Soon you’ll start to see a spate of shows, columns and magazine stories that will tell you how to make the “perfect turkey” for the holiday. You can roast it in a paper bag, you can bake it upside down, you can deep-fry it, you can put it on a rotisserie, you can smother it in mustard, blacken it, debone it and cook just the pieces, you can invite Kenny Rogers over, you can stuff it with bread, rice, oysters, onions, mushrooms, squash or a duck and a chicken. Or don’t stuff it at all. I have no quibble with that. I have enjoyed turkey almost every possible way there is to prepare one. The thing that bothers me is that they all want you to be “perfect.”
Have you ever been to a Thanksgiving dinner where a guest pushed back his chair, stood up, threw his napkin on the table and yelled at the hostess, “I’m leaving, don’t ever invite me here again, that turkey is not perfect!”
Nothing else about your holiday will be perfect, why should the turkey be? Was waiting in the airport lounge for 10 hours perfect? Was the traffic jam on the way to grandma’s house perfect? Did the kids behave perfectly? Was shoveling 10 inches of driveway snow perfect? Does everything you eat have to be perfect? Was that egg you had yesterday perfect, or was it a little runny? What? You ate it anyway? You would never make it in TV. Was that leftover lasagna you had for breakfast yesterday perfect, or were the edges a little crispy, the cheese a little dry? Did you just hold your nose and eat it even though it was not perfect? Even though it wasn’t perfect, I forced myself to have two pieces. Are the TV shows that tell you how to make the perfect turkey perfect? Hardly.
But that doesn’t stop them from implying that if your turkey is not perfect, you have failed your friends and family, you have spoiled everyone’s holiday, you have stolen all the joy from the world, you have wrecked everyone’s life, now and forever. I can say from years of experience that cooking the perfect turkey and cooking any old turkey, any old way, has about the same effect on the festivities. That’s the great thing about turkey: it’s hard to mess up. Unless you forget to thaw it, which I think I have done more than once. Even then, the same people keep coming back, year after year.
Unless you’ve done something really ghastly to it, say, turkey sashimi, turkey on a stick, turkey tartare, turkey Jell-O mold or turkey ice cream, people will still eat it. And even if they don’t, they will talk about it for years. They will still come back year after year to see what crazy thing you’ve done next.
The next time you see an anorexic morning show co-host who is working his or her way through their third marriage, has two teenagers in rehab and just sat through an hour of hair and makeup, say, “And coming up next, how to make the perfect holiday turkey,” you should ask yourself, “How has all that perfection worked out for them?”
If making the perfect turkey still has you tied up in knots, here’s a fool-proof, can’t-go-wrong, surefire, crowd- pleasing suggestion: Go buy a ham.
Jim Mullen is the author of “It Takes a Village Idiot: Complicating the Simple Life” and “Baby’s First Tattoo.” You can reach him at jim_mullen@myway.com
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The perfect turkey: ham
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