My Porcinis and Sage, Their Kugel and Casserole
At Thanksgiving, I Know Now That I Can Add, but Not Subtract

By Jane Black
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, November 14, 2007

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.

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.

What menu would satisfy both of us?

"Do what you want," my friend Regan advised. Regan had faced a similar situation the previous Christmas when she entertained her father and sister for the first time in her one-bedroom apartment. They told Regan not to fuss, but she ignored them and went all out, roasting a leg of lamb with rosemary and black olives, whipping up creamy polenta, even baking a pie from scratch. "They would have been happy with takeout Chinese," Regan remembered. "I did it all to make myself happy." And she was.

"Do what they want," warned my friend Lorin. She had given that year's Passover dinner an upgrade and felt the family's wrath. Instead of the matzoh ball soup from the box, she'd slaved over a homemade saffron chicken soup with spinach matzoh balls. Her husband declared it "avant-garde," then added sarcastically that it had helped him to "push his culinary boundaries" -- even if he'd been happier right where he was.

For once in my life, I decided to listen to my dad, whose mantra is "everything in moderation." Some things would stay: my stepmother Anne's carrot-sweet potato puree, and Grandma's cranberry apple crisp, which I love as a leftover. Ditto my aunt's kugel, which inexplicably has always been part of our Thanksgiving table. But I was hellbent on making Brussels sprouts, shredded and sauteed in butter to tame the bitterness -- and the inevitable complaints. And instead of my hoity-toity mushroom salad, I dressed up the stuffing with porcini mushrooms, hazelnuts and sage, and I tossed carrots in an orange Moroccan vinaigrette. And I roasted a whole turkey, not just the breast, and basted it in sage butter and cider.

The cooking took two days. At 4 p.m. I set everything on the table and held my breath. One by one, family members came in to fill their plates. They oohed and ahhed and were generally thankful, if only that they hadn't had to do any of the cooking. Grandma was the last in line.

"Oh, Janie, it looks beautiful," she said, taking a little bit of everything. "What's in the stuffing?"

"Ummmm," I said nervously. "Porcini mushrooms."

"It smells delicious."

Why had I worried? In the fog of my food frenzy I had forgotten that Grandma thinks everything I do is perfect.

As we sat down to eat, everyone raised a glass to the cook. "I'm so glad you like it," I said. "Even if I didn't make the zucchini casserole."

"Oh, yeah," said my sister Hilary. "How come you didn't make the zucchini? I love that zucchini."

"I can't believe you didn't make the zucchini," my sister Kate chimed in.

This year, guess what's back on the menu?