How To Cook A Turkey In August
Think you’re bored of Thanksgiving? Imagine being a food writer.
Thanksgiving beckons! Or does it loom? Either way, it’s coming soon, just around a corner or two. And whether it’s is an annual high- or low-light for you, Thanksgiving is a death-and-taxes truth, as certain as Halloween endcaps in August and Valentine’s Day cards out on New Year’s Day. The early warning system for Thanksgiving, however, is the flood of themed issues of monthly magazines and pumpkin spice-templated food websites, which start hitting the mailboxes/grocery checkout racks/tabs around the Ides of October.
Of course, not everyone looks forward to Thanksgiving (like, say, the non-U.S. portions of the planet), and not everyone participates in this annual content rollout. For retail employees it could be well the day that one has to clock in at four thirty in the morning so that the paid-day-offs can come and riot over a doorbuster Blu-ray player. For others, the dread starts well before, when others are apple-picking or pulling the A/C units out of their windows. But it must really be the worst for people who write about food for a living. Somehow, enough Americans to power a sector of the food and beverage content industry to keep this charade going. They flip through the mags and wonder: Is this the year to try a Mexican-themed menu? Should we maybe slaughter the bird ourselves? How can I get the can-shape in a fresh cranberry dressing? Maybe chestnuts? Each year, they ask, What exactly is the right way to cook a turkey?
A 2006 issue of gone-but-not-forgotten Gourmet suggests both a simple roast turkey or, for a more intimate po-mo experience, a turkey roulade with cider sauce, while a 2008 issue offers the dilemma of either an Adobo Turkey with Red Chile Gravy or an Extra-Moist Turkey with Pan Gravy. Last year’s Food & Wine ran three different Juicy Turkey Recipes (all basted through cheesecloth) and a fly-on-the-wall view of perennial television food host/guest Tyler Florence’s first Thanksgiving at home. Meanwhile, Bon Appétit had a Glazed and Lacquered bird on the cover, with a Barbeque Spice-Brined Grilled Turkey and a Porchetta-Style Roast Turkey Breast inside. To be really completist about it, a still Chris be-Kimballed Cook’s Illustrated in 2011 concedes that roast turkey is the norm, but might you try the only, test-kitchen-proven way to make an Oven-Braised Turkey?
It’s a queasy number of turkey recipes, even from an incomplete and tiny sample size. But imagine if your job was turkey recipes? Imagine if, once a year, when it’s still hot enough to go to the beach on the weekends, turkeys were the wheel you had to reinvent? Can you imagine how fucking much you would fucking hate fucking turkeys?
This is admittedly an issue of parochial interest. Maybe we are more ready to delve into what it’s like to pretend to be someone else for money, than we are to wonder what it’s like to try to make sense of a biological imperative that’s been elevated into elaborate rituals and customs that differentiate groups of people on the planet. Or maybe not! Thanksgiving is actually important, here in these United States.
Every kindergartener knows Thanksgiving was set into motion by a bunch of apostate Protestants who didn’t think the Church of England was sufficiently churchy enough. They risked life and limb to transit the North Atlantic wearing scratchy wool clothes, met some friendly Indians (as they were blithely called at the time) who taught them how to make creamed corn and so they all had a big annual party to thank each other, themselves, the Creator, etc. It looks good when Norman Rockwell paints it, but the story is a little more complex, if not kind of wrong. The Pilgrims left from Holland, not England! Thanksgiving Day as we know it was not invoked until 1863, during the Civil War, by President Lincoln, and did not achieve banks-closed status until 1941 when President Roosevelt signed a bill making it so (also during a war, oddly enough). The holiday was intended as a day of literal giving-of-thanks from the beginning, but leadership felt a little more inspired to pursue this during times of strife, for whatever mostly transparent political reason.
It’s also a harvest holiday based on timing: back before food production was globalized and industrialized and refrigerated and test-tubified, the waning days of fall were when the last of such food was gathered and stored so why not cook up some perishables for one light moment before a long winter of eating roots? All together, Thanksgiving is a sui generis conglomerate of non-pilgrim related causes, which has been noted all over the place but nicely summed up by Co.Design:
Ultimately, you have all of these discrete forces coming together to form Thanksgiving that were unique to a 19th-century America — a need for revisionist history, an earnest quest for new tradition, the migration of New Englanders across the country, a hope for an end to civil war, and a cold weather holiday before the era of Christmas.
