Introduction
Can any interesting new sentence be formed using the words
“holiday” and “tradition?” Probably not,
so I’m going to chuck the junior high writing guidelines, skip the topic
sentence, and just dive right in.
Eye-rolling
In my family, the run-up to Thanksgiving always involves
some eye-rolling by my wife. She almost
never rolls her eyes at my utterances, with a few notable exceptions. If I use certain automotive terms (e.g., “synchromesh,”
“constant-velocity joint”) she rolls her eyes … or when I start going on about
Bell’s Seasoning.
If you’re not familiar with Bell’s Seasoning, your mother
probably doesn’t love you. I’m sorry to
be so harsh, but it needs to be said.
There is only one use for this product, and that’s as an ingredient in
stuffing. (If your mom calls stuffing
“dressing,” she probably hates you and you’re at some risk for Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy.) I say Bell’s Seasoning is “an
ingredient” but really it’s the ingredient
(although it’s also critical that your mom bake fresh cornbread, which she then
cubes and sets out to get just the right degree of stale, to mix with other
stale bread for the stuffing).
If your mom doesn’t cook your Thanksgiving dinner, things
get much more complicated. More on that later.
How crucial is Bell’s
Seasoning?
Bell’s Seasoning is easy to find in New England and the Northeast, but elsewhere it can be
tricky. My mom can’t find it in Oregon,
where she lives now, though she never had any trouble when we lived in Boulder
(where I grew up). I had to really hunt
for it when I lived in San Francisco, but it’s not too hard in the Berkeley
area. Still, I get a little nervous
every year when I need to buy it.
A few nights ago my wife and kids joined me for a Post-Prandial
PromenadeTM to Andronico’s Park & Shop, the store that had
Bell’s last year. This place is so
expensive I cannot normally go in there.
(I once encountered this hippy-dippy woman there who was buying a foil pan
of grilled asparagus that cost over $70.)
During the walk I fielded the inevitable question, this time
from my daughter, “Is this seasoning really that important?” I said, “Suppose you were an astronaut about
to go on a spacewalk. Would you think of
going out there without your space suit?
Would you get bored of the same old space suit routine, and say, ‘You
know what? I’m just going out with a
SCUBA mask this time. I’ll probably be
fine’?” Before I had a chance to finish
my little analogy, I realized that nobody was listening.
My wife has either heard it all before, or feels like she
has. It’s become something of a holiday
tradition for her to grouse good-naturedly about how much dialogue surrounds
this Bell’s Seasoning. She has a point;
in the weeks leading up to Thanksgiving I always have several phone calls with
my mom about Bell’s. A typical call
might go something like this:
I’ll say,
“So, I don’t have the Bell’s Seasoning yet—Safeway doesn’t have it anymore—but
I’m sure I’ll be able to get it.”
My mom will
respond, “Well, I actually have two half-boxes of it in the freezer. So if you can’t find it that’s no big deal …
I think these will work.”
“No, no, I
don’t want to risk it. Don’t worry, I’ll
be able to find it.”
“I think it
does okay in the freezer. I think I’ve
done that before.”
“You know
what? I just discovered have a box of it
here, but it’s only half-full and it’s been in the spice rack, not the freezer. No, I just smelled it and it’s no good. I think it’s from last time we hosted
Thanksgiving here. Don’t worry, I’ll be
able to find a fresh box. I’ll
definitely bring one.”
Perhaps I derive excessive pleasure from this subject because
procuring Bell’s is basically the only thing I do to help out with the Thanksgiving
meal. As a modern husband/father who does a lot of the housework (and even a modest amount of the cooking), I take great pleasure in being almost useless on Thanksgiving Day.
The secret of Bell’s
So what’s Bell’s’ secret?
That’s a tough question, for a couple of reasons. First of all, I’m not at all sure about the
apostrophes I’ve just used. I could have
put “Bells’” but the mere act of suggesting it has caused another problem, that
of running an apostrophe right up against a quotation mark, which is
grammatically fine, but which (at my age) I realize lots of people have trouble with, due to spotty
eyesight, so I try to go easy. The other
problem with “Bells’” is that it connotes “belonging to or associated with the
Bells,” which isn’t at all what I mean.
And “Bell’s” connotes “belonging to or associated with Bell,” which is
probably worse. I need to convey
“belonging to or associated with Bell’s [seasoning].”
