Philadelphia’s week of inclement weather has not so far proved particularly picturesque. But it has reminded me that I have photographs from the much more beautiful ice and snow I enjoyed a few weeks back, when I was in Central Pennsylvania for Thanksgiving. Here are two images:
The first features an indistinct Sarah, and the second puts me in mind of Snow White.
(Both are best viewed large.)
A little while ago, I posted this guide to gifts for your friends and family in the 2013 holiday season. And I told you that by clicking through and purchasing any of them — or even by clicking this link to get to Amazon.com and then buying anything at all — you’d be supporting Twice Cooked, and helping me out with stuff like hosting costs for the year to come.
I stand by those recommendations, and I stand by that rationale.
Chanukah is — alas — almost over. But the season of gift-giving has only just begun. As I gaze down into my crystal ball, the shape of the rest of December comes sharply into focus. I see cheerful holiday parties at work. I hear the clinking sounds of champagne toasts, shared with good friends. I smell the boozy spiciness of eggnog, sipped around the fire with family from far and near.
And above all — at all of these gatherings — I see presents.
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the term inspissated is an adjective meaning: brought to a thick consistence; thickened.
I mention it because in the 1777 volume, A Voyage Toward the South Pole, Captain James Cook speaks of having been given several barrels of inspissated wort — syrup of unfermented beer — to carry aboard the H. M. Bark Endeavour as it sailed to the South Pacific and around the world. It was thought, he writes, that the syrup would require to be fermented with yeast, in the usual way of making beer.
But things do not, apparently, always go as planned at sea. So active was this inspissated wort — because of the heat of the weather, and the agitation of the ship — that it reached the highest state of fermentation all on its own, and evaded all our endeavours to stop it.
If this juice could be kept from fermenting, Cook writes, it certainly would be a most valuable article at sea. But alas. It was not to be.
Those same shipboard conditions that proved so beneficial to the aging of Madeira wine made this particular fermentation experiment a spectacular, perhaps explosive, failure.
And the sailors — poor sailors — were left with a sticky, beery mess to clean.
There’s a moment in Edith Wharton’s piercingly funny, devastatingly beautiful novel, The Age of Innocence, when Mr. Sillerton Jackson — consummate dinner-guest and even more consummate gossip — weighs the relative burdens and benefits of dining in the home of the Archer family. The food, he muses, is inevitably far from good. But the conversation is sure to be fascinating. And at least — luckily, he thinks — the Archer Madeira had gone round the Cape.
I’ve read The Age of Innocence many times over the years, and even taught it. But that comment — that at least the Madeira had gone round the Cape — has always confused me. Because what I’ve always known about Madeira wine is that it is very sweet (sort of like port), and that it is either very bad or very expensive (neither of which holds a whole lot of appeal). And nothing else about it has seemed particularly relevant to my life, or to my tastes.
The moment of truth is upon us, Thanksgiving cooks. Now is the time for a frenetic flurry of brining birds and baking bread, looking up last minute formulae for oyster dressing and sweet potato pie. At this late date, there’s little I can do to soothe your jangled nerves. But I can at least do this.
For your convenience, here is an index of Twice Cooked’s Thanksgiving recipes from this year and last:
And here are a couple of other recipes that you might find useful (and seasonally appropriate) as you plan your Thanksgiving meal:
Happy Thanksgiving, everyone! And happy Chanukah, too!
And when all the food is eaten and all the dishes are done, remember to support this site by clicking through here to Amazon.com
I would appreciate it if you would all take the word ‘pumpkin’ in pumpkin mousse to be a metonym for a larger category, rather than a thing unto itself. I’m not trying to mislead you about the content of this dessert. You could, in fact, make it using a pumpkin. But this is a companion piece to my recent entry on winter squash purée. And as such, I feel it is my duty to inform you that in my version, there is nary a proper pumpkin to be found.
As I said in that post, the issue is not that I have any antipathy toward pumpkins. Far from it. But as I look out at the landscape of tough, warty, leather-skinned gourds at my culinary disposal, I find that there are lots of better ones — even to use in dessert.
Ever since Elizabeth and Hana each made their posts about foraging last summer, I have been unable to turn off the part of my brain that notices interesting mushrooms. This one I found poking out of some leaves along Philadelphia’s Forbidden Drive. I have no earthly idea whether it is edible. But I wouldn’t.
Pumpkin pie, dear readers, is one of my favorite autumn treats. But suspect squash purée, excavated from a sealed tin can labelled with a happy turkey, or a beaming grandmotherly face, or some other graphic designed to distract from the disturbing vagueness and small print of the tin’s actual ingredient list is a thing I find somewhat less agreeable. I’ve mentioned here before that dairy — like sweetened condensed milk — that is designed to be stored at room temperature disturbs me. And pumpkin glop is another one of those things that fits into the same general category in my mind.
Luckily, there is a way to produce squash purée that does not involve a can opener. And while it admittedly takes more time, it is hardly an arduous task.
As you consider this turkey breast roulade, I’d like you to think about two possible scenarios.
First: you’re having a small Thanksgiving. Maybe the budget is a little tight this year — maybe you got hit by the recent government shutdown — and the idea of flying to another state, and contending with a hotel, and managing the maintenance of hypothetical progeny is more than you can bear. And so you invite four or five friends, similarly stranded, to your house to share a meal, a couple of bottles of off-dry riesling, and — if you’re absolutely nothing like me — the gladiatorial rumble of two matched teams playing at American football.
It’s a comfortable Thanksgiving. Not elaborate, but enough.