This secular holiday has somehow united the country through food (and televised football and shopping) in a way that none of the religious/nationalistic/greeting-card-industry holidays ever has.
Christmas is obviously important to commercial interest, giving that it is the holiday of purchasing things and giving them to third parties, in the food and beverage business, Thanksgiving is the kick-off of that season, falling conveniently in Q4. As TakePart food editor Willy Blackmore explained, “There is a whole industry built around supplying birds for Thanksgiving.” According to the National Turkey Federation, a little less than a quarter of all turkeys eaten in the U.S. are served on Thanksgiving Day, and according to Nielsen, when it comes to whole turkeys, that percentage is more than three-quarters. It’s not just poultry that sees a bounce for Thanksgiving — it is (again according to Nielsen) the biggest time of year for both cranberries and sweet potatoes. The week of Thanksgiving is second only to the week of Christmas for food and beverage consumption.
Indeed, Thanksgiving is not illogically a red-letter day for the food-and-beverage-content industry — aside from construction-paper historicities with Pilgrims and smiling indigenous peoples sharing a traced-hand turkey, it is a federal holiday entirely glued together by food. “It’s an eight-hour day of cooking, the marathon meal,” said Blackmore. Sure, a five-and-dime foodie will be thumbing through Lucky Peach at any given time, but for the vast majority of Americans who have other more pressing concerns, Thanksgiving is the day that even they might rip a page out of the Parade insert in the Sunday paper, or start punishing Google with BEST GRAVY RECIPE searches.
This interest is good for content creators — content can be tailored to it — and it’s really good for the those in the business of making money off this content (if, say, the venture is wholly/partially advertiser supported), because it’s a peg. You probably can’t tell the local Buick dealership that a pipe bomb will go off next week and that will boost newspaper circulation, but you very much can tell the Buick dealership that President’s Day is coming, and your ad department will happily photoshop Abe Lincoln in sunglasses riding in a 2017 Buick Lacrosse.
“It’s a good time to get people to throw money at a publication,” Blackmore said, and, the bottom line being the bottom line and all, it is a good thing for the publication to have money so thrown. And so the front-of-book piece on whether the third S in Brussels sprouts should be disappeared is assigned, written and published.
For some in the food-content profession, Thanksgiving is more like Groundhog Day (the movie and not the fake holiday) but with turkey instead of a rodent. In 2009, Regina Schrambling wrote for Slate about how food writers hate Thanksgiving. “Not the day, not the food, not the cooking or the shopping,” she qualifies, but rather the hands-on aspect of taking the holiday and the consumer interest therein and converting that into copy, recipes and photos that will bump circulation:
What makes me totally crazy is the persistent pressure to reinvent a wheel that has been going around quite nicely for more than 200 years. Every fall, writers and editors have to knock themselves out to come up with a gimmick — fast turkey, slow turkey, brined turkey, unbrined turkey — when the meal essentially has to stay the same. It’s like redrawing the Kama Sutra when readers really only care about the missionary position.
Your personal Thanksgiving may or may not resemble that last bit (as much as your uncooked turkey does), but the point stands. And in addition to the forced annual revisit and deeper-than-average scrutiny afforded, the lead time for good old-fashioned print publishing, is cognitive dissonance on a stick. For some magazines, the lead time can be as long as three months, with spitballing and recipe testing starting in August, and the food we eat on Thanksgiving Day is food that is good and appropriate to eat in the waning days of Autumn, and not so much in the full swelter of the summer. The week before Labor Day, one might want a slice of refreshing key lime pie, not a gooey wedge of sour cream apple, or really anything that contains and/or resembles mince meat.
The process of devising a recipe, in between conception and transcription, is cooking something over and over, in an actual kitchen, and when it’s a muggy ninety-five degrees out, a tester can be forgiven for wishing there was such a thing as Thanksgiving Ceviche. Sophie Brickman, the features editor at Saveur, said, “It’s a surreal thing to walk into work and smell Thanksgiving every August, but every year you have to come up with a new way to cover it.”
One writer I spoke with confided that the Thanksgiving issue was actually the last straw — her reason for leaving a staff position for good after an ideas meeting for the months-hence Thanksgiving issue. “It was a specific meeting. It was like, if we have to talk about how we’re going to reinvent a turkey one more time…? Because I think that I already have a great turkey recipe. I use it every year!”
