Good Gravy

And other thoughts on Thanksgiving

This is a photo of a framed recipe for my Aunt Tish’s potatoes, in my mother’s handwriting, complete with stains, which indicates that the recipe is good. It’s very good, in fact, and I thought about making it for Thanksgiving dinner, but I can’t make those potatoes on Thanksgiving, because they are for Easter. I have to make sweet potatoes and mashed potatoes for Thanksgiving. And stuffing. And green bean bake. And chickpea salad. And reception salad, which is more of a dessert than a salad, but never mind. And pumpkin pie and mince pie and apple pie and burgundy berry pie. Most of all, I have to make Madhur Jeffrey’s Cranberry Chutney.

If you’re anything like me, when you read about a recipe, you want to see it and perhaps try it for yourself, and in that spirit, I am going to share the recipe for the chutney and I will beg you to try it, because it is so good:

1-inch piece fresh ginger

Three cloves finely chopped garlic

1/2 cup apple cider vinegar

4 tablespoons of sugar

1/8 teaspoon cayenne pepper

1 pound canned cranberry sauce with berries

1/2 teaspoon salt, or less

Ground black pepper

Cut ginger into paper, thin slices, stack them together and cut into really thin slivers.

Combine ginger, garlic, vinegar, sugar, and cayenne in a small pot, and simmer on medium flame about 15 minutes or until there are about 4 tablespoons of liquid left.

Add can of cranberry sauce, salt and pepper. Mix and bring to a simmer. Simmer on a gentle heat for about 10 minutes. Cool, store and refrigerate. Makes about one and a half cups.

This is a little more labor-intensive than just dumping a can of cranberry sauce into a pretty bowl. But it’s worth it. I am tempted to also give you the very simple recipe for cranberry blueberry pie, but I don’t want to overwhelm with food, when would I really want to talk about is the company at Thanksgiving. (Although I think, given the title of this post, I should talk a little bit about gravy, which I will do at the end.)

When my mom was still making Thanksgiving dinner, it was understood that a stranger could be invited too. When I was in nursing school, I brought along one of my instructors and her daughter one year. Another year, two of my friends whom she had not met came, and one of them brought his mother’s rutabagas. “We all hated rutabagas,” my friend said, “including my mom, but she made them every year and so I make them every year too.” I tasted them and pronounced them not bad and then ignored them.

When I began making Thanksgiving dinner myself, I went to the grocery store and bought the biggest turkey I could find. Sometimes I could barely lift it. Inevitably, the checkout clerk would say, “Wow, you must be having a lot of people for Thanksgiving!”

“Nope,” I would always say. “It’s just for my family of four.” And when I cooked dinner for my family of four, I always followed a certain ritual which I loved then and love in memory still. It began with witnessing the sun coming up.