Today’s Wall Street Journal has a business trend article (subscription only) on supermarkets’ focus on prepared holiday dinners. Interesting tidbit: the dry goods sales at supermarkets (the non-snack food of the center aisles) have declined over 8 percent over the last four years. Given that 2001 was probably already a nadir for home baking and cooking, that’s a sign that those cooking Thanksgiving dinner from scratch may be more and more in the minority.
It’s a shame, because the holiday has always excited me for the food possibilities. If one can’t make quality food and enjoy the process of cooking at the holidays, when can one enjoy it? Seems like a basic joy of life to me.
Besides, like with men’s fashions, the very limited range of possibility that the rules allow just make the challenge all the more exciting. Some bending of rules and creativity is possible, but go too far (as my friends and I did one year in having straight-up Italian food for the meal) and people start to miss the turkey, stuffing and cranberry sauce.
Perhaps the strictest purity lies in the pecan pie, which I’d venture is the centerpiece for most people raised in the South. (It seems to gain popularity up here year by year, as well, to the point when my attempt to go native with Indian pudding last year was met with no nostalgic response from dyed-in-the-wool New Englanders). My first time making pecan pie on my own, I called my mother to get the recipe. "You mean Mrs. Kelly’s family recipe?" she asked, Mrs. Kelly being a society matriarch friend of the family. That was the one, I replied. I dutifully bought all the ingredients and began to make it, only to turn the bottle of Karo corn syrup around and see Mrs. Kelly’s secret pecan pie recipe on the back, verbatim! You can add bourbon or chocolate, but essentially every pecan pie recipe I’ve seen is the same. The excellent Gift of Southern Cooking promises a less-sweet version, but calls for exactly the same amount of sugar and syrup. Guess some things you can’t really mess with too much.
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