The other problem is, I’m not a chef. I know enough to say, “This food would taste
better with more salt,” but when we’re talking about what to add to a bunch of
dried out bread to achieve that amazing apotheosis into a food as uncannily
delicious as stuffing, I’m completely out of my depth. And yet, I think I do have one theory about
why Bell’s is crucial.
The fact is, Bell’s imparts a flavor that is not only pleasant,
but totally unique. Stuffing itself
doesn’t taste like anything else we eat, and my mom’s stuffing doesn’t taste
like any other stuffing I’ve ever had.
(Don’t take this for granted.
Consider those ten-page Chinese menus where the same sauce is presented
in the poultry, seafood, beef, and pork sections.) This morning I waved the open box of Bell’s
in front of my daughter’s nose and she said, “Mmmmm, that so smells like stuffing.”
So, had my mom used Mrs. Dash in her stuffing since I was a
kid, would I be blogging about that product instead? Of course not. That stuff is a) inferior, and b) used in
various foods, not just stuffing (at least, by those who use it, whoever they
are).
What is at stake
Okay, Bell’s makes stuffing yummier and more familiar. So what?
Well, there may be people in this country who can tinker with the
Thanksgiving formula every year and haphazardly try some new recipe or
introduce some new side dish, or allow guests to bring a dish, but I’m not one
of them … I’ve been through too much tumult for that. It’s bad enough that a divorce ripped my
family in half, but on top of that, I’ve had to deal with a stepfather and two
different stepmothers. Throw a
neighbor’s stepmother onto the pile and you’ve got some hard times.
Pre-stepparent, Thanksgiving was hard enough because my
parents would fight over who got my brothers and me for the holiday. They never communicated directly with each
other on this; my brothers and I were used as arbitrators. This is a horrible task to take on, so more
often than not we’d just lie, and tell both parents they’d won out. This only worked because each parent (for
some reason) wanted to serve the meal at a different time. So we’d dual-dinner, which took the traditional
gut-busting Thanksgiving tradition to a new level that might have actually been
physically dangerous.
Did my dad use Bell’s seasoning? Nope.
He either didn’t know about it, or refused to turn his culinary effort
into facsimile of my mom’s. I can
respect that. (Adopting her formula would
be like a new rock band doing nothing but covers.) There was nothing unpleasantly
foreign or alien about my dad’s Thanksgiving dinners because they captured his
odd, sometimes scientific approach to cooking.
He had occasionally cooked dinner for us pre-divorce and it was usually
something he invented; he tinkered at length over this wacky savory skillet-fried
concoction halfway between an omelet and a pancake which he called a
“doormat.” For Thanksgiving he put the
turkey in an oven-cooking bag which he called the “Buzzard Bag.” It did come out more tender, though it tended
to fall completely apart, like a gastronomic embodiment of deconstruction.
Stepparents hugely complicate this holiday meal tradition. There was the stepfather who thought the
turkey should be carved in the kitchen and served buffet-style, and the
stepmother who actually served the meal without
any f’ing gravy! Can you believe
that? For all the grisly detail on these
two meals, click here.
The other stepmother experience wasn’t as jarring, but still
unhinged my brothers and me a bit. This
stepmother was (and is) actually a very cool lady. My brothers and I liked her just fine, which is
saying something given the unavoidably difficult dynamic of these bolted-on,
imposter-ish fake parents, whose very existence creates a situation which
cannot exist anywhere else in the animal kingdom except perhaps in brood
parasitism (click here and search on “brood parasitism” for details).
This stepmother’s Thanksgiving dinners were basically okay
except that she served these weird onion balls.
I don’t know the real name, but they were silvery onions, the diameter
of a quarter, in this strange pearl-colored sauce with the exact viscosity of
human saliva. This was an important
enough side dish to our stepmother that she had two platters of onion balls
going around, and since we tended to pass them along pretty quickly (not really
wanting to engage), they seemed to be constantly bobbing up in front of us,
like there was no escape. They didn’t
taste bad or smell bad or anything, but they were just weird, like if James Bond’s suit had epaulettes, or Natalie Portman
had a tail. I thought I was the only one
vaguely creeped out by this side dish until after the meal when one of my
brothers said, “What the hell were those onion balls?” and we all immediately
joined in, puzzling over them and bonding in our mutual bemusement.
