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THANKSGIVING 2004 |
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 "OH, NO, JOYCE! YOU'RE NOT GOING TO USE PRUNES!" |
Don't forget the essential
ingredient: A dollop of love
By JOYCE KIEFER
of TheColumnists.com
Pitted prunes.
Ugh, you say. Even with the pits gone. But there they are, essential
ingredients in cranberry chutney. When I was 10 years old and
discovering that the kitchen is a wonderful place for creativity,
I would never choose to try out a recipe with prunes.
“When I grow up,” I told my mom. “I’ll never
eat prunes.”
Never would I believe that when that anticipated time finally
came, I would clip a recipe that mixed this evil fruit with cranberries
and serve the resulting chutney year after year as a Thanksgiving
treat.
Prunes grew on me slowly. “When you grow up,” my mother replied. “You can do whatever you want, but while you’re a child, you’ll do as I say.” And so I ate prunes cooked with a stick of cinnamon and a bit of lemon for dessert and prunes out of the box with walnuts for an after school snack. They weren’t bad the way liver is bad. My taste buds stored a grudging respect for the flavor of this wrinkly, sticky black fruit. It surfaced when I had children of my own.
Fresh cranberries.
I used to love canned jellied cranberry sauce, mostly for its
texture. If the can was dipped in hot water, the sauce would
slip smoothly out and challenge me to catch it and turn it into
neat slices, one for each plate at Thanksgiving dinner. But when
I grew up, its basic flaw looked fatal. The jewel-like sauce
melted all over the plate and seeped into the vegetables. The
resulting color was all wrong, spoiling the Norman Rockwell look.
I always thought that canned whole cranberries tasted faintly
of soap, so I tried mixing them with other things, such as crushed
pineapple and setting the whole thing in cherry Jell-O. This
was the time of my bridal cuisine–the Jell-O years of the
‘60’s.
Time passed and one of Bill’s first cousins moved with his family to California. At last Bill could share holidays with relatives of his own. We began a custom of doing Thanksgiving together that now includes our children and their families. From the beginning we decided that our meals would break the confines of mashed potatoes, yams with marshmallows, string bean casserole with Campbell’s soup, and canned cranberry sauce. Jell-O would get left behind, too. We’d cook from scratch.
A few weeks before our first shared Thanksgiving, I thumbed through a good housewife magazine for cosmopolitan suggestions and there it was: a recipe for cranberry chutney.
Chutney is an exotic fruit preserve that I first tasted at a Thanksgiving dinner at the home of family friends who had made a career in the foreign service. They explained that chutney came to England from India. I said it reminded me of prunes. My mother nudged me and whispered that it’s diplomatic to try what your hosts put before you--and please keep your remarks to yourself.
The cachet of chutney stuck. It moved me to snip out the recipe and attach it to the refrigerator for further consideration.
Allspice. Preserved ginger.
Ingredients I never saw at home. Mom didn’t like allspice
and had no use for preserved ginger. She was an excellent meat
and potatoes cook and did very little experimenting with food.
Her Depression-Era mentality told her she would probably waste
ingredients. I went shopping.
Brown sugar, water, salt.
These are the mundane basic ingredients--the bones, so to speak.
If the brown sugar has dried into a brick, as it does when I
don’t make cookies often enough, it can be chiseled and
dropped into the mix where it eventually will melt.
Vinegar. Grated orange
peel.
These add sophisticated piquancy and remove all associations
with Jell-O. When everything is stirred together in a heavy pot
and the cranberries started to pop, the pungent scent wafts anticipation
through the house. It heralds the feat to come. It challenges
the blandness of the turkey in a way that Ocean Spray can never
do.
Emotion.
I’ve left out the secret ingredient, the one that defies
measurement, but is capable of causing the strongest effect of
all. Laura Esquivel wrote about this indefinable essence in “Like
Water for Chocolate.”
In the book, Tita, the main character, is doomed by custom never to marry. As the youngest daughter of the family, she must dedicate her life to caring for her widowed mother. But Tita falls in love with Pedro. Since they can’t marry, he is handed off to her sister. An accomplished cook, Tita makes her sister’s wedding cake. She weeps into the meringue. Her tears don’t alter the taste or consistency. However, as the guests consume this excellent cake (Esquivel gives the recipe), something happens:
“The moment they took their first bite of the cake, everyone was flooded with a great wave of longing. Even Pedro, usually so proper, was having trouble holding back his tears. . . . But the weeping was just the first symptom of a strange intoxication–an acute attack of pain and frustration--that seized the guests and scattered them across the patio and the grounds and in the bathroom, all of them wailing over lost love.”
Esquivel’s novel is a wondrous account of how feelings flavor food.
As my wooden spoon caresses the dark red bubbling mix, I stir in my love of Thanksgiving itself–the simplest and warmest of public holidays. The day is all about family and the natural bounty of our country and gratitude for having been born to the people and place where the Good Lord put me. The chutney is the first dish I prepare because its flavors blend well over several days. I make it by popular demand; my husband’s cousin’s wife asks for it every year. I’m sure I’ve given her the recipe but, like the best dishes, the result changes with the cook and with the time and circumstances of the cooking
When she grew up, our youngest daughter named her cat “Chutney.”
CRANBERRY CHUTNEY
2 12-oz. packages fresh
or frozen cranberries
1 medium red apple, diced
2 1/2 c. brown sugar
1/2 c. diced pitted prunes
1/2 c. water
1/2 c. cider vinegar
1/2 c. minced preserved ginger or 1/4 tsp. powdered ginger
1 tbsp. grated orange peel
1 tsp. salt
1 tsp. ground allspice
Heat all ingredients to boiling in large pot, stirring occasionally. Reduce heat to low. Cover and simmer until thickened, about 15 minutes, stirring occasionally. Put into large bowl, cover and chill. Makes about 6 cups.
©2004 by Joyce Kiefer.
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