The Thanksgiving Backlash

All the Thanksgiving food magazine issues and podcast episodes have now hit the streets, and I’ve noticed a bit of a trend developing: Thanksgiving fatigue.

When Adam Sachs, the editor in chief of Saveur, joined Hanna and me on a recent Winnow podcast, he revealed that this was the second year in a row he had elected not to put a turkey on the cover of the November issue—a decision that originally caused quite a bit of consternation among the editorial team. (This year, they happily went with an entire issue dedicated to pasta.)

Earlier this week, Dan Pashman released what he promised would be “The Last Sporkful Thanksgiving Special Ever” on his Sporkful Podcast. As much as he and his team love the actual holiday, they found themselves dreading doing another Thanksgiving show because they didn’t have anything new to say.

One of Pashman’s guests, Christopher Kimball, late of America’s Test Kitchen and now of Milk Street, scoffed at the notion of ever getting off what he termed the “karmic turkey wheel.” He admitting that he had toyed with 86ing the turkey this year for Milk Street, but in the end—after going through a dozen duds—they came up with a creative recipe using a smoky lapsang souchong tea rub that turned out great.

Is this what we poor food writers have been reduced to? Rubbing down oversized poultry with fancy tea?

Another of Pashman’s guests, Mimi Sheraton, offered what I thought to be far more sage advice: don’t feel compelled to keep reinventing Thanksgiving each year. Part of the whole appeal of Thanksgiving is its sameness—the turkey, the dressing, the cranberry sauce, the mashed potatoes. Does anyone care if you roast the turkey this year the exact same way you did last year? Probably not. Odds are the last time they had roast turkey was a full year ago.

There’s much to be said for sticking with the tried and true. Susan Stamberg of NPR has been repeating for listeners the same “Mama Stamberg’s Cranberry Relish” year after year—something her mother got from Craig Claiborne’s New York Times column in 1959. It’s a simple five-ingredient recipe and doesn’t even look particularly tasty (Stamberg herself calls it “Pepto Bismol pink), but that’s not the point. By now it’s just a tradition.

So maybe instead of wracking our brains trying to come up with something new or going to the other extreme and rejecting Thanksgiving altogether, we food writers should just dig back into the archives and re-run an oldie but goodie. I bet no one will remember that they’ve seen it before.