The recipes in The Chamberlain Calendar of American Cooking (Narcisse and Narcissa Chamberlain, 1957) don't always have a lot to do with the month they've been assigned, but the November recipes definitely seem Thanksgiving-y.
November offers up a cranberry sauce.
I'll admit that I'm always on the lookout for my grandma's cranberry salad recipe, and I have still not found one just like it. This is no exception, as it's a sauce. The Chamberlains are far too classy to include Jell-O based salads like my grandma's. This version sparks the cranberries up with orange marmalade (which sounds delightful!) and almonds (meh). (I mostly love nutty additions to recipes, but not so much when they soak for hours and end up soggy....)
The Chamberlains take us from the cranberries in New England down to New Orleans for some Corn Bread and Pecan Stuffing for the turkey.
And maybe I'm a little hypocritical in thinking that pecans in stuffing sound pretty good, even though stuffing is usually quite moist.
If you're sick of Thanksgiving turkeys (like my other, non-cranberry-salad-making, grandma was), Wyoming offers up a game option: Roast Wild Duck.
You know this is serious because it starts with hanging the ducks to age, then plucking them and removing the oil glands! Plus, you need one duck for every two guests, so you better plan ahead and have some good luck hunting if you want to pull off duck for Thanksgiving.
I don't know what you're going to do for Thanksgiving, but Chamberlains think you should start planning now! (I'm probably going to shove a Gardein Holiday Roast in the freezer when I find one and then I'll make the same dinner rolls as I make every year. Pretty easy, and no oil gland removal necessary!)
I think it's interesting that they use the turkey liver in the stuffing. Now if the liver is included in the turkey, it's in a little bag that is accidentally cooked by people who don't know to do a thorough cavity search of their bird. Very few cooks (including myself) would know how to find let alone remove an oil gland on a duck.
ReplyDeleteCookbooks used to assume readers knew a lot more about cooking than current cookbooks can safely assume-- at least, for a mass audience.
DeleteThat is pretty similar! Ours has no nuts, a higher proportion of fruit, and a top-secret ingredient that used to be much more popular than it is now. (Orange juice concentrate to taste. It balances out the flavors.) Oh, and it's served straight from the Tupperware bowl it was mixed in.
ReplyDeleteI always loved Tupperware, but then again, we never tried to store anything tomato-y in it. I think my favorite is the little salt and pepper shaker set-- with a blue shaker for pepper and pale yellow for salt held up by a little white stand. So cute!
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