Bell’s Seasoning II - The Spawning

Introduction

Having been a drone for the better part of two days (as you shall soon learn), I am bound and determined to do something with my brain now. So why not blog? (Don’t answer—rhetorical question.) To get you in the mood for serious literature, I shall start with an epigram:

”They have a saying in Chicago, Mr. Bond. Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. The third time, it’s enemy action.” –Auric Goldfinger (in Ian Fleming’s Goldfinger). 

Do I have an enemy meddling in my affairs? Read on and decide for yourself.

The quest for Bell’s

What is Bell’s seasoning? Well, I’m glad you asked. It is nothing less than the key to Thanksgiving, as documented at length here.  Bell’s goes in the stuffing and is, I believe, instrumental in its apotheosis from dried bread cubes and celery (useless on their own) to stuffing, that supreme Thanksgiving dish. (At this meal, I could probably do without the turkey, and could almost do without gravy —but without stuffing, you might as well forget the whole thing and get takeout Chinese.)

As documented in that first Bell’s post, one of the few ways I contribute to the Thanksgiving feast is to procure this all-important seasoning. That’s a harder task than you might expect. Some stores carry Bell’s, many don’t, and for some reason I can never remember where I got it the previous year. It’s just a blur … like when you have this vivid dream that somehow gets erased within minutes of your waking up. If I were smart I’d have checked out that previous post, though this didn’t occur to me until after my quest.

My strategy

Phoning a store for a stock check is nearly impossible these days. Even if you manage to get past the Interactive Voice Response system and are transferred to a human, they usually shunt you off to some other department and you bounce around until you give up. Or they put you on hold, try to find the item, get distracted, and eventually someone else picks up and you have to start from scratch—or, more often, the line just goes dead. I did phone Andronico’s on Solano Ave because they have legit customer service. It turns out (I only now discovered when rereading my last Bell’s post) that’s where I got the Bell’s last time. Alas, the clerk yesterday advised that they’re out of stock. This answer came swiftly, meaning she’d rather make up an answer on the spot than bother to check, or they’d had a run on Bell’s and I wasn’t the first person to ask.

So forget phoning. I decided to just stop in at this or that store in a gradually increasing radius until I found the Bell’s. Surely somebody would have this and my circle wouldn’t grow to encompass all of northern California … right? I had some time, because I started on Tuesday. (Only an idiot would brave the markets on the day before Thanksgiving, right?)

Store #1 – Berkeley Natural Grocery

This was a no-brainer. I was walking back from the mailbox, several blocks from my home, and Berkeley Natural was right on the way. I dig this store because a) it’s my “corner grocery,” b) they used to give my kids balloons (click here for details), and c) my younger daughter worked there one summer. Alas, though they have lots of bins and an admirable spice section, I did not find Bell’s there. I knew this was a wild card, my “fail-fast” foray, anyway and the effort cost me almost no time.

Store #2 – Magnani Poultry

This is where I went to pick up our turkey. It was supposed to be mobbed—they told us Monday would be a lot better than Tuesday for the pickup—but who wants to store a fresh turkey that long? Early signs were not good—there was no parking anywhere nearby and I had to park in a nearby neighborhood and walk a few blocks—but it wasn’t that crowded in there. I took a number, was served pretty quickly, and was told that the turkey pickup was a separate line, but since I had the guy, I bought a pound of organic local grass-fed beef from cows that are “encouraged to socialize.”

I got my turkey and yikes, it was $115. For that much, I hope it also had been encouraged to socialize. I should have just hit one of our neighborhood’s many stray turkeys with my car … it wouldn’t be hard to do. But then, I’d have had no idea how to pluck it. Plus, what if the impact didn’t kill it? (This is how I rationalize the $115.) I also picked up a quart of frozen turkey stock and—could it be, their extensive spice rack included Bell’s? It did not, alas. All kinds of rubs, sauces, and seasonings, but no Bell’s. There’s the rub.

