Gobbling up for Thanksgiving

“The king and high priest of all the festivals was the autumn Thanksgiving. When the apples were all gathered and the cider was all made, and the yellow pumpkins were rolled in from many a hill in billows of gold, and the corn was husked, and the labors of the season were done, and the warm, late days of Indian Summer came in, dreamy, and calm, and still, with just enough frost to crisp the ground of a morning, but with warm traces of benignant, sunny hours at noon, there came over the community a sort of genial repose of spirit-a sense of something accomplished.”

-Harriet Beecher Stowe

Thanksgiving is undeniably my most favourite holiday meal. For some it's Christmas and for others it's Easter, but there's something special about seeing the bounty of year's harvest end with a glorious meal of thanks. Christmas always seems to be such a hectic whirlwind schedule of over indulgence and too much entertaining leading up to that special day which is usually anti-climatic. But with Thanksgiving, there never seems to be the pressures one has with the Yuletime holidays.

As Ms. Stowe mentions gloriously with her beautiful prose, Thanksgiving comes during a season of great colour and harvest abundance which we have much to thank for. For myself, having the ubiquitous golden roasted turkey for Thanksgiving dinner is usually far much appreciated than when it's featured at Christmas. With today's over-hybrid massive turkeys, leftovers of the bird normally last to the start of the festive season and then it's time to start all over again!

When those early Pilgrims in America celebrated their first Thanksgiving dinner, the wild turkey was cooked on an open fire and fresh cider was the accompanying beverage. Whatever their ethnic heritage, almost all North Americans eat turkey on their respective national holiday, but our domestic bird has become a very different creature. Because most consumers prefer white meat (I'm not one of them fortunately!), turkeys have been bred and injected with antibiotics until their breasts are so huge that they can't get close enough to mate and have to be artificially inseminated. After all the pre-Thanksgiving massacre, all the plucking and drawing is done for us and some birds are even injected with a yellow fluid to impart “buttery” flavour with no bother to baste yourself! The once open fire pit has transgressed into a microwave or convection oven, and the insertion of a pop-up thermometer has spared us the problem of when the bird is done. When it comes to turkeys, the more things change, the more things change…

Although turkey meat is a reasonably inexpensive meat, the consumer demand for larger birds have now created over developed poultry, almost too big to stand on their fragile feet. Fortunately, the trend for organic or free-range turkeys is increasing compared to the vast commercial grown varietals. Not only do you get a more flavourful meat, but the birds are treated in a much more humane environment. At a recent visit to one of Vancouver's specialty turkey farms, J.D. Farms, I was impressed with how the farmers, the Froese family, were taking conscious efforts and a commitment into producing a superior high quality bird. One of the farm's newest ventures is growing a varietal of wild turkey, a bird our first explorers would have been treated to. Perhaps, the trend for simplicity is coming back to a full circle and soon we might be having what the Pilgrims originally ate, cooked over an open flame!