I remember that when I was a kid Thanksgiving was always my mom’s favorite holiday and she would begin preparing the meal days in advance, lovingly making the same menu every year: Roast turkey with stuffing. Mashed potatoes with gravy. Mashed sweet potatoes with marshmallows on top. Green bean casserole with cream of mushroom soup and fried onions on top.
Jellied cranberry sauce was traditional, as was a very peculiar “salad” called “ambrosia” that was made with green jello, cream cheese, maraschino cherries and crushed pineapple. To finish it off was pumpkin pie with whipped cream. Looking back, the hallmark of this dinner was not only that you did not need a knife to eat it, you did not even need teeth.
I was remembering that long-gone time when my mother would spend days in the kitchen as I was reading an article detailing the abject dangers of stuffing the Thanksgiving turkey. In a tone of breathless alarm, the author was citing the many ways that turkey stuffing can kill if the cook is foolhardy enough to actually roast it inside the turkey. I chuckled slightly as I read and when I came to the part about how serving a stuffed turkey was akin to “dietary terrorism” I laughed out loud because by that reasoning, my mother should be serving a life sentence at a culinary Guantanamo.
My mother’s Thanksgiving stuffing was one of her claims to fame. She would start it on the Tuesday before Thanksgiving. It was made with almost a dozen eggs and several quarts of scalded milk, all mixed with the bread she had torn into chunks by hand and then dried on the back porch. She added massive amounts of onions sautéed in butter and plenty of parsley and black pepper and spices and mixed it all together.
Because of the sautéed onions and the scalded milk, the resulting concoction was steaming hot and she would put the pan of hot stuffing on the back porch to cool for several hours. Then, on Tuesday night she would stuff the turkey. Because we are a large family, the turkey was generally between 18 to 20 pounds, almost too big for the stove and certainly too big for the refrigerator, so after the turkey was stuffed she would put it on the back porch until Thursday morning.
Now, my mother’s attitude towards refrigeration was always fairly casual, and keeping cooked food on the back porch seems foolhardy today I know that no one ever got sick on her stuffing.
I have a couple of theories as to why. Perhaps in the time between stuffing the turkey and cooking it, the dressing fermented and the resulting antibodies killed any pathogens that may have been lurking. It is also possible, in the heat of our back porch, that the stuffing began to compost and the resulting heat killed off any bacteria.
Actually, either of these scenarios seems plausible because by today’s standards we should have all been very, very sick, if not actually dead, after every Thanksgiving dinner. But we weren’t.
It was last Thanksgiving, in a classic passing of the baton, that my mom was watching my big sister make the dressing in her surgically sterile kitchen, and then carefully cook it in a separate casserole dish. “Why don’t you just stuff the turkey?” Mom asked and my sister patiently explained why she couldn’t.
Mom laughed dismissively: “Just cut the turkey on my old wood cutting board,” she said. “Everyone knows the wood kills any germs.” And she walked off, shaking her head and chuckling quietly.