The wilderness years
During my college years, it wasn’t always possible to make
it home for Thanksgiving, and that’s where things got really rough. One year, when my brother and I were renting
an apartment in San Luis Obispo, our friend in the apartment next door came to
our rescue. Knowing we had nowhere to
go, he invited us home with him. Problem
was, his home was broken, too, and this was his first Thanksgiving with his new
stepmother. She really couldn’t cook
worth a damn—I think her stuffing was made with Wonder bread (that weird
plastic-y white bread from the Rainbo Baking Company). I mean, I’m not a fascist about good cooking
or anything, and if a master chef who was not my mom made a great Thanksgiving meal,
I could probably enjoy it, but this was pretty foul. Even worse, the dad, whom my dad would
certainly have labeled a “knuckle-dragging cretin” (or “KDC” for short) was
watching football on TV the whole time, even during the meal. I’m aware that millions of Americans do this
every year, but that doesn’t make it okay.
I’d rather have a street mime performing in the dining room … at least
they’re quiet. The worst part was that
our friend was in agony, between being ignored by his silent father and unctuously
doted on by his stepmother, whom he clearly despised.
The next year, another neighbor friend—a guy old enough to
be our father—promised to take us out for a gourmet Thanksgiving feast at The Cliffs
At Shell Beach, a fancy resort. His
treat! The idea of eating this family
meal at a restaurant seemed a bit off, but at least (we figured) the food would
be good. Well, the afternoon dragged on as
we all waited for this other kid our neighbor had invited, who had the
car. When it became apparent that this
friend wasn’t going to show, we had to punt and head over to the nearby Sizzler
Steakhouse. They had a “special” buffet
meal that did feature traditional Thanksgiving foods, but with a special Sizzler
twist: all the foods were loaded up with
staggering amounts of salt. On top of
the bad food we suffered a low-grade bitterness: the neighbor was bitter that his friend had
flaked, and my brother and I were bitter at our friend, whom we suspected of
hatching a half-baked scheme without getting actual buy-in from this (perhaps mythical)
car-equipped friend.
The next year after that, another San Luis Obispo pal
invited us home for Thanksgiving, and even drove down to pick me up from UC Santa Barbara. Though I don’t remember anything about
the food—which probably reflects well on it, under the circumstances—my brother
and I experienced a new kind of pain.
Not only was the host family still intact, but they’d invited another
unbroken family. After the meal we all
sat in the living room talking, and everybody was so convivial and
non-dysfunctional, it kind of rubbed Geoff’s and my noses in the fact that our
own family would never be together again.
(Even at gatherings of all the brothers plus one parent, there was no
escaping the shadow of who was missing.)
So, the next year I said screw it and made a meal for my two
UCSB roommates. This was okay except the
food sucked. I wasn’t about to roast an
entire turkey, so I did some chicken legs with canned cranberry sauce dumped
over them. I made Stove-top stuffing and
used canned gravy, which I thought would be edgy and ironic but turned out just
salty and MSG-y, taking me right back to that awful Sizzler’s meal. On top of that, one roommate realized to his
horror that he’d lost the ability to eat an entire meal in one sitting. All his body could handle anymore was little
snacks. (He seemed to subsist almost
entirely on sunflower seeds, which he ate like a little bird, flinging the
shells everywhere until I trained him to store the seeds in one margarine tub
and drop the shells into another.)
Return to normalcy
Now that I have a family of my own, I’m determined to get it
right, and to build up traditions and institutions that provide the supreme
comfort of predictability and reliability.
There’s a wonderful continuity in having my mom make the meal, the old
way, not just to close up old wounds but because she’s such an awesome
cook. (Has my wife ever cooked the Thanksgiving
meal on her own? Yes, but she had the
kindness and good sense to consult at length with my mom on the phone. She completely nailed it, even the stuffing
with its perfect blend of stale bread, stale homemade cornbread, celery, nuts,
and—of course—Bell’s seasoning.)
So will I tolerate any innovations at all when it comes to
this special meal? Sure, as long as
they’re introduced gradually and by an authorized family member. Some years ago my mom introduced a relish
tray which includes pickled herring in sour cream, and I now consider it
non-optional. And more recently she took
to complementing her own homemade cranberry sauce and raw cranberry relish (both
mandatory) with one little saucer of canned cranberry sauce, slid right out of
the can so the corrugations of the can remain intact. I don’t know how or why this innovation was
adopted, but I’m completely okay with it, as long as I can wave an open box of
Bell’s Seasoning in front of my daughter’s nose and have her say, “Mmmmm … that
so smells like Thanksgiving.”
No comments:
Post a Comment