[Dialogue] A Good Article

[Jack Gilles]

Dear Colleagues,

Our friend here in India, Marguerite Theophil whom several of you have met, 
sent us this article which we thorougly enjoyed.  We think it says a lot 
about America at this time.  Enjoy.

Jack & Judy Gilles

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Hold The Turkey!

By Shoba Narayan

"Here, my dear," Mrs. Wilson said, handing me a brush. "You just dip the 
brush into this paste, and baste the turkey like so."

I watched her baste the bird with practiced strokes and tried not to turn 
away or wrinkle my nose. Being Indian, Hindu and vegetarian, I had never 
touched a turkey before. But Mrs. Wilson was working so hard to include me 
in her family's Thanksgiving I didn't have the heart to tell her that I felt 
queasy, not thankful, at the opportunity to baste. So baste I did, taking 
care not to let my fingers come in contact with any part of the bird.

The Wilsons were an old New England family who "adopted" me when I came to 
Mount Holyoke as a student 15 years ago. On Thanksgiving Day, Mr. Wilson 
picked me up at my dorm and drove me to their Colonial home, where relatives 
asked polite questions about India. Crystal decanters clinked by the 
fireplace as the men helped themselves to drinks and discussed golf, 
politics, taxes and horses, but never each other. Women wearing smart, 
sensible clothes bustled around, laying china and silver on a cherry dining 
table that seated 15. Silver swans held place cards, and a large silver 
rabbit displayed a menu that never changed during the five Thanksgivings I 
spent there. Everything was so civilized compared to my family's feasts in 
India, where a hot, chaotic kitchen filled with sweaty, harassed cooks 
turned out vast quantities of food, where relatives insulted each other, 
abused the servants or went off in a huff never to return. So this is 
America, I thought.

Five years after my first Thanksgiving, I moved to Memphis for graduate 
school and was invited to spend the holiday with my roommate's family. 
Within minutes of my arrival, Mrs. Guyette enveloped me in a bear hug and 
coaxed my life story out of me. When I told her that I was a vegetarian, she 
was amazed. "Even our collard greens have lard," she said. Hastily, she 
ordered a cousin to "fry up some okra" for me. Instead of fancy china, we 
ate from beautiful handmade ceramics on a table covered with black-eyed 
peas, collard greens, candied yams, biscuits, cheese grits, sweet potato pie 
and, of course, turkey. As the day wore on, someone got out a guitar and we 
launched into an impromptu jam session. So this is America, I thought.

As I moved around the country, I encountered many variations on 
Thanksgiving. In Santa Fe, the Lorenzos spiked every dish--from stuffing to 
mashed potatoes--with green and red chiles. In Ann Arbor, my Italian boss 
invited several employees home for a traditional meal that included spinach 
lasagna. An old roommate's family, the Haitoglous, served an outdoor buffet 
with grape leaves, moussaka, souvlaki and a fragrant, fresh Greek salad that 
was the best part of the whole meal, given the 100-degree Miami temperature. 
This was America? Where was the turkey?

Last year, after a decade of attending other people's Thanksgiving dinners, 
I decided to host one of my own. It was time to plant my flag, to let 
America know I had arrived. It was time to participate instead of observe, 
contribute instead of mooch. I would not roast a turkey, of course. My meal 
would be a paean to the versatility of vegetarian food.

I considered following Mrs. Wilson's conventional Thanksgiving menu using 
meat substitutes, but the "tofu turkey" I tried tasted so horrible I decided 
against it. An all-Indian menu was out too; I wanted my menu to reflect 
America, and my experience of it. A friend suggested "world cuisine," and I 
jumped at the idea. America was a nation of immigrants, after all; I was one 
myself. Even the Wilsons, whose ancestors had sailed in with the Pilgrims, 
seemed as much of a minority as the Haitoglous, who flew to the United 
States 20 years ago and still dreamed of Crete. So it seemed perfectly 
appropriate to appropriate food from many different cultures for my meal.

Evenhandedly, I chose something from each continent except Antarctica, which 
doesn't have much by way of vegetables. If I couldn't offer turkey, I would 
at least offer a dish from Turkey, so the main course would be cabbage 
dolma--cabbage stuffed with rice, tomatoes, onions, pine nuts and currants. 
(Stuffed cabbage vaguely resembles stuffed turkey, I thought.) Instead of 
mashed potatoes, I would serve baba ghanouj. Japanese umeboshi plum paste 
could stand in for cranberry sauce; it was about the same color. I looked to 
Italy for my appetizers and salads. Aleecha, a hearty vegetable stew from 
Ethiopia, was the only African dish I knew. Chilled avocado soup would be 
South America's contribution; from Australia came the Shiraz wines I love.

So it came to be that I stood in my kitchen on Thanksgiving Day, cooking up 
the world and awaiting 12 guests. About half were foreigners, and the rest 
were artsy New Yorkers who preferred not to celebrate Thanksgiving with 
families they cordially disliked.

I spread a bright blue tablecloth and littered it with silver stars and 
candy canes (in lieu of stripes). The centerpiece was a small American flag 
stuck in a vase. I added flags from several other countries so as not to 
offend the foreigners, until my table had a true United Nations look.

My guests arrived, professing hunger and eagerness to sample my food. They 
looked innocuous enough as they awaited my avocado soup with mango-cilantro 
salsa, but when I brought it to the table, Todd, the painter, said he was 
allergic to mangoes, and Carlos, from Guadalajara, declared that he hated 
cilantro. How could a Mexican hate cilantro, I wondered as I spooned the 
garnish out of his bowl. Margo, the macrobiotic, wouldn't eat avocado since 
it wasn't native to New York, and Robert, the banker on a Pritikin diet, 
wouldn't eat it because it was high in fat.

Things got progressively worse. Niloufer, the daughter of a Turkish 
diplomat, took one look at my dolma and said, "That doesn't look like the 
ones my grandmother made." Reza, the Iranian consultant, announced that he 
wouldn't eat Turkish food since his ancestors were murdered by Turks. Todd, 
I discovered, wasn't allergic merely to mangoes but also to cabbage. He was, 
however, the only one in the group who touched my umeboshi cranberry sauce, 
which everyone else pronounced inedible. Olivia, my fashionable Italian 
friend, stated that she "couldn't" eat the pine nuts I had liberally tossed 
into my dolma stuffing, and spent the entire meal scratching her plate to 
spot and discard the offending kernels.

With each dish, I had to recite the ingredients in excruciating detail and 
answer questions about whether I had used stone-ground flour, whether the 
produce was organic (it wasn't), all of which determined which of my 
delicacies my guests would deign to eat. After an afternoon of listening to 
Olivia wax eloquent about how pine nuts are among the fattiest substances on 
the planet, keeping Reza and Niloufer from each other's throats and catering 
to Todd's multiple allergies, I was almost faint with frustration.

For the first time, I found myself empathizing with Mr. Wilson, who harked 
back to "simpler times," when everyone ate the same thing--a strange 
position for me, since in those simpler times my vegetarianism would have 
been viewed as an exasperating aberration.

My chef friends have it worse. Jerry Traunfeld, who turns out sublime 
nine-course tasting menus at the Herbfarm, his restaurant outside Seattle, 
says he can no longer serve the same thing to his 60 diners each night. 
Nowadays, he has to accommodate a dizzying array of diets--vegetarian, 
kosher, vegan, low-fat--not to mention any number of food allergies. Hearing 
this, I had to wonder if American individualism has run amok, with people 
shunning certain foods not just because of religious strictures or doctor's 
orders but simply because they can. I had planned a feast for a nation of 
immigrants but found myself serving a table of individuals. In this country, 
we seek to define ourselves in every decision we make, right down to what 
we'll allow on our plates. Language, ethnicity, religion--none of these seem 
as important as personal choice.

A year can soften a memory, which must be why I am thinking of hosting 
another Thanksgiving dinner. This year, rather than coming up with a 
monumental menu theme, I will invite some close friends and ask each one to 
bring a dish. If nothing else, people can eat whatever they've cooked. A 
potluck Thanksgiving for a melting-pot culture. How perfectly appropriate! 
No, not perfect, but appropriate.

Shoba Narayan is at work on a collection of essays to be published by Random 
House next year. She lives in New York City.

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