Store #3 – Monterey Market

I walked over to this place because it’s just across the street from Magnani and has all kinds of cool stuff (beyond their produce which is excellent and cheap; for example, around $0.40 for a bunch of cilantro). They have like ninety kinds of mushroom, fifty kinds of pepper, all manner of salsas and spices and extracts, and … no Bell’s. But hey, it was only like a five-minute detour and I got in some really great people-watching, everyone from restaurant owners to frugal housewives to college professors to tech bros, and a variety of ethnicities including those who actually know the differences among the ninety kinds of mushrooms and fifty kinds of peppers.

Store #4 – Lucky

It was time to stop messing around and actually do some research. The website for Lucky, in the neighboring town of El Cerrito, indicated that this very location did in fact have Bell’s in stock. This is a bit of a schlep so I never go there. In the parking lot an old, run-down guy seemed to need help getting out of his car, and called out for assistance. I was happy to oblige, but when I reached him he said he just needed money to buy a sandwich. This was a bit perplexing. I mean, he had a car, right? How broke could he be? But then, he was sitting sideways on the car’s back seat, legs sticking out, with no driver in sight, so who knows, maybe it wasn’t his car. Maybe he just needed to sit somewhere and found this car unlocked. The smallest bill I had on me was a five. Oh well … happy holidays, dude.

 I made my way through the front door and immediately encountered a large security turnstile, manned by a security guard. I got through that and the next thing I came upon was the “Convenience Section,” an area containing pricier items like cigarettes and booze, all fenced in with a locked door requiring customer service assistance. “Convenience” indeed. The fluorescent lighting at Lucky was that overly intense type that makes you feel like you’re being interrogated. The whole scene was pretty downscale. I made my way over to the spice section and—denied! Here is the gap where the Bell’s should have been:

I headed to the customer service counter, which was oddly situated beyond the checkout lines so I had to squeeze past people. The place was teeming with shoppers. At the service desk I waited behind a woman with a giant clear jar of what looked like granulated ginger, but it was the size of a coffee can, and had been penetrated by moisture so the contents were like cement. She was having a protracted negotiation about a refund or exchange and there was a language barrier, so it took some time. Finally it was my turn. “You mean the spice mix in the yellow box, with the turkey on the front?” the clerk asked. Yes, yes, yes! She said, “Oh yeah, we have that. If it’s all out in Aisle 2, go to our seasonal display.” She pointed toward that area and assured me there’d be more Bell’s there. I headed over and scoured the area. Nothing.

But surely there’d be more in the back, right? I decided to head back toward customer service, but didn’t feel like squeezing through a checkout line again. Seeing some people on their way through the inbound security turnstile (it had two big gates, you could drive a truck through it) I decided to slip through there instead, like piggybacking in reverse. Well, this set off the security alarm, which was exceedingly loud and shrill. The security guard gave me a withering look that said, “Man, you’re a damn fool.”

The next clerk at customer service rang up her boss on the red line. He took forever to answer. “My boss isn’t answering!” she said, bewildered. Finally the boss answered and said I should head way to the back almost by the double-door exit, near the dairy, where there’s yet another holiday display that would have more Bell’s. I found my way there but it was another fool’s errand.

Store #5 – Ranch 99

Ranch 99 is a giant Asian grocery in the Pacific East mall in Richmond. It wasn’t all that far away, since I was already pretty far north. It was a long shot I figured, but then this place is vast and has, like, millions of products. Once in the mall I had a lot of other businesses to navigate, but eventually found Ranch 99. Walking around in there was like a Willy Wonka experience, one tantalizing aroma after another, none of them exactly recognizable but like being at a Chinese restaurant and/or an open-air bazaar. They have half an aisle just for seaweed, and more kinds of cup-o-noodles and ramen than you’ll ever see anywhere. I scanned several hundred wacky spices, but no Bell’s. So I headed over to the seafood department to look at the lobsters. Check this one out:

From this (hastily snapped) photo it’s hard to grasp the scale of this lobster. It was the size of a small dog. Now, unless this critter had been living in this tank for years, which I very much doubt, he (or she) was waaaaay over the size limit on lobsters and should have been thrown back in the ocean (details here). This was basically an illegal lobster.

