There is also something intensely masculine about cooking large cuts of meat, or the entirety of an animal, like a turkey. I do it because no one else in my family will. It falls in the same category of dad tasks as removing corpses, fixing toilets, or burials. This I think as I grapple the wet bird from the brine and lift it over the sink, a perverse newborn of sorts, pale and dripping.

We only cook turkeys on Thanksgiving or the odd Christmas, and I write the years in my cookbook dating back to 2006. I do the James Beard method of flipping the bird to ensure even roasting. High heat, high danger. You waddle a bunch of paper towels and just use your hands, as James did (or instructed his assistants to). Be sure not to let the hot juices leak out.

Because the gravy called for white wine and was make ahead (or so complicated it required distinct phases of preparation), my drinking was make ahead too. And I often had a cigar out on my mother-in-law’s deck. If Thanksgiving is all about tradition, mine came down to this.

There is the time we roasted a turkey at mom’s house in Germany and I learned how to do giblet pan gravy from mom’s friend Heidi’s dying ex-husband Alan, who was British and smoked, smoked even in people’s kitchens, smoked over the stove to boot, ashed in the pan without skipping a beat, only winced and kept stirring.

There is the time we roasted a turkey there and could not find a V-rack to elevate the bird off the roasting pan and had to rummage in mom’s medieval barn for a stand-in, and used some old metal spring.

And there are so many turkeys we cooked and ate I can’t remember. Last year’s, which we brined in buttermilk for the promise of a deep-golden skin, but came out only meh and required the dumping of quarts of gross, chicken brine buttermilk solution down the drain.

It is also the dad who carves the meat. The year I was quite buzzed and used the electric carver on the brand new carving board and then joked about it looking like Seal’s scarred face.

How for so many years of my kids’ life I acted like a kid myself, or insisted on remaining one, and am just now starting to see that.

It is perhaps the one holiday we have in the States that requires reflection. We put our hands together in an aspect of prayer, we hold hands at the table, we think about others who don’t have it as good. And then I always put the carcass in a bag and cook it down the next day.

This year will be our last at my mother-in-law Beth’s, who’s putting her house on the market in January and moving to an apartment. It will end a cycle of 15 years or more coming here on a Wednesday and leaving on Friday. I’ve ceased the cigar on the deck afternoon ritual, though I confess I miss looking out over the lake bundled in flannel and puffing. Instead this year we’ll do the turkey trot down in Issaquah and perhaps I’ll go out on the deck with an apple cider or tea.

It’s still dark now, an hour before sunrise, and there’s a creamy line of light on the far side of the lake. Once I’m done here I’ll head home to start the gravy. And as I always do, I’ll put the turkey in a box in the trunk and trot it back over to Beth’s for a final roasting. I am glad I’m not a kid anymore I guess, glad for the time being my kids still are.

Categories: Memoir, writing

Tags: Creative Nonfiction, pacific northwest