As we count our blessings following another Great White North Thanksgiving, I’m left with two questions:
1) Who decided people should celebrate the biggest family holidays – Christmas and Thanksgiving – by cooking and eating a giant, greasy bird that could easily poison your whole family and burn your house down? And 2) Can I have this person plucked, stuffed and roasted?
Let’s find some answers. According to ancient lore passed down from mothers to daughters to Wikipedia, the tradition of eating turkeys for Christmas gained fame when King Henry VIII became the first British monarch to gobble up to celebrate the holiday. This seems plausible, given his well-documented affinity for chopping the heads off of things, as well as his later-life affinity for being a tubby greasewad.
He also burned his way through six wives, so by the end of it all he would have had six mothers-in-law there every Christmas, telling him that he was carving the turkey wrong. This is likely what led to him to becoming very angry and unstable, causing him to engage the Pope in a Twitter war, which in those days was just called “war.”
Turkeys eventually became the Christmas meat of choice in England because the peasant farmers didn’t want to eat their cows and chickens, animals made more valuable than turkeys given their milk and egg production, as well as their usefulness as props in the castle-storming scene in Monty Python and the Holy Grail.
Thanksgiving, meanwhile, was invented by Pilgrims who landed in America after sailing across the Atlantic Ocean. When they arrived they threw huge parties to give thanks that they could finally go to the bathroom after holding it in all the way from England because the latrines on their ships were an “unholy mess.” Forsooth.
Turkeys were the animals of choice for Thanksgiving because they were easy to grab running wild all over the New World, and Pilgrims weren’t very good at catching lobster – they didn’t want to get their pantaloons wet.
Somehow these traditions have stuck around even now when catching a delicious lobster is as easy as going to any grocery store and asking the 70-year-old deli manager to grab one from the tank, and rounding up a succulent steak won’t cost you your head (although my butcher is happy to charge me an arm and a leg for one).
Anyway, the turkey remains, and so now nearly every major holiday it falls upon me, the man of the household, to reach into the middle of a giant bird and pull out a bag of “giblets,” which I believe is a French word that literally translates to “ha ha, made you grab a bloody pile of goo.” After pulling out the Carcass Surprise, it’s time to reach inside once again to “stuff” the bird, something that always feels a little too intimate to be done with grandparents watching and little kids running around. Hey guys, I’m elbow-deep in this fellow. A little privacy, please?
My last two turkeys have hit the hotspots of potential full-family death. At Christmas I was tasked with cooking a giant bird in a fancy brand new oven in my mother-in-law’s fancy brand new house. I put the turkey in at a reasonable hour, knowing that with two conscientious mothers – my wife and sister-in-law – there watching over three young children, dinner needed to be delivered on time or else we’d face the wrath of three starving little Christmas Chernobyls.
That’s why a little sweat started to tingle down my spine when I pulled the bird out four hours later and the meat thermometer was registering a reading of “Donald Trump’s heart.” Uh oh.
Three hours later, with the little ones barely surviving on rations of saltine crackers and handfuls of snow, I pulled the turkey out again and the reading on the thermometer was in the safe zone. Barely. Good enough, though, so let’s get this thing carved and – oh my God one half of the turkey is gushing so much pink juice all over the counter that it looks like I just murdered the Kool-Aid man! Oh yeah!? Oh no!
It was about this time that I was informed that the new oven “runs a little cold.” So does revenge, I thought to myself.
So anyway, I carved the non-gushing side of the bird – the obvious food-safe choice – and served it to the gathered guests who were doing a great job of masking their homicidal hunger thoughts. I then spent the night worrying that the police would arrive the next morning to find a house full of salmonella-poisoned corpses dressed in their merriest pyjamas. But it was a Christmas miracle – no one died!
Last week there was more excitement at my house as my wife had me try out a fancy new roasting pan for our Thanksgiving bird. I didn’t see any problems with the old roasting pan, but, well, you know. It was on sale, probably.
Halfway through, though, juice started jumping off the bird and into the pan, and then right back out of the pan and onto the floor of the oven. Then smoke filled the oven. Then smoke filled the house. That’s when I said, “Enough of this turkey business,” and headed to the park with my boys, leaving my wife with a few simple instructions – toss some potatoes in the pan, add a little water, open the windows, stop, drop and roll. In the end it was another holiday miracle – no one died!
But I’ve had just about enough of this fowl business.
Come Christmas, I’m going to talk to the deli man and see if we can’t come to an agreement on a nice market price.
And if I ever see that Henry VIII, I’m going to come at him with a carving knife and a handful of cranberry. At least I know the Pope will have my back.
Andy Prest is the sports editor for the North Shore News and writes a biweekly humour/lifestyle column. [email protected]
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