My Porcinis and Sage, Their Kugel and Casserole

At Thanksgiving, I Know Now That I Can Add, but Not Subtract

My panic about cooking my first Thanksgiving began a year before I ever went near the stove. I'd come home early from Boston to help my grandmother, who had single-handedly made our holiday dinner for 30 years, by shopping for the meal for 12. Grandma would cook.

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I went to Whole Foods Market and dutifully checked off everything on her list. As I unpacked the bags, my grandmother picked up a hunk of Parmesan cheese and said, "Why'd you get this?"

"It's for the zucchini casserole," I answered. "You said to get Parmesan."

"This isn't the kind I like," she said.

"Don't worry, I'll grate it for you."

"No, this isn't what I wanted. I like the kind in the green can."

I inherited my love of cooking from Grandma, but let's just say we have very different tastes. She likes chow mein, grilled chicken -- hold the salt -- and Kraft Parmesan in the green can, while I swoon over the stuffed dates at Komi and have spent 15 minutes debating the merits of Parmigiano-Reggiano made with spring milk. (Would the spring cheese's grassy flavor be overwhelmed by that fig spread? Perhaps a manchego would be better.)

Every family faces the trauma of the Thanksgiving handoff. After years of having the same food at the same house with the same people, someone -- in this case me -- has the audacity to make a change. No more chestnut stuffing, maple sweet potatoes, fill in your favorite dish here. Then the other people -- in this case, my sisters -- get angry. They are, after all, awfully attached to the zucchini casserole.

"More than any other, Thanksgiving is a traditional holiday," said Barbara Haber, a food historian and former curator of books at Harvard University's Schlesinger Library. Change another holiday meal and no one would notice, "but Thanksgiving is about capturing the past and maintaining it."

As a food writer with strong opinions on the subject, I wanted to put my own stamp on the meal. As a cook, I wanted to please the army of palates that is my family: Dad is a meat-and-potatoes guy; Mom prefers everything low-fat; and my sisters, now longtime New Yorkers, don't understand why it can't all just be delivered. Most important, as a granddaughter, I wanted to show respect for tradition. The whole thing was starting to make my head spin.

Actually, some dishes had disappeared over the years. I vaguely remember eating stuffed mushroom caps in the 1970s. The Jell-O mold finally vanished from our Thanksgiving buffet in 1987 after someone I will not name concocted a combination of green Jell-O, apricots and sour cream. The flavor was fine, but the color was Army green, which prompted my uncle to name it " 'Platoon' mold" after the hit Vietnam movie. We haven't eaten it since.

So that September, I started thumbing through cookbooks and scouring the Internet for recipes. The highlights of Grandma's dinner had always included: turkey breast -- "I don't like dark meat" -- basted in orange juice, along with white-bread stuffing, zucchini casserole and cranberry apple crisp. My fantasy meal -- served, of course, in my dream loft apartment -- looked more like this: butternut squash soup with seared scallops, turkey with cider herb gravy, warm mushroom salad with pecorino and hazelnuts, and Brussels sprouts with glazed pecans.