Thanksgiving on Eagle Street

Mom knew how to cook.  But by the time I came along, home cooked meals were beginning to fade away.  Even though most of our meals consisted of  fast food, TV dinners or canned Spaghetti Ohs, Thanksgiving was different.  Mom always made Thanksgiving dinner.

She would buy the frozen turkey and let it thaw in the fridge for a week.  Then the night before Thanksgiving, she would prepare the bird.  Her specialty was her stuffing.  She always used Mrs Cubbisons little dried cubes of bread.  In a huge bowl, she would throw in the cubes, chopped celery, cans of chicken broth, and the secret to big flavor- Farmer John's breakfast sausages that had been cooked in water, then pan fried and sliced into tiny pieces.  She stuffed the mix into the bird and tied its legs up.  The rest of the stuffing went in a Corningware casserole dish.

She would set the oven to a very low temperature, around 300 degrees, and put the bird and stuffing in the oven around 11 at night.  It would slowly bake all night long, and when we got up in the morning, the house smelled so good.

We usually ate around noon or 1 PM.  The menu always was:  Turkey and stuffing.  A can of Ocean Spray jellied cranberry sauce. (I was the only one who liked it) a can of Princella Yams, (I never knew you could get a yam from anywhere but a can until I grew up) a can of corn, and a can of LeSueur baby Peas, which she mixed with butter and milk and warmed in a saucepan. And we had pumpkin pie  and French vanilla ice cream for dessert.

I don't really remember much about Thanksgiving except the food.  We never had a large gathering.  I don't ever remember sitting at a table with Mom and Dad for the meal.  We never had guests.  And I don't even remember the older kids coming home for Thanksgiving dinner either.  Black Friday and all its craziness hadn't been invented yet, so there wasn't any time spent pouring over hundreds of newspaper inserts, no planning for a predawn shopping experience.  Thanksgiving was about staying home, eating, and watching TV.

Thanksgiving night was spent removing all meat from the turkey carcass.  My job was to get every piece off and put it in a big bowl.  Mom would dig her old Moulinex food processor with the taped up electrical cord out of the deepest corner of the cupboard and grind all the meat up into mince.  Then she would mix the meat with some of the leftover stuffing and form the mix into patties, dip them into raw egg, and roll them in bread crumbs.  She could get at least a couple dozen patties out of the leftover meat.  She called them Croquettes.  The croquettes would go in the freezer, and we would be eating them for dinner for the next few weeks. You would just take a few out of the freezer, fry them in oil in a skillet, and dinner was served.

In Mom's absence, some of her Thanksgiving traditions have stuck with me, while others slipped away.  Working on holidays for decades at the USPS forced me to keep things simple.  So it's usually turkey parts instead of the whole bird.  I have ditched the peas and replaced the canned yams with fresh ones. But I still make Mom's excellent stuffing, and I must have a can of Ocean Spray Cranberry jelly.  The pumpkin pie remains on the menu every year, and I usually eat way too much of it. The old meat grinder with the dangerously damaged electrical cord was tossed in the garbage after Mom passed away in 1986.  I have never made Mom's croquettes, because I psychologically need that old Moulinex in order to make the mincing authentic.  

Thanksgiving on Eagle Street was not fancy, and we kids ate alone in the kitchen.  But this day always brings back many warm and happy memories of helping Mom in the kitchen and of eating a home cooked meal instead of our usual TV dinners.  I am thankful for her efforts to give us that one special meal each year. 

 

This is the only photo of Mom showing off her Thanksgiving turkey.  It was taken in 1974, specifically to be sent to her prison pen pal.