Family Touches

Mingling Tastes And Traditions

Steven, left, and Vladimir Davidovas, with the Beltsville family's vegetarian turkey loaf and stuffing. (By Mark Finkenstaedt For The Washington Post)

"It's too dry," Jae Young Noh said with a laugh. "We had to do something about that."

What the Bethesda woman did was take ownership of the classic Thanksgiving turkey. And she did it with banana peels.

The secret hit her one day 10 years ago when she and her husband and their two young girls were living in Bayside, Queens, and preparing their annual 25-pound bird for relatives, neighbors and church friends. The plan was to baste and foil-tent it to hold in moisture. But then she spotted daughters Josephine and Monica eating bananas in the kitchen.

She saw the peels in their hands, and the idea came in a flash. Rather than throw away the beautiful yellow skins, she could use them on her turkey to help keep it from drying out, no foil required.

Noh's appreciation of the humble banana stems from her own childhood.

"Korea was poor, and we never had them in my house when I was a kid," said Noh, 49, who moved to the United States from Seoul in 1980. "I had my first banana when I was 15 years old. I was at a party. It was so exciting."

On the Thanksgiving bird, the bananas are an unforgettable sight, the brilliant wraps draped over the ridge of the turkey's breast. As the bird cooks, the peels slowly darken and eventually turn jet black. The kitchen is slowly suffused with the scent of caramelized bananas. Noh's turkey is bread-stuffed and American in every other way, with just a hint of fruitiness transferring to the bird itself.

For Noh and many of the other 1 million immigrants the Census Bureau says live in the metropolitan area, the November feast incorporates the cuisines of the countries and cultures taking root in Washington.

"Everybody knows how to make American turkey," said Noh, who with her husband runs the Courtyard Cafe luncheonette in the West End. "We just had to make it better."

Across the Potomac River, in the Thanksgiving kitchen of Amiza Said of Centreville, the problem was blandness, not dryness.

"My turkey was so flat," Said recalled. When her mother visited in 1992, "she and I wanted to find a way for turkey that tasted like Africa, the flavors I learned as a girl."

Said separates the skin from the breast meat and stuffs the pocket with a rub mixture of cardamom, cinnamon, turmeric, garam masala, garlic, black pepper and coriander. Then she sprinkles the bird with lemon juice and lets it rest in the refrigerator to absorb the flavors.