There are a few things I remember being part of every Thanksgiving in my life so far. Number one is that the main dish has always been turkey. Long before the arrival of pre-basted, seasoned, frozen ones equipped with pop-up thermometers, the turkey usually came from a local farm and sometimes arrived at our house alive, covered with dark feathers and confined to a small cage so that he or she would get little exercise – a practice believed to guarantee that their meat would be tender once it reached the dining-room table. As children, we were allowed to feed it but warned against naming or making a pet of it. We were also usually given the drumsticks on Thanksgiving Day, which seems to have been the traditional piece awarded to the youngest diners. Just why never made sense to me because turkeys at that time were not bred to have fewer of those sharp, thin bones in that part of their legs and were difficult, even dangerous, to eat.

The turkey dressing, made with toasted bread cubes, onions, celery, and seasoned with sage and turkey broth was cooked inside the turkey (supposedly to keep the meat moist) and was called stuffing for obvious reasons. It wasn’t until I cooked my own sixth or seventh turkey that I began adding oysters, mushrooms and wild rice and my children began to prefer it over mashed potatoes. I also learned that larger quantities of dressing could be baked in a casserole dish in addition to what fit inside the turkey. In my early years of turkey-cooking, I followed cookbook directions and covered the stuffed turkey with bacon strips and aluminum foil, roasted it in a slow oven for hours, getting up at 6 AM to put the eighteen pound monster into the oven, basting it frequently until the last hour or two when it could be uncovered and the skin allowed to turn brown and crisp. It seemed to always be important to cook the biggest turkey that would fit into the oven, no matter the number of people expected for dinner, and most of the leftovers were usually consumed before the last of the skin, bones and scraps were simmered to a tasty broth and made into what my children called “turkey-bone soup” containing the last of the meat, some freshly cut onions carrots, peas and thick homemade noodles.

There was a time when people made mincemeat as a matter of course when they butchered at home. Scraps of fatty beef were chopped fine (minced, thus the name), combined with raisins, currents, vinegar, cloves and other spices and canned in quart-sized jars specifically to make pies for Thanksgiving and Christmas. Nobody I knew ever made just one pie, so there would often be a choice of pumpkin and apple in addition to the mincemeat. With no home freezers to keep ice cream handy at that time, pies were often served warm or buried under drifts of whipped cream. When home meat processing became less common, cooks began making mock mincemeat with chopped apples or green tomatoes and butter substituting for the meat and fat. Our family seemed to prefer Mother’s plump filled cookies made with the mock mincemeat rather than having it made into pies.

It seems there was always cranberry jelly that came in a can, but I preferred strawberry jam or grape jelly on the soft dinner rolls that were a feature of every festive meal my mother served. It wasn’t until I discovered fresh cranberries and learned how easy it was to make delicious cranberry sauce with just a hint of orange peel, that it became a part of the Thanksgiving meal I prepared, and it went well alongside the turkey and dressing. Since then, I’ve developed a preference for a cranberry salad one of my daughters-in-law makes from her mother’s recipe. It involves fresh cranberries, apples and other more mysterious ingredients, ground up and combined with strawberry gelatin to make a dense cold salad. I’ve never made it myself, but I look forward to it every time I’m invited for holiday dinners.

Mother always served several vegetables, hoping to have everyone’s favorite. I settled for a creamy sweetcorn pudding that almost everyone liked, and I didn’t care who didn’t eat their vegetables at that one over-abundant meal of the year.