Thanksgiving and the Blessings of Gustatory Diversity

The food on our tables this holiday inspires gratitude for the American melting pot.

T hose of us who grew up watching the classic Charlie Brown cartoons remember well exactly what went wrong with poor Chuck’s Thanksgiving celebration. To be fair, the fellow was forced to invite a whole crew to dinner, despite his lack of culinary skill and adult supervision. But no excuses! His guests were right to be let down when they discovered that he and Snoopy had crafted a meal of popcorn, pretzels, toast, and jellybeans.

The moral of the Charlie Brown Thanksgiving story is that the holiday is about those with whom you celebrate, not what you eat. But I think most of us would’ve been similarly disappointed to sit down to such fare at the Thanksgiving table. Because as much as Thanksgiving centers first and foremost around the many things for which we’re grateful, this holiday is also focused on food.

It’s been this way since the beginning of the American tradition. Though Thanksgiving only became an official U.S. holiday in 1863, we trace its origins back to when the Mayflower Pilgrims celebrated having survived their first winter in the New World. From that celebration up to today, Thanksgiving has always been about these two central elements: gratitude, and the food we eat to mark the occasion.

These two elements were part of even that first Thanksgiving, when the Pilgrims were grateful in large part for food, for having learned how to grow what they needed to sustain themselves in this foreign land.

As Melanie Kirkpatrick recounts in Thanksgiving: The Holiday at the Heart of the American Experience, two eyewitness accounts of the first Thanksgiving, written by William Bradford and Edward Winslow, “make much of the bounty on hand in New England, an abundance that presages the dining tables at modern-day Thanksgiving dinners.”

Bradford celebrated the “great store of wild turkeys” and the various types of fish available, while Winslow focused on the rich natural resources of the New World in contrast to what had been available in the country they had left behind. That first Thanksgiving was a celebration not only of food but also of its diversity and the joy to be found in learning to cook, eat, and enjoy something new.

Several centuries later, Thanksgiving, more than any other holiday in the U.S., is a food lover’s dream. Even if you don’t happen to be a big fan of turkey, there’s something for everyone at the Thanksgiving table. In fact, even the question of turkey is up for grabs; I have friends who forgo turkey entirely and celebrate with steak, on the rationale that Thanksgiving is more about enjoying what you eat than about carrying on the turkey tradition.

Meanwhile, the striking regional diversity of the Thanksgiving meal epitomizes what’s always been at the heart of America: a melding of cultures and ways of life, learning to embrace and appreciate that which is new to us.

At my family’s Thanksgiving table, we have plenty of the standard fare: a turkey roasted to golden-brown, a pile of mashed potatoes (never riced or blended into a purée), rolls, and some sort of green vegetable.

But we also have slightly less common favorites that appear every year. My personal favorite is an Italian sausage and cornbread stuffing, always cooked outside the turkey to avoid the inevitable sogginess. And, even more unusual, we always have dirty rice, a heavily spiced Cajun dish made with chicken gizzards. Since I was young, my unique contribution to the meal has been a riff on cranberry sauce, inspired by a recipe on the back of the Ocean Spray cranberry bag: cranberry-orange relish. (If you try it yourself, make sure you use only a quarter of the sugar the recipe calls for, and whatever you do, don’t purée.)

That’s how we fill our table, but if you take a look around the U.S., you’ll find raging debates over what constitutes the proper Thanksgiving meal — and some of these questions are especially divisive.

In some parts of the country, it isn’t Thanksgiving unless there’s green-bean casserole, a dish that has neither appeared on our holiday table nor passed my lips. But according to Campbell’s, which holds the coveted title of having invented green-bean casserole, their online recipe receives 4 million views each Thanksgiving Day, so someone out there appears to be enjoying it.

Then there’s the dispute over the proper preparation of sweet potatoes. In our house, cut into wedges and roasted until dark brown in the turkey’s pan drippings is the only way to go. But many people swear by a casserole topped with marshmallows or pecans, a preparation that strikes me as more fitting for dessert than a dinner side.

While reading through food magazines earlier this month, I came across a few articles celebrating Thanksgiving’s gustatory diversity. Bon Appétit featured recipe developer Peter Som, whose Thanksgiving table has always been heavily influenced by his Chinese heritage.

“We had the turkey, the sweet potatoes with marshmallows on top, and then steamed gai lan or bok choy and my grandmother’s no mai fan — sticky rice studded with lap cheong,” Som writes of his youth. “It was so focused on what, to me, cooking is all about: bringing people together.”

Last year, Som’s Thanksgiving featured char siu, a Chinese barbecue pork, and his rendition of his grandmother’s no mai fan. This year, he plans to roll the char siu in duxelles mushrooms and turn it into Wellington, cook sweet potatoes with Chinese five-spice, and roast Brussels sprouts in gochujang. In addition to another round of no mai fan, he’ll make bread pudding with a milk-tea custard, a nod to his family’s Hong Kong origins.

I was thinking of Som when I came across a story Kirkpatrick shares in her book, about visiting a school in Long Island City, N.Y., to discuss Thanksgiving with the children of immigrants, whose families incorporated their favorite home-country dishes into the meal.

“A Polish girl mentioned pierogies. A Chinese boy said his family would eat rice,” Kirkpatrick writes. “When I asked whether it really matters what you eat on Thanksgiving, I got a bunch of you-gotta-be-kidding looks. ‘Yes! It’s tradition!’ one student shouted out. ‘Remember the history of the country,’ another student admonished.”

This seems to be a common theme in the American understanding of this holiday. In Bon Appétit, Stanley Tucci says his mother insisted on serving a big, traditional Italian antipasto on Thanksgiving, even though there was a big meal ahead. “There’d be cured meats like prosciutto and salami, cheeses, roasted peppers; there might be a raw seafood, almost like a ceviche,” Tucci explains.

This reminds me of my father’s stories about how, growing up in a big Italian family in the Midwest, his Thanksgivings always featured antipasto, a large helping of pasta and meatballs, and Italian wedding soup in addition to the usual fare. One generation later, he and my mother created a new Thanksgiving tradition: including Cajun food and leaving out the pasta, probably on the rationale that we ate spaghetti and meatballs every Sunday and didn’t need to revisit it on this particular Thursday as well.

With these stories in mind, this Thanksgiving, I plan to ignore the voices insisting that there’s something shameful about being American and about our history. Instead, I’ll let the food on our table remind me of the glories of the American tradition, and how grateful I am to be part of it.