Not wanting my trip to have been in vain, I searched for something to buy, that I couldn’t get elsewhere. I hit pay dirt with this cookie tin, perfect for a Christmas gift for one of my daughters:

But alas, it too was not meant to be:

Store #6 - Oaktown Spice Shop

Google Maps found me a sneaky way home, which took me on this frontage road and then right up Solano Ave where we have a Safeway. The Safeway app said they were out of stock, but I figured, what the heck, maybe it’s wrong? So I started to head up there and passed right by this giant spice emporium I’ve somehow never noticed before:

This place was huge—I mean, floor-to-ceiling spices—but it’s all this homegrown Oaktown stuff, no third party products like Bell’s. The clerk was very helpful, letting me sniff various products designed to enhance poultry and even stuffing. I’m getting over a cold (don’t worry, I was rocking a COVID mask) so I couldn’t smell all that well, but suffice to say nothing smelled even remotely like Bell’s. So it would be as inappropriate as, say, putting jelly on a hot dog instead of mustard. No way.

Store #7 – Safeway

This is where I normally shop and I found the spice section very quickly, and almost just as quickly ascertained that they were either out of Bell’s, as their app had warned me, or didn’t actually stock it and only made it available online through some partner, like they’re trying to be mini-Amazon or something. But hadn’t I bought Bell’s here before? I decided to check out the discount shelves where they put overstocked and discontinued items. I mean, you never know, right? No Bell’s, but I found this:

Huh? Girl Scout Seasoning? Is this for, like, cannibals? Next I headed over to the “Manager’s Special” shelf, at the other end of the store. I’ve found weird products there before that I liked, and normal products oddly reduced, so I figured what the hell. Alas, no Bell’s, but I did find this:

How about Crushed BS? Is that good in stuffing? Dang. At least when I wandered the shelves for something else to buy, so as not to go home empty-handed, I found a crazy QR-code-driven digital deal that saved me—I kid you not—$18.40 on eight cans of cream-style corn. Since when is this humble product so expensive? At this point I realized my blood sugar was getting precariously low so I headed home, made Southwestern Corn Goo for my visiting daughter, and called it a night.

Store #8 – Berkeley Bowl West

Berkley Bowl is a great supermarket. When I was in college, friends would say to me, “What?! You don’t know about Berkeley Bowl? You of all people would love Berkeley Bowl.” I ignored all their advice because I thought it was a bowling alley. Why, I’d wondered, do all these people thing I’m a bowler? Finally someone clarified that it’s a grocery. So yesterday I checked online and confirmed that their Berkeley Bowl West location (the one nearer me) had Bell’s in stock. At this point my wife had a list of stuff she forget to get for our feast, so it wasn’t a special trip (though it’s a lot farther than I usually go to shop).

Their parking lot was large and cramped and full. I made a hot lap in vain. They even have a parking garage, but I just didn’t feel like it. I took another lap and got lucky. It took ages to walk across that giant parking lot and get a cart. I made my way to the spice section and—denied!

I found a customer service clerk and asked if they had any more in the back. “No,” she sighed. I asked if their other location would have it. “They do carry it, but there is no way I could find out if it’s in stock.” Well heck, if they won’t disclose that proprietary information to their own employee over the phone, I didn’t see any point in calling them myself. I decided I better just head over there.

Now, if you’re starting to think I’m bat-shit crazy to stick with this obviously doomed search (as my wife certainly does), you should know that this will be my first Thanksgiving in at least twenty years without my mother present, either at her place or ours. No, it’s not that I’m some momma’s boy or anything; it’s just that to let my wife to fly solo on the feast without having Bell’s seasoning would be like setting her up to fail. I don’t want to put that kind of pressure on her. If my family isn’t making spontaneous and heartfelt yummy noises over the stuffing, it will be pretty obvious.

Store #9 – Berkeley Bowl

I headed up to the original Berkeley Bowl. Traffic was murder. Every single motorist in the Bay Area was on the road, and many of them were angry, probably hangry, and honking. I so badly wanted to judge them, for being so utterly stupid as to wait until Wednesday before finishing their Thanksgiving shopping, but here I was, one of them. Having to withhold judgment was just insult to injury. I arrived to find another huge parking lot, also cramped, seemingly designed for nothing but Minis and those little Fiats. I totally lucked out and found a spot next to a guy at the end of the row who was so worried about his (albeit humble) car getting dinged, he was at the very far edge of his spot, meaning I had room to squeeze in despite the SUV encroaching on my other side. I headed in past throngs of people going in both directions. It was like a music festival or Burning Man. Oddly, when these masses of people aren’t in cars, I don’t mind them at all.

