Giving Us the Bird

It is time to lay to rest a pernicious myth. It is the myth perpetuated by countless illustrations of a family at a Thanksgiving table, happily looking on as the head-of-household deftly carves a turkey. The carver is always gussied up for the holiday, immaculate in jacket and tie. He carves and fills plates with neatness and expertise. The bird cooperates by allowing its parts to be disassembled in precise and orderly slices. It is a touching and heartwarming scene. And it has absolutely nothing to do with real life.

Thanksgiving, in bitter truth, is not a people holiday. It is a day set aside to allow the turkey its revenge. Stupid in life and bred only to be consumed, the turkey leaves the roasting pan with but one thought in its carcass: to bring humiliation to the first human it encounters. It comes before its carver a sly and greasy adversary, oozing juices and contempt, determined to do battle until the bitter end. Pictures in cook books and magazines show the roast turkey as docile, inert, passive. They lie. The turkey is in fact a squirming, slippery menace. It gives no quarter, and plays by no rules. Slice here, and it dodges there. Grab it by one leg, and the other reaches out to hit you in the eye. You could secure the turkey to the cutting board with railroad spikes, and still it would wriggle from your grasp.

We finished our own battle with carving knife and fork the other night greased to the elbows. The kitchen walls dripped with juices. The platter that lay before us bore no resemblance to all those pretty pictures of sliced turkey. Ours was a mound of lumps, slivers and blobs. We were exhausted. We didn’t want dinner--only a bath in some industrial-grade solvent. We had met a foe worthy of our steel. And, as happens every year, the turkey won--wings down.