It’s All About the Gravy
She was damned good at it. For 60+ years Mom fixed Thanksgiving dinner, as well as Christmas, New Year’s, Easter, etc., full on, by herself, without batting an eye. With no fuss, no drama, no anxiety, that I can recall, about how it might turn out. She did not make it about her. It was not served with a flourish. She would not have been one to Instagram her finished dishes.
Mom’s not here for this holiday season. She passed in July, and it’s our first without her. It had actually been several years since she fixed a holiday dinner, her dementia and frailty having prevented her from doing so. We, her kids, had stepped up our game; most of us became quite good at pulling off the family Thanksgiving dinner, albeit with help. Yes, for us it has been a team effort, an it-takes-a-village effort, to pull off what Mom pretty much did in her sleep.
The menu, the main elements, was set early on, shortly after she and Dad married, and had not changed in decades. Which is not a bad thing. My dad, from Massachusetts, was used to a cracker dressing, which Mom never fixed for him; I think it would have just been mush. She introduced him to her Midwestern bread dressing (celery, onions, and lots of butter) and they never looked back. Never fooled around with cornbread, oyster or sausage stuffing, no apples or chestnuts or anything like that. Dad did ask Mom to fix the typical New England side dishes, all based on starchy New England root vegetables. Hardy New Englanders are like the Russians in this regard: get through the winter by eating starchy root vegetables. Like beets. The New England sides – turnip, rutabaga and squash - were all boiled, mashed and amended with butter, cream and even sugar. Because they’re bitter. Now, I appreciate some bitter, as in IPA beers, in which bitterness is quantified in “IBUs”: International Bitterness Units. Being a scientist, I love that someone has come up with a scale of bitterness in beer. These vegetables, though, are perhaps an acquired taste, but I love them. Especially the rutabaga, which is so fibrous that it takes twice as long as potatoes to soften by boiling.
But the key to the whole damn thing was, and is, the gravy, in my opinion. And Mom could have taught a master class in making gravy. Pouring off the drippings, separating the fat. Deglazing the pan. Making a roux out of the right amount of fat and flour. Browning the heck out of the flour, and then adding stock or potato-boiling water (my addition; it’s starch-laden and thickens the gravy) a little at a time. It’s a bit of an art, and getting it right can test a marriage. My brother Dan has gotten really good at this and the whole meal, by design. Thirty years ago he followed Mom around the kitchen as she made the Thanksgiving dinner, taking copious notes, and in fact he did this for several years. Now he even takes notes on how he fixes it every year. And has been known to fix as many as 56 cups of dressing to feed a crowd.
The decades Mom made this meal included cooking through some hiccups, such as when Dan broke his elbow in a Thanksgiving Day football game. He spent the night in the hospital, undergoing an operation which put three pins in his elbow (which kind of looked like turkey roasting pins, appropriately enough, and may be in his elbow still) and caused him to miss Thanksgiving dinner. Katie and Jim got married over a Thanksgiving weekend, and Mom fixed Thanksgiving turkey for so many out-of-town relatives we had to rent a park to hold the meal. Come to think of it, Dan broke his nose in a football game that day. Courtesy of his soon-to-be brother in law.
Mom’s appetite decreased with her dementia. Last year she just picked at the Thanksgiving meal, but perked up for pumpkin pie. Wide-eyed, we watched her eat a whole piece, including the whipped cream. After that we started giving her pumpkin pie for breakfast, just to get some calories in her. When Mom was home under hospice care, and all six of us kids were with her, we had a big turkey dinner – in July – because it is the most family of our family dinners. Dan led the way and we went all out. All the sides. Terry hadn’t had the full-on Coonan Thanksgiving dinner for decades, he says, and took full advantage. Went back for thirds. We were all pretty impressed. It’s been decades since I was able to do that – if I ever did.
Yesterday Katie led the way in fixing Thanksgiving dinner, in this Covid year, our first without Mom. Katie nailed it, too. Even the gravy. Mom was palpably gone, was not there, and is missed. I take some comfort in the fact that her kitchen is pretty much exactly the same as it has been for decades, so her presence is there. I know where everything is. The two big enamel roasting pans, one large enough to accommodate a very large turkey, and so large it didn’t fit in the oven until my dad, the engineer, removed the handles. The two large, banged-up aluminum pots that may have been used to sterilize baby bottles back in the day but then found new life for boiling potatoes, enough to feed a small army. Two gravy boats. The divided glass dish to hold both black and green olives, the crystal bowl for cranberry sauce. There’s even the little bottle of Gravy Quick Mom used to darken the gravy. That might be in the cupboard for quite some time.
My dad takes comfort in her continued presence as well. When Mom was failing, and spending most of her day in her room, Dan had dozens of pictures printed and put on her wall. Pictures of her youth, of growing up in Illinois; pictures of her McFadden family, of her courtship and early life with Dad, and, of course, of our family though the years. Dan’s hope was that they would jog her memory and get those synapses firing, and bring her comfort. As she passed we were sure that other McFaddens were in the room, welcoming Kay to the other side. Now Dad visits that room, not necessarily because it is a shrine to Mom, and to them – it is that. But Dad goes in there often to look at the pictures, and remember. And he speaks to her.
I see her presence in other ways. My recipe box has many recipes of my mom’s, some in her handwriting, and some others copied by Nora for me years and years ago. One recipe, or tenet, isn’t in there, but she taught me it nonetheless, by her actions: when you cook for someone, that’s love. Just get the gravy right.
