Martha and I came to an agreement on Thanksgiving many years ago. We don’t do turkey. A turkey is too much for two people, especially the way US industrial turkeys have had their beasts bloated by “science” into the big and tasteless tits real ‘mericans secretly enjoy wrapping their lips around (but are hell, of course, for the turkeys to carry around, on account of they drag on the ground and such).
Anyway, our tradition is this: rich or poor, we will always have a no-holds-barred, blow-out Thanksgiving feast. Often this meal consisted of things you didn’t see very often in the supermarkets—yummy natural things that allow us to really give thanks for the animals that had given their lives for our pleasure and sustenance. We might target guinea fowl, pheasant, rabbit—and throw in a crustacean or two, for which we’d make a pilgrimage to the sea for of course.
As you can imagine if you’re American, all this required a sacco di soldi, or s**tload of cash, not to mention many long pilgrimages, mostly because the industrialists haven’t yet gotten around to making cheap and tasteless white meat out of quail, or give them enormous breasts, so they’re rare enough in the market that you pay dearly for them.
Problem is, this year we’re spending Thanksgiving in Tuscany. All of the foods I’ve mentioned, the exotic “game” birds, the crustaceans fresh from the sea, and other comestibles like truffles, porcini mushrooms, and good wine, are all normal foods here. You don’t hunt them down in specialty stores, they practically come to you!
Take that prawny thing you see over there to the right trying to get you to look left. You go to the Fivizzano market to get your turnips and such, and there’s always the nice man inside the fish van just waiting. There is no stench of rotting fish. There are no Styrofoam trays, each with exactly the same number of shrimp in them, marinating away in a bacterial slime that came with them last week when they were trapped in their little Styrofoam coffins by a judicious encasement of saran wrap blithely applied by a snot-nosed kid fresh out of high school. No, they’re fresh from the sea, they’re on ice, and you can order as few as 1 of them. What a concept! And if you don’t know what something is or how to cook it, the fish guy actually knows!
We may make a pilgrimage today to Lunigiana Naturalmente. But it’s not the same. We’re not forced to go there by the lack of demand for good food by the population at large.
So Italy, shame on you. You’ve ruined our Thanksgiving ritual. Good food ought to be rare enough to be enjoyed only by the industrial elite and a couple of crazy people who’ve saved over the year to see what the rich could eat if they had taste. It’s cathartic, you know?
Otherwise, Thanksgiving is just no fun at all.
I leave you with a photo of the grilled prawns. Well, not really the prawns, the aftermath of shells. This kind of picture is what I always think of when I think of Italy, the remains of the meal doused in endless sunlight.
And this was in November. You know, the off season.
Anyway, Happy Thanksgiving. Don’t eat too much.