of the earthquake that toppled the ceilings of the Basilica of Saint Francis of Assisi in 1997) to consult with my friends Joanna Ross and Bruce Adgate. The Rossgates, as they are sometimes called, have been an Umbria resource since the day they decided to quit their jobs in New York—Joanna was a theater agent and Bruce an actor with Ellen Stewart’s La MaMa theater company—to move with their ten-year-old son to Eggi, a village near Spoleto (where Bruce had spent three summers performing Euripides in the mid-seventies). They went to work restoring a fifteenth-century village house, best described at the time as a pile of stones, and in the process unearthed a bread-and-pizza oven just outside the wall of their son’s bedroom. The oven was falling apart, but they peered into its cavernous beehive chamber and immediately thought Thanksgiving, or, as Bruce puts it, “Getting it back in shape went ri
ght up there with plumbing and heat as one of my high priorities.” He worked on the oven all summer, making pizzas. By November of 1993, he was able to roast a Thanksgiving turkey for ten people. (His biggest turkey, to date, weighed thirty-seven and a half pounds, and thirty-five people spent the better part of two days polishing it off.) In July of 2009, he volunteered his oven for my next Thanksgiving, and more to the point, his services at the oven, because just firing it up—feeding it wood until the embers turn red and the bricks lining it white hot—takes four or five hours of skilled hard labor and leaves you drenched, even in November. In August, you start drenched.
So I moved Thanksgiving across the mountain. I stopped looking for an oven, and a few days later, when Joanna called with the news that she and Bruce had prevailed on their butcher to find a farmer willing to part with a turkey for fifteen or sixteen people, I stopped looking for a bird, too. We made a guest list of American friends who lived in or around Spoleto and would be spared having to cross a mountain after a feast that, according to Bruce, promised to last past midnight. We made a shopping list. Bruce, whose Thanksgiving specialty is pumpkin pie, came home that night with the first pumpkin of the season. Joanna discovered a dusty bottle of maple syrup at the back of a shelf in a discount supermarket called Sabatini, which didn’t surprise me; she can find anything, and what she doesn’t find, she grows. We were in countdown mode when Naomi Duguid, the Canadian food scholar and cookbook writer I had got to know on assignment last year, e-mailed to say that she was flying to Italy that week. I invited her to Thanksgiving and, of course, gave her the rest of my shopping list. She arrived at night, on August 5, and emptied a suitcase full of rapidly defrosting cranberries on my kitchen table, along with a sack of pecans, two jars of chipotles, three cans of organic pumpkin, and homemade crackers for the cooks. Dinner was pasta al pesto (my basil pots) and salad (my garden) tossed with oil from my olive trees, and it left me thinking how much simpler life would be if the Pilgrims had been Italian.
The next morning, we drove to a farmers’ market for spinach and dandelion greens, and then to my favorite Todi salumeria to discuss with the salumerista’s wife the pros and cons of faro or chestnut flour for my stuffing bread. It was our festa del ringraziamento, I told her, only a little early. She considered my problem for a minute, disappeared into the stockroom, and emerged with a two-pound sack of local cornmeal, stamped “To be eaten by June 21, 2009,” which she had been saving for herself. (“Of course you can use it,” she said.) By lunchtime, I had started a pumpkin purée, and Naomi, having discovered three plum trees on the hill behind my kitchen door, had managed to bake two plum cakes and a loaf of bread and to produce a mysteriously spiced and soured cranberry sauce, which, she assured me, was much prized in its original incarnation as a sour-plum sauce in Georgia (the republic, not the state). Lunch was salami, prosciutto, creamy Campania mozzarella, garden tomatoes, and cucumber salad; it emptied the fridge. The afternoon meant cornbread. The recipe I had found, tearing through cookbooks, seemed a little off—six eggs, for one thing—but it looked easy, and, more to the point, it was the only one without buttermilk. I should have known better. When Bruce and Joanna crossed the mountain that afternoon with maple syrup for my purée, giblets for my gravy, fenugreek seeds for Naomi’s cranberries, and fresh pumpkin for Bruce’s pies, they found us crumbling burnt cornmeal goo onto a cookie sheet to dry.
Eggi is a walled medieval village tucked into one of the Apennine foothills, with a road that winds up to the church and then turns into a path—which is to say that to get to the Rossgates’ house you walk. We were three people, a very large dog, my grandmother’s turkey roaster, which I had carried on a plane from New York ten years earlier (turn-of-the-twentieth-century pans were made to last) and six big and extremely heavy Le Creuset pots, bought on the last day of a going-out-of-business sale in Todi and one of them filled with what was left of my gravy stock, which had splashed and splattered all over the back of the car by the time we parked. Ullie, the dog, licked up the gravy. The climb, pot by pot, in the August sun, took twenty minutes. The first thing I saw, walking up the steep stone steps to the Rossgates’ house, was a fiendish circle of flames leaping out of the enormous mouth of the pizza oven, and Bruce, with a bottle of cold white wine and a pair of long iron tongs, waiting for me in a deck chair.
I fled up to the house, where Naomi was already at work, doctoring our greens with spices from Joanna’s larder, and Joanna herself, an inspired cook, was slipping a paste of pancetta, garlic, and rosemary under the skin of a perfect turkey that covered most of her kitchen table. Her mother had just arrived, bearing a case of prosecco, and she and her husband were sitting in the garden, filling glasses for the first guests. They came, like Indians, with offerings—everything from caponata and olives to platters and decorations. Big cardboard turkeys were soon perched on the garden tables, their tails unfolding into a kaleidoscope of crepe-paper pleats. The trees were draped with the Rossgates’ Christmas lights, and a string of big gold letters—HAPPY THANKSGIVING—was dangling between two pergola poles, waiting for a breeze.
The bricks turned white by the end of the afternoon. The turkey slid into the oven. Bruce covered the mouth with an iron sheet, to seal in the heat, and the two of us settled into the deck chairs, poured some wine, and told Thanksgiving stories. (I have to admit that Bruce’s were better, given that in the past five years he and Joanna had managed to pull off credible Thanksgiving dinners in Mexico, Vietnam, and Argentina and were planning to do it again this year in Laos.) From time to time, he would pull on the thickest mitts I had ever seen, lift the sheet with his tongs, prod the roasting pan into a half-turn, and from a safe distance, fling some wine over the bird to baste it. People drifted down from the garden, watched for a while, and disappeared back up the garden steps. It has to be said that I was not much use that evening as a sous-chef. My one attempt at flinging wine into the fiery maw of the pizza oven fell at least a foot short of the roasting pan. On the other hand, Bruce was spared all my Thanksgiving in New York anxieties: should the bird be lying on its back in the pan, or upside down, or on one side and then the other? Should it be falling apart from “slow cooking,” or turning crisp from a quick run, legs and wings akimbo, under a blast of electric heat? Should it be basted with butter, or wrapped in a cloak of wet cheesecloth, or left to smolder under a paper bag? Our eighteen-pounder—roasting, by Bruce’s calculations, at somewhere between seven hundred and eight hundred degrees—was golden-brown, tender, and on its platter in not much more than an hour. The pots of pumpkin purée and doctored stuffing went into the oven to reheat. I poured some bourbon into the roaster. It sizzled into a juicy sauce, which brought my gravy pot close to brimming, and ready to carry upstairs.
It turned into a fine night. A soft breeze blew in from across the Spoleto Valley and set the HAPPY THANKSGIVING fluttering; the chimes in the garden trees came to life. I forgot the work of the past few weeks and joined the party. The best thing about Thanksgiving is that it is always worth it. Everyone agreed on that. In fact we decided to do it again next summer. We toasted Thanksgiving at midnight with what was left of the wine and a bottle of Jack Daniel’s that the Rossgates had stashed for the occasion. I fell asleep in the car and dreamed of leftovers, going home.
RITES, RITUALS, AND CELEBRATIONS
DECEMBER 2016/FEBRUARY 2017
In January of this year, when the Metropolitan Museum’s medievalists Melanie Holcomb and Barbara Drake Boehm were five years into researching and assembling the exhibit “Jerusalem 1000–1400: Every People Under Heaven,” they called Yotam Ottolenghi in London to talk about holding a period celebration soon after their show opened in the fall. Ottolenghi was born and raised in Jerusalem. And given that his cookbooks, restaurants, and documentaries have been largely responsible for our millennial obsession with the tastes and colors and textures of the Eastern Mediterranean, it isn’t surprising that Holcomb and Boehm—having spotted an eleventh-century brass lentil pot and brazier i
n a cache of metalwork long buried in a huge clay fenugreek jar in Caesarea—decided to throw a medieval Jerusalem dinner at the museum, and said to each other “Ottolenghi!” (Jerusalem was the third of Ottolenghi’s six cookbooks.) “We travel together, we love to eat, it’s part of what we do,” Holcomb told me, describing their first trip to one of Ottolenghi’s London restaurants, and their decision to celebrate Jerusalem’s cultural heritage and its historic diversity with a feast that would evoke civility and amity in what is arguably a politically toxic present.
A few weeks later, Ottolenghi flew to New York for meetings with the two curators and with Limor Tomer, the director of the Met’s Live Arts program, and in the course of them, suggested bringing on board the food writers Maggie Schmitt and Laila El-Haddad, whose cookbook The Gaza Kitchen was for him an eloquent reminder of the fact that, however potent its symbolic status and however many armies fought to control it, medieval Jerusalem was a dusty provincial town, with little to offer by way of a great culinary tradition of its own, whereas Gaza, at the time, was a prominent trade-route port and cultural center where the classic Indian spices—galangal, ginger, cloves, and cinnamon, to name a few—had transformed the local cuisine into a repository of flavor, fit for what you might call high-end feasting.