Thanksgiving : On Carving the Bird

We had snow by Thanksgiving in Colville, Wash., in 1946. A home-movie cameraman, probably my father, panned across a snow-covered front yard, then recorded the arrival of the Thanksgiving guests at the Ingle home at First and Cedar.

Young Bill Lane, just back from Germany, wears his Army Air Corps uniform. Silver bars shine on his shoulders. He brandishes a Nazi dagger as he slips toward the camera on the icy sidewalk and laughs and talks animatedly and hugs himself as though freezing from the cold. No sound accompanies the home movie.

Main Street merchant Neal Ledgerwood, my mother’s father, opens the back door of a well-polished sedan where a roast turkey rides like an honored passenger. Neal gingerly approaches the camera, his wife, Lilian, on his arm. He holds out the turkey in a roasting pan for inspection and gives the camera a few quick words.

The turkey steams in the cold air. The color of the film has deteriorated in 40 years, turning the bird a sanguine brown. The Thanksgiving guests look slightly jaundiced.

Ingles, Lanes and the Ledgerwoods surround a dining table covered with linen and loaded down with bowls of vegetables and mashed potatoes, sauce boats filled with thick gravy, condiment trays bulging with canned olives and sticks of celery and ice-water pickles. A cut-glass bowl shows off the fresh cranberry sauce to best advantage. A basket piled with hard-crusted dinner rolls baked at the Davenport Hotel delicatessen moves from hand to hand around the table. Guests unfold damask napkins the size of road maps and pat them onto their laps.

The camera pulls back from all the merry faces around the table to capture my grandfather emerging from the kitchen carrying the turkey on a carving board to the head of the table. He is smiling and chattering, a long thin version of my father, the same wavy hair.

He sets the turkey down, the drumsticks pointing off to his right, and sticks the two-pronged fork into the bird to anchor it. He waves his long carving knife at the camera with a flourish and a showman’s smile. Then, radiating the confidence of a man well practiced at what he is about to do, my grandfather separates a leg and thigh from the body of the turkey, his single easy stroke catching everyone’s attention.

My grandfather used his father’s carving set for the task. This same carving set is now my own.

Sterling-silver bolsters separate the knife from staghorn handles worn smooth with use. The blade has a shape like the Old West: 9 1/2 inches of flat-ground British carbon steel, forged and polished with buffalo hump roasts in mind. The back of the blade rolls forward from the bolster and crests in a steel wave that drops down with a sweep to the tip. The cutting edge bellies inward from years of sharpening. A short, businesslike honing steel accompanies the carving knife, as does a two-pronged fork.

I don’t use this carving set to slice roast chicken, a common meal in my house, so it remains in its box under the counter, behind the pot lids. I have another knife and fork, mere kitchen tools, for the likes of chicken or grilled flank steak or the occasional leg of lamb.

I wait for the turkeys and venison roasts before I get down on hands and knees to dig out my great-grandfather’s carving set. That is to say, I wait for the occasions at the table that demand a certain ceremonial display.

Before guests arrive, I clean the carbon steel and silver bolsters of the carving set with