Let’s take for granted that writing, for “exposure” or for money, is easier to romanticize and to treat like a calling or holy work — a divine prerogative to conjure ether into a different kind of ether! There is a self-proclaimed exaltation that is rarely invoked in, say, HVAC maintenance and repair. Food writers, man, they sure have it easy, getting paid to cook and eat! (Although the industry is slowly dying and the formerly remunerative staff positions are being eaten from the inside by digital, of course.) But at the end of the day, it’s still a job, and as such, grounds for griping.
As the writer who left after the ideas meeting told me, “I have no more ideas. I have no more thoughts. I have no more joy left for this holiday.” I think we’ve all had days we’ve felt similar, and not a thing wrong with that. Sometimes you hate Mondays, and sometimes you hate the last Thursday in November.
The first time I asked anyone in the know about this was actually not recently at all and purely out of curiosity. I was chatting with an old pal with ample experience editing publications devoted to food/cooking/dining etc. over dinner, I asked, “So hey, is it sort of a grind having to put your Thanksgiving hat on every August forever and ever?” And the answer was, “Oh yes, ugh, OMG I very much dislike that part of the process, yes.” A paraphrase, of course, but the impression given was that the Thanksgiving issue and the preparations therefor was a well-known drag.
But as I started to talk to other food media professionals, I noticed that the disdain for this particular flavor of food journalism was not exactly universally held, and when held, not always enthusiastically so. Then I talked via email with Jane Lear, another veteran of the food mag business and executive editor of upcoming print mag CURED. She wrote:
After more than 30 years in this business (including almost 20 years at Gourmet), I can say that Thanksgiving is never far from the mind of a professional food writer or editor. And you would think that over the course of Gourmet’s 68-year history, we would have it down cold, and be bored to death of the same-old, same-old. But, in fact, that couldn’t be further from the truth. The cooks there took absolutely nothing for granted, and were always on the prowl for new and better ways to cook a traditional Thanksgiving feast or, on this, the most inclusive of holidays, provide centerpiece-worthy vegetarian or vegan alternatives.
Possibly that could qualify as a “yes, but,” but then again, as Brickman says, “You still have to cover it.” Thanksgiving may be a very unique meal in a year of 365 menus, but it’s still a meal, and if the job/calling is to report and talk about the things we eat and the ways we cook and eat them, Thanksgiving counts.
I spoke with Sam Sifton, food editor for the New York Times and the author of the book on Thanksgiving (titled Thanksgiving: How To Cook It Well), and Sifton remains an unabashed fan of producing coverage of the holiday, and the holiday itself. “Either you’re into the holiday, or you’re not into the holiday, and I completely understand that there are those who do not relish the thought of having to come up with a new way to celebrate it in the world of food media.” Sifton is not an advocate of catching trends by the tail and shoving them into a Thanksgiving dinner-sized box. “What you really need to do if you’re going to write about Thanksgiving in a fresh way every year is to find ways new to you, new to your readers traditions, that are deeply held by someone else.” Sifton also confirmed he does not believe that Thanksgiving is a repetitive-motion injury for a food writer: “I relish the chance to find out something new about it every year.”
Not to get all Rashomon about it, but big secular food holiday can be a big deal to those involved up to their elbows both in a kind of lousy way and in a big aspirational climb-every-mountain way. This is also the case for service journalism in general, which is also the case for slinging burritos for a fast-casual chain, which is the case for a job. Unless you are so lucky as to devise something as world-saving as a ride-sharing app, a job is the thing you do for money and any personal satisfaction derived therefrom is a purely subjective matter.
Six years after Schrambling’s short essay went to digital press, Drew Magary, then of the website/McGuffin known as “Gawker,” noted the piece and declaimed, “Food writers are shit.” It was a slow news day I guess, but the backlash is always there, if you ask for it. And if you ask for the converse, then, well, the busman’s holiday is still a holiday, so here have the world’s tiniest violin.
The holiday itself is worth writing about: is it a cynically exploited moment of nationalistic groupthink or just an artifact of our collective innocence? Thanksgiving Day is a reality for great swaths of America for people of all types and situations and circumstances and political orientation. “It is our nation’s biggest secular holiday,” Sifton said, “and the chance to make those meals better through our reporting and the services we provide is pretty fun.”
Maybe the griping about Thanksgiving coverage — overkill, backlash, backlash-to-the-backlash — is blown out of proportion by jerks like me who take what would otherwise be a robust Slack thread and rip it out of context for the hopeful edification of the reading public. Maybe the hopeful edification was the point in the first place. Either way, it’s the middle of October. You’re about to learn the best way to roast a turkey again, just like you will next year.