Making Limited Peace : A Thankless View of Yams, Turnips and Other Thanksgiving Vegetables

Why is it, I ask myself annually, that a bittersweet shadow falls over the Thanksgiving meal? A cloud no larger than a man’s yam moves between it and the sun, and it is as though Francis Bacon or Gary Larson had done some editing on a Norman Rockwell painting of us all--one not unlike the cover of this magazine--as we are about to attack the steaming goodies.

It is an old cloud, an old shadow, as old as childhood, and it is the memory of childhood distaste (an antipathy bordering on revulsion) for the vegetables that went with the turkey.

The meat was wonderful, the dressing ambrosial (even before it was stuffed into the bird and baked), the mashed potatoes white, firm and sensible. But on Thanksgiving there were also yams, which in the snowy north of New York state I can remember having on no other day of the year. Even when they had been candied sufficiently to qualify for a Whitman’s Sampler, they struck an impressionable child as alien and of a most peculiar texture. They were what you had to plow through to get a clean plate and qualify for seconds of turkey and stuffing.

In my years of mature and tolerant wisdom, I have learned to like yams. (Tolerate may be the better word.) At that, they weren’t the worst. One year--in a fit of madness, as I now think of it--my mother prepared turnips. There may have been a shortage of yams.

I understand there are those who prefer turnips to any other item of food. Not me; not then, not ever. One night in the winter of 1944, in what now seems another life, I tried to catch some sleep on a bin of turnips, frozen rock-hard, in a bombed-out barn in Germany. I thought of the Thanksgiving turnip debacle, and it felt like a kind of revenge, although I’m not sure on whom, or for what.

Discussing these vegetable matters a few days ago with a colleague, a man of serene and lofty intellect, I discovered I was not alone in my dark memories of legumes and other side dishes.

This man retains even now a loathing of creamed onions. I happen to like creamed onions (no one is totally imperfect), but he and I find common cause in our shuddering unhappiness with rutabagas, and, without knowing for sure, I suspect we might also agree on Brussels sprouts and lima beans.

The cranberry jam, or sauce, always loomed as a sort of consolation prize for the mandatory vegetables. And, by then a working journalist living in Manhattan, I was thrust back to childhood memory the year the Cape Cod cranberry crop was found to be, or thought to be, infused with DDT, and the berries in all their forms were withdrawn from the marketplace.

The wonderful British comedy team of Swann and Flanders was performing in New York that November, and Michael Flanders pleasantly told the audience that he and Donald had so much enjoyed the traditional American Thanksgiving dinner--of turkey and guava jelly.

It seems comprehensible--standard behavior, in fact--that a child might be able to take vegetables or leave them alone, but to be finicky about dessert is another matter, near to treason. Yet I was never able to get on the same wavelength as mince pie, and I had the same trouble with pumpkin pie, which, like yams, surfaced on only that one day a year (later it edged into Christmas). But there was usually ice cream to be thankful for.

Nothing ever stays the same, of course. I have made a limited peace with yams and lima beans, and with pumpkin pie, although not yet with turnips or rutabagas or mince pie.

I have also advanced from being the carved-for to being the carver, appreciating the sport we used to have with my great-uncle Victor,who was the family carver for years. Having served the very large lot of us--maiden aunts, widowed aunts, grandparents, parents and children--he would finally be ready to sit to his own plate about the time the rotten kids, of whom I was one, began asking for seconds.

Much else has changed, and if I remember (now with amusement) my hassles with the side dishes, I have seen for a long time what a richness those gatherings of an extended family represented, and how the day did push aside, for the length of a meal at least, the real problems of a depressed town in a depressed country. There was never, then or now, a shortage of things to be thankful for.

The side dishes did not usually outlast the Thursday, Friday at the outside. But the turkey had a long afterlife, from sandwiches to dreaded hash, disappearing at last in a thin soup to which the exhausted bird contributed an aroma as faint as perfume. It lingers, along with the rest of the abiding pleasure of Thanksgiving, the memories.