Now, this is the Berkeley Bowl where my brother M— worked, and I’m going to tell you a fun story about that. M— worked in their excellent seafood department, and was impressed at how well it was run. But he had trouble making friends with the staff, who—being career blue-collar guys—might have assumed he was a fly-by-night college kid or something. One guy in particular, Jose, seemed a bit cold. Well, for various reasons, M— decided to move back to Boulder, and on his very last day working there he waited on a rather snooty old lady who told him something like, “Make it snappy.” She seemed so privileged and self-important, M— just couldn’t bring himself to move very quickly. Gone was his normal verve; he somehow felt like he was underwater and everything was happening in super-slo-mo. Eventually the lady became exasperated and demanded of Jose, “Why is he so slow?” Jose, taken aback, didn’t really know what to say and after an awkward pause, replied, “I don’t know. Why don’t you ask him?” Flummoxed, she could find no other response to this suggestion than to turn to M— and ask, “Why are you so slow?” M— stared at her and said, “Because I’m stupid. Okay?” He handed her her purchase and she stormed off. Jose looked over at him and said, “M—, you’re okay.”

And so, on to the spice section. Guess what:

No, that’s not a repeat of the first Berkeley Bowl picture. It’s just the same old story. Gobs of the competing products on either side (I got really sick of looking at this fancy Colman’s mustard powder and Old Bay seasoning, whatever those are) but the Bell’s was totally gone. The customer service clerk said, “Gosh, that’s odd, this was just stocked this morning!” There wouldn’t be more in the back, she advised, but they might have more in the boxes atop the shelves. She climbed a stepladder and rooted through at least a couple dozen boxes up there, wheeling the ladder down the entire aisle before finally giving up. But hey, at least she tried.

(By the way, did you notice that the Bell’s at this rather upscale store sells for only $3.79, whereas at the down-market Lucky it was $5.19? I’ve seen this disparity before and I just don’t get it…)

Store #10 – second Andronico’s

I decided to head home via Shattuck Ave, which would take me by another Safeway, this one much more chichi than the one near my place. Along the way I passed an Andronico’s I’d totally forgotten about. Since the first Andronico’s acknowledged that they normally did stock Bell’s, this seemed well worth a shot. The parking lot was completely full, and parking in the surrounding streets was no better. On my second hot lap I got lucky and a SUV was pulling out. This was a weird spot right up against a brick wall, but I had plenty of room. Maybe I was just too tired and frazzled, but my first approach was way too shallow and then I felt like I was committed. It took me a good bit of sawing back-and forth to nestle in there, during which time an old geezer in a motorized wheelchair oozed so gradually across my path it took all my patience to wave nicely at him and put on my best fake smile, and also during which time some other dude, as if to rub it in how far I was from the wall, passed by my car on that side. I finally got ‘er done and headed in to the store.

This had to be the flagship Andronico’s. Fricking giant place. I found the spice section, which was quite large and I counted over twenty different kinds of salt. They had stuff I hadn’t seen anywhere, but—you guessed it—no Bell’s.

Store #11 – second Safeway

The Safeway on Shattuck has the largest parking lot of all, and it was 100% full. They had a garage too, with a digital sign to indicate available spaces, but it was broken. I finally found a very narrow spot in the 15-minute section, between a big concrete median and a battered pickup truck full of all of somebody’s possessions, parked diagonally so it infringed significantly on my target spot. I just couldn’t get in there because my tires kept hitting the median. No wonder nobody had taken the spot. I finally managed to find parking along the street. I headed in, braved another crazy crowd, found the spice section, and I know you’re not gonna believe this, but … they didn’t have Bell’s. I was beginning to feel like the narrator of Poe’s “The Raven” who seems to take a masochistic pleasure in asking the bird question after question because he knows it will only reply, “Nevermore.” He’s basically torturing himself, as was I.

As a last resort, I double-checked the websites for Sprout’s and Whole Foods. Here’s what Whole Foods said:

What a blatant lie. “We can’t seem to find this product” actually means, “We have chosen not to stock this, even though we have an entire aisle for homeopathic remedies, aka snake oil.” I’m not necessarily averse to placebos, but they shouldn’t cost an arm and a leg; Whole Foods is basically stealing from clueless people. They’re dead to me. Sprouts showed me bell peppers, some kind of beer with Bell in the name, and hundreds of unrelated spices, but no love.

Well, that was that. I was done. Nobody could say I didn’t try. In fact, I realized it would be better not to even mention stores 10 and 11 to my wife. She already thought (knew?) I was crazy to be so persistent … why salt the wound?

Store #12 – Rose & Grove Market

As I headed home I realized there was one more store I could try, which had been next door to the bike shop I worked at in college (which is where I met my wife). Oddly, I’d never set foot in this little store, but always grasped it was a Berkeley institution. (Its very name attests to its longevity, since the street it’s on, Martin Luther King Jr. Way, was called Rose Street until 1984.) Rose & Grove is not a big place but hey, you never know. I decided if there happened to be street parking right out front, I would take that as a sign from God that it was worth checking out.

Well, guess what? There was a parking spot right out front—unbelievable! So I headed in. Now, if this story were an “ABC After School Special,” Rose & Grove would have had Bell’s Seasoning and the holiday would be saved. But what I encountered was almost the opposite: they had almost zero inventory. All the shelves were bare except for some booze behind the counter. The clerk informed me that they’d gone under and would have a new owner in a month or so. The end of an era, and the end of my quest.

“Wizard of Oz” ending

Oddly enough, my story has a happy ending, along the lines of “there’s no place like home” in “The Wizard of Oz.” No, I didn’t wake up and realize all this had been a dream. Rather, I arrived home defeated, but had a backup plan: on Monday night, foreseeing possible Bell’s supply issues, I took from the freezer a fresh box of it I’d put away last year. My mom has said it freezes just fine. But when I opened the box on Tuesday, I discovered to my great disappointment that it had almost no smell. Since I’m getting over a cold, I had my daughter smell it to double-check. Instead of saying, “Mmmmmm, that smells like Thanksgiving!” she frowned and said, “It doesn’t smell like anything.” Unlike Han Solo, the Bell’s had not survived the cryogenic freezing operation.

But now, in desperation, I gave it another sniff. Eureka! As it thawed out, it must have regained its potency. Like magic, it now smelled like Mom’s stuffing! I had my daughter sniff it again, and she agreed. It’s not ideal, but we should be fine. What a relief.

Enemy action?

What remains to solve is how so many places could possibly be out of Bell’s at the same time. It couldn’t possibly be coincidence. So I started to wonder if I’ve made any enemies who might want to thwart me in this quest. I’ve certainly seen evidence, when shopping, of a doppelganger at work, who buys up, say, all the Bonne Maman apricot jam (but no other flavor!) when it’s on sale because he has the same taste as I do and is just as much of a cheap bastard. But that has a logical explanation: he’s stocking up, same as I would. But who needs more than one box of Bell’s (or two, if freezing one for later)? What would be the motive?

Maybe it’s that first blog post. Maybe somebody read that, decided he hated me based on my writing style, and is an eccentric millionaire, and so went around buying up all the Bell’s, or (if he’s not local) hired some taskrabbit to do it. That could be. But then, why would somebody hate my blog that much (other than the Velominati, Andrew Tillin, or Margolis and Liebowitz)? This enemy action theory just doesn’t seem very realistic.

But then a much simpler explanation occurred to me. Perhaps my last Bell’s post simply hit the mark, and convinced all my readers that this particular seasoning really is the key to Thanksgiving. Maybe across the country, even across the world, including my own locale, people are buying up the Bell’s in droves. To test my theory, I looked up the stock price for Brady Corporation, which makes Bell’s seasoning. Sure enough, its price began a dizzying climb in late 2015, right around the time of that first post. I appear to be a victim of the very success my blog has brought about!

Yeah. That must be it.

Well, if you’ve made it to the end of this post, especially if this was after your big feast, congratulations. And have a very happy Thanksgiving!

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Email me here. For a complete index of albertnet posts, click here.

Bell’s Seasoning & The Key to Thanksgiving

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 Promenade^TM 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.”

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