Dad's Home Cooking

I don't have any warm, cozy, over-the-river-and-through-the-woods childhood memories of Thanksgiving. I don't recall ever seeing my maternal grandmother cook anything, let alone a holiday dinner, and my paternal grandparents lived several hundred miles away. My father's brother and his family lived nearby, but he and his wife did not get on well with my parents. Also, with seven kids in our family, we really were not at the top of anyone's invitation list.

What I do think about at Thanksgiving is my father's cooking. He, not my mom, was the cook in the family. Oh, mom cooked the day-to-day stuff, spaghetti with bottled sauce, sloppy Joes, macaroni and cheese, and of course, fish sticks and tater tots on Fridays, but with a big family, she really did not have the time to enjoy cooking. Dad, on the other hand, loved to cook.

Dad was no gourmet, just a good basic cook, most of his skills having been learned in the Army, but he loved to improvise and experiment. He rarely made a dish the same way twice and he loved tweaking traditional recipes, which is why he made his Thanksgiving stuffing with saltine crackers. I have never seen anyone else do this, nor in all my years of reading cookbooks and food magazines have I ever seen a recipe like his.

He would start by boiling the neck and gizzards removed from the turkey along with an onion and some celery to make a stock. After they were cooked, he would remove the meat from the neck and reserve that for the gravy. The heart, liver etc., were chopped up for the stuffing.

Next he would crumble 4 sleeves of saltine crackers into a bowl, add diced celery and onion, an egg, a can of crushed pineapple, the gizzards, enough warm milk and melted butter to moisten the mix and some salt and pepper.

This was the basic recipe as I remember it, but of course there would be variations. Sometime he would add canned button mushrooms, or pureed cranberries, or chopped garlic.

I don't recall him adding herbs, which were rare in our house. I think we may have had a jar of Italian seasoning and some garlic powder that was used for doctoring up jarred pasta sauce, but that was it.

After the turkey was stuffed and in the oven, we would retire to the living room to watch the Macy's Thanksgiving parade until the first whiffs of roasting turkey began to waft through the house, then it was back to the kitchen. There were potatoes to be peeled and boiled, canned yams to be baked in a brown sugar coating (no marshmallows!) and frozen pumpkin pies to bake.

My favorite part of the Thanksgiving prep was the relish tray, which allowed me free reign at creative food presentation. There were the obligatory carrot and celery sticks of course, but also my grandmother's pickles, two kinds of olives (only seen in our house on holidays) and pickled herring for my parents ( we're Lithuanian, it's a tradition.)

Once the pies and yams were out of the oven, the potatoes were mashed, the turkey was resting on it's platter and the frozen green beans were on the boil, it was time to make the gravy.

Once again, dad had his own unique way with this recipe. The cooked meat from the turkey neck would be pulverized in the blender with a little of the cooled broth reserved from cooking the gizzards. This would be scraped into the turkey drippings that were simmering on the stove. After measuring out the amount of flour he deemed necessary for thickening the gravy, my father would mix it with enough stock to make a paste and add that to the dripping. He would then whisk in a little bit of stock at a time until the gravy was just right for pouring. While he was working on this I would be sneaking bits of crisp, roasted skin off the turkey, a habit I have kept to this day.

After I left home and began my gypsy lifestyle, I never did make it back home for Thanksgiving. I was there for other holidays, of course, but never Thanksgiving for varied and sundry reasons. I began hosting my own eclectic Thanksgivings following my father's example of experimentation and improvisation, but I always called home to see what dad was putting in the stuffing that year.

Sadly, my father passed way 12 years ago, but his stuffing and gravy live on as legend and are given pride of place in our family cookbook. My brothers and sisters, their families and my mom all still live pretty close to each other and still get together at Thanksgiving. I know this pleases dad and I promise I'll make a point of getting back there one of these Thanksgivings too, and I'll be sure to make the saltine stuffing.