| Despite having worked full-time with Americans for the past five years, I have to admit, as a Brit, that I still don’t really get Thanksgiving. I don’t understand what it’s celebrating (harvests? Friendship? Colonialism?) and I really don’t understand the food. Honestly, who in their right mind would want to eat a whole roast turkey?
But I digress. I am thrilled to write the intro for this week’s Nostalgia Newsletter because the story I’m introducing is by Jeffrey Steingarten, the former food critic at Vogue. I was first introduced to Jeffrey’s writing by my friend Marisa, who works with the Alajmo family—the greatest chefs of the Veneto—and gave me his book The Man Who Ate Everything right after I started my job as Vogue’s lifestyle editor. It contains some of the smartest, funniest, most stylish essays about finding pleasure in food I’d ever read; I finished it in two or three helpings and cannot recommend it enough.
Steingarten’s Thanksgiving essay may feel a little academic at first: he goes on for a bit about a turkey shot in Connecticut in 1794 by Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, the indulgent French gastronome who also happens to feature heavily in one of my favorite novels of all time, John Lanchester’s The Debt to Pleasure. (Read that too!) But then, with the help of the late, great chef David Bouley, he reels off a series of recipes to celebrate the holiday, each more enticing than the last: crookneck squash soup with maple-glazed sour apples, Maine diver scallops roasted in lemon thyme, white-tail rabbit with a green herb mustard sauce, Agen prunes in a verbena flan with burnt muscovado sugar and gingerbread and Armagnac ice cream.
Okay, maybe I do get why you guys do Thanksgiving. Just please don’t waste your time roasting a whole turkey. Cut it up! I really will die on that hill. |
