In Winter's Kitchen. Beth Dooley

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      Innocent and ambitious, I wanted to share with my family these new discoveries when they arrived in town. Hosting Thanksgiving for the first time is a rite of passage for any cook. Like that first bike ride without training wheels, it is both daunting and liberating. I got to choose which traditional foods to serve and which to scratch. I wanted to showcase those carrots—as well as ruffled kale, cranberries, sweet potatoes, and a small free-range turkey—and I wanted to make all the pies, bake all the bread, and create all the condiments by myself.

      We didn’t have a single table big enough to seat everyone, so I simply duct-taped together three different tables and smoothed my grandmother’s lace tablecloth over the odd assembly. My dad told me over the phone that he’d ordered special cheese to be delivered and that he planned to bring the “good carving knife.” I could picture this bone-handled beauty, snuggled in its velvet-lined, rosewood case and folded into his suitcase for a trip into an unknown place so far from my family’s comfortable home.

      It’s not that our traditional Thanksgiving fare was all that special. Sometimes the gravy was gloppy or the turkey dry. But in my parents’ sprawling dining room we’d always played out our vision of what a family might be if we didn’t have to live with each other all the time. No uncle’s divorce, no cousin’s odd girlfriend, not even differing views on the Vietnam War could spoil the fun. We were open, joyful. The lights of Thanksgiving past would glow warmly as my father held court at the head of the table. Having sliced the breast meat to the bone with exquisite thinness, he would raise his glass to toast the guests and the bounty before us. More than any other day, Thanksgiving brought out the essential nature of my dad. He showed us that one could live both loud and gentle, both hungry and whole.

      So now, with that Joy of Cooking spine cracked flat open on the counter, I rolled pie dough, kneaded bread, and scored and roasted chestnuts for stuffing. I scrubbed the counters and floors, ironed napkins, polished silver, and, as fatigue set in, began to wonder why I’d thought this was such a great idea.

      The night my family flew in, the Twin Cities were hit with the season’s first storm of wet, sloppy snow. My family was delayed several hours in Chicago and it was near midnight by the time I picked them up. The driving had been slow, the roads treacherous.

      After heartfelt airport hugs, all six of us, sitting on luggage, squeezed into my Datsun and crept onto the highway. Icy clumps pummeled the roof and glazed the windshield, making it difficult to see as freight trucks barreled by. The giddiness of our reunion soon congealed into uncomfortable silence. I missed our exit, circled up over the highway, and retraced our route, not once but twice, and on the third try, as we passed the grain silos on Hiawatha Avenue . . . my father could hold back no longer and asked me in a whisper, thin with impatience, “Beth, do you know where you are?”

      What I knew was that change is hard. But while I realized that this was going to be a different Thanksgiving in location as well as food, I was naively unprepared for its emotional impact. Applying my grandmother’s early lessons and my understanding of Rachel Carson to the fresh, beautiful food from my new local market just wasn’t playing out quite as planned. I had a lot to learn.

      Thanksgiving morning my mother, looking askance, asked, “No creamed onions?” Even though none of us had ever actually eaten the Birds Eye Pearl Onions in a Real Cream Sauce, they were my absent Aunt Ruth’s favorite. Aunt Ruth adored fake pearls and Scotch and doused herself in Shalimar, and though she was not present, the missing onions seemed like a slight.

      “Where’s the big bird?” my dad asked as I trussed the local, organic, free-range, but admittedly undersized turkey. My brother, digging a bag of Cheetos from his backpack, paused long enough to say, “Looks like Beth went with a fat chicken instead.” In our tiny living room, sibling rivalries, unspoken resentments, and secret rages, fueled by the exhaustion of holiday travel, threatened to boil over. “Oh God! Not more weeds and seeds,” moaned my sister as I trimmed the kale. “Eeew,” she said, spotting the yogurt curing on top of the fridge. “Stinky milk!”

      My hopes for fluffy mashed potatoes were dashed, for I’d chosen the wrong spuds—waxy yellow Finn and red bliss—a mistake compounded when I tried to whip them up in the food processor and churned out a gluey and gray mass. That little turkey had a teeny lean breast but huge thighs and might have provided delicious dark meat, if it hadn’t been overcooked (no pop-up thermometer).

      The kale, however, was a surprising hit, thanks to my friend Atina’s advice to sauté it with garlic and douse it with dark sesame oil. (“Cooked that way, even gravel tastes good,” she quipped.) The gnarled sweet potatoes were wonderfully and naturally brown-sugar sweet, and the Haralson apples for pie were tart, juicy, and crisp. As we peeled and sliced them my mom asked me to ship a box back east. My valiant failures had elicited sympathies and inspired engagement as my brothers and sisters chipped in to help with the meal. Being in the kitchen knitted us together in ways we didn’t know we’d forgotten.

      At the rickety makeshift tables, my dad did the best he could to carve the little turkey with the beautiful knife he had bequeathed us. We lit candles as the day darkened and the mood shifted. In the making and partaking of this dinner we’d renewed our relationships, to each other and to a different tradition.

      Though СКАЧАТЬ