For Thanksgiving, Coming Up

     Food is often the carrier of cultural tradition. Goose and plum pudding were as important for a Victorian Christmas dinner in England (at least, according to Charles Dickens) as turkey is for Thanksgiving dinner in America today. Sometimes, as in the case of Thanksgiving, the food is symbolic of a historical occasion, though maybe as much mythological as historical by the time the food has become traditional. Did the pilgrims really eat wild turkey, corn, cranberries, and pumpkin pie on that first Thanksgiving? How much of our tradition is myth and how much is history? And how much do we really care? It's the food that carries the tradition.

Thanksgiving pies, years ago, when we could be
so close together. I am the pie-maker,
third from the left, in red.

    In today's immigrant-rich world, such food customs mark both the continuation of cultural traditions and their gradual, sometimes grudging synthesis. One of my favorite Thanksgiving stories comes from an essay by the California farmer David Mas Masumoto. He grew up with a Japanese mother who cooked a traditional American Thanksgiving dinner even though her Japanese husband preferred white rice to rolls and no one ate the cranberry sauce because to the Japanese, fruits are desserts.

    "We knew what a holiday table was supposed to look like," Masumoto says, "but no one told us how it was supposed to be eaten." His father didn't know how to carve the meat, either. After a poor show of an effort, he always gave the job to Mrs. Masumoto. who took the turkey into the kitchen, where her family could hear her "whacking and tearing the creature into tiny shreds, as if she were preparing strips for a teriyaki sauce."

    Masumoto himself avoided the carving task until he married a woman from Wisconsin, whose family served Thanksgiving dinner completely comme il faut. Then he learned to carve, prompted, he says, "by my frantic wife when she hosts the family holiday dinner. 'Here,' she says, thrusting the golden brown bird into my hands. I imagine her adding, 'It's time you became a man.'" But in true fusion fashion, the Masumoto family celebrates annually a thoroughly American Thanksgiving and also hosts a thoroughly Japanese open house on New Year's Day, when they laden the tables with "plates of teriyaki chicken, sushi, and somen salad, along with symbolic dishes—long… buckwheat noodles for long life…black beans for good luck, and herring for virility and the blessings of many children." And of course, there is salmon served to the guests with the Japanese explanation: "It's the one fish that always returns home."

    I know that turkey is Thanksgiving food, but maybe this year, when we can't return home because we're COVID-restricted, we should all eat salmon, just to remind ourselves that there'll come a time when we can once again share the Thanksgiving tradition together.