Previous Article | Back to Media Index | Next Article
It's OK to Meddle with
Thanksgiving Meal
By Rachel Travers, Globe Correspondent,
11/21/02
Tweaking the traditional family Thanksgiving dinner menu can be a disaster,
unless it's done deftly. Expectations run high, and meddling with the menu is
dangerous. Whatever mother made is usually what the family wants, and it's
amazing how many families still expect candied sweet potatoes with miniature
marshmallows or even green beans with mushroom soup and fried onion rings.
Creating new traditions is hard to do, but not impossible. Here are a few
suggestions from local chefs, culled from their own backgrounds, menus, and
family offerings, that might inspire you to add or change just one item of your
own holiday repast.
For his restaurant's holiday menu, Eric Brennan, chef at Harvest restaurant in
Cambridge, has turned to the past for Thanksgiving guidance. Inspired by his
Plimouth Plantation maternal ancestor ByGod Eggleston, Brennan researched the
early celebration - initially called ''Feast,'' not ''Thanksgiving.'' He
suggests a first course of a warm, woodland mushroom salad that's more elegant
than early foragers might have made, but is a nod to ingredients they might have
found. (Tip: Make twice the amount of sauteed wild mushrooms than you'll need;
then, over the weekend perhaps, add a little cream and fresh sage to make a
fettucine sauce.)
Last year, Brennan didn't have to work on Thanksgiving for the first time in
years: ''We didn't have days surrounding it to prepare, and the kids couldn't
care less about turkey, which we eat a lot, so we each had a 21/2-pound lobster
and had a great family day.''
Julia Shanks, chef and owner of Interactive Cuisine, introduced wild rice
pancakes to her own family's traditions of turkey, stuffing, peas, and what she
calls ''hockey puck biscuits.''
''I decided to do a Native American dinner,'' Shanks said, so she turned to a
cookbook called ''Spirit of the Harvest, North American Indian cooking'' by
Beverly Cox and Martin Jacobs (Stewart Tabori & Chang). She added new ''old''
elements such as sunchokes, sage bread, and sunflower seed soup to the standard
meal. ''Now the family regularly expects my wild rice pancakes, baked squash
instead of sweet potatoes, and homemade tamales.''
Jody Adams, chef and co-owner of Rialto in Cambridge and co-owner of blu in
Boston, still works off her mother's original Thanksgiving menu. ''Our
traditional holiday meal was fresh roast turkey; Pepperidge Farm bread stuffing
with onions and celery; mashed sweet potatoes with marshmallows, although we did
graduate to sliced oranges with fresh ginger; a classic cranberry sauce that
pairs the acidic berries with an orange and sugar, all ground together in a food
processor; creamed onions; green beans with almonds; and pies,'' Adams said.
''And the final thing that is always on the menu is coleslaw made with chopped
cabbage and fresh mayonnaise. That was my father's thing.''
Adams now brines her turkey, ''and I've added fennel and more herbs to my
mother's basic stuffing, as well as fresh apple cider for the moisture.''
''In the Hands of a Chef,'' the cookbook Adams wrote with husband Ken Rivard,
offers several contemporary variations of some dishes that sound more delicious
than radical and could please family members more than distress them. They
include roasted vegetables with fresh herbs and pomegranate seeds or pumpkin and
apple tart. They write, ''As soon as a holiday food tradition begins to feel
oppressive, it's time to give it a rest, if only temporarily.''
So this year, try tweaking Thanksgiving with a new menu item. It may provide a
little something else to be grateful for.
This story ran on page H5 of the Boston Globe on 11/21/2002.
© Copyright 2002 Globe Newspaper Company.