The Mouth: Talking turkey about a Thanksgiving menu change

The biggest stumbling block to embracing Thanksgiving isn’t selling the idea of a massive meal and ‘count your blessings’ vibes, says The Mouth. It’s the menu.

Does anyone love turkey? Really? Except maybe this kid? Picture: Supplied.

OK, Mouthers, holiday pop quiz: What is the worst Christmas song of all time, you know, the sort of thing they’d play on repeat at Guantanamo Bay to get Talibangers talking about next week’s terror attack?

Is it The Little Drummer Boy, Do They Know It’s Christmas?, THAT Mariah Carey song, or Bing Crosby dragging his way through that snail-slow Silver Bells number that’s about as exciting as drifting off under anaesthesia?

Trick question!

It’s too early to be talking about Christmas, we haven’t even had Thanksgiving yet.

Which, to be fair, we don’t really have in Australia. But we should.

Yes, it’s an American holiday, but you don’t need to be American to appreciate a big meal and a vague Hallmark “count your blessings” vibe.

A roast turkey looks fabulous, but American humourist Calvin Trillin proposed a switch on the grounds turkey is a pain and people don’t really like it. Picture: Supplied

And while things perhaps didn’t work out fantastically down the track the original tale of Pilgrims and Native Americans coming together for a feast is a good early example of what today we would call “practical reconciliation”.

Which suggests that the biggest stumbling block to the feast is not the idea but the menu.

Because, really, turkey is not the most inspiring of table birds, is it?

We used to know an American ex-pat in Sydney who would hold a Thanksgiving feast that involved deep frying whole birds in a giant vat of oil in his back yard.

The end result was delicious but one year, he briefly set his Bondi Junction semi on fire, leading to the loss of a fairly hefty rental bond and, he suspects, the eventual dissolution of his marriage.

Others swear by cutting the backbone of a turkey out and spatchcocking it so the meat cooks evenly and doesn’t dry out.

It works (we’ve tried) but you don’t get the whole Norman Rockwell effect when you bring a flattened turkey to the table.

Is a deliciously eggy carbonara the solution to tiresome turkey. Picture: Supplied

The only solution to the problem, then, is to go completely off-piste and make spaghetti carbonara.

Seriously.

The story goes that back in 1981 an American humourist named Calvin Trillin proposed a great national switch on pretty much these same grounds, i.e.: that turkey is a pain and people don’t really like it.

“It does not require much historical research to uncover the fact that nobody knows if the Pilgrims really ate turkey at the first Thanksgiving dinner,” he wrote.

“The only thing we know for sure about what the Pilgrims ate is that it couldn’t have tasted very good.”

The solution, he proposed, was a rich eggy carbonara (no cream!) with pancetta and a big glass of red, which also fits in to Australian schedules as we don’t get the traditional Thursday off and it’s a lot easier to organise after work on the day.

Oh, and for the record, the correct answer to the quiz is Little Drummer Boy.

Gobble, gobble!