November 2008

My Turkey

BY TOM SCHADE, MINISTER, FIRST  UNITARIAN CHURCH OF WORCESTER,  MASSACHUSETTS

I remembered this year why I don’t like to make turkeys for Thanksgiving. 

I had not made one for several years.  We have been taking the “anything but a turkey option” for Thanksgiving. We have had the overpriced brown sugar encrusted, spiral cut hams from the baked ham boutiques. We have had overpriced roasts of beef. We have dined in fancy overpriced French restaurants, and even in an Italian restaurant, which raised its prices for the occasion. 

I am not sure why I resist making a roast turkey for Thanksgiving; I just do.

This year, however, someone recommended to us that we buy a turkey at the local grocery store. It was assured to us that  it had the very best turkeys imaginable, and that they were suitably overpriced, so that, at least, one tradition would be maintained. So that’s what we did.

I had to go to the store a week in advance and speak with the turkey consultant at the special turkey order desk.  And there, after a short interview, our family was matched with a suitable Thanksgiving turkey. 

Our turkey was a splendid specimen.  It had an excellent resume, and came with references. It had avoided the temptations of drugs and chemicals and was as pure as the driven snow. It was represented to me that it had spent its life strolling about the great open plains, grazing across the range where the deer and the antelope play (and the sky is not cloudy all day), doing whatever young, innocent and touchingly naïve turkeys do.  

Had our children been younger, I would have engaged this turkey as a governess for them.

On Thursday, I got out my Betty Crocker’s Cookbook, the one with the big pictures, and read the instructions for roasting the turkey. 

I have to tell you at this point that I have one of those ovens that come with a temperature probe. You stick this thermometer into the turkey, and it turns off the oven when the bird is perfectly cooked. Could it be any easier?

I hooked everything up, set the oven and put my brand new roasting pan, holding this tender, innocent yet outdoorsy turkey in to roast.  Betty Crocker said that it should take three to four hours.

90 minutes later, the alarm goes off. 

The turkey is done, according to the thermometer. How could this be? Well, it looks golden brown on the outside, but that doesn’t tell you whether it is cooked down in the innards. And it is only half way through the recommended time. Perhaps the temperature probe is not accurate. Perhaps I didn’t sink the probe into just the right place in the turkey. (“Next year,” I say to myself, “you should buy a kitchen model X-Ray machine that will guide your thermometer placement more accurately.”) Perhaps my oven is too hot. I am perplexed.

So, I decide to cook the turkey some more. After all, the rest of the meal is not yet done, and not everyone is ready to eat. It seemed like a rational decision at the time. On the one hand, I had the high-tech oven, with its well-engineered temperature probe, telling me it was done. It even showed me the internal temperature of the turkey with a digital display, in case I was unable to squint enough to read a regular thermometer. On the other hand, I had a vague intuition, knowledge beyond all rational knowing, that it just couldn’t be fully cooked yet. 

So, I cooked the turkey for another hour. After all, if I believed in empirical evidence, I would have been called to another profession.

The result, of course, was that our Thanksgiving feast was splendid. The Schades gathered around the groaning board; we expressed our great gratitude for all our blessings, which included the chance to live close to one another, the peace that reigns in our family, our shared sense of purpose, our good health and fortune. Surely, we are blessed. The food was delicious and plentiful, with one tiny exception: the turkey was kind of dry. As in, Iraq is kind of dry. You didn’t really slice this turkey; it sort of crumbled when touched. The best strategy for eating it was to try to glue the turkey dust together with a lot of gravy so it wouldn’t blow off your fork on the way to your mouth.

Later on, during the cleanup stage of the meal, I did find the special roasting instructions that came with my very special turkey. It turns out that because the turkey is so fresh, so natural, so healthy, so close to the Platonic ideal form of turkey-ness, it cooks more quickly. Naturally, my 1987 Betty Crocker’s Cookbook with the big pictures had not kept up with these developments. Apparently the only thing Betty Crocker has over Martha Stewart is that she was not in prison.

There are, of course, many lessons to be learned from this tragic tale. I’m just not sure what they are. Perhaps simply that there is such a thing as too much striving for perfection, and that gratitude is warranted even when perfection evades our grasp. Or maybe just that when Thanksgiving rolls around, any one of us can end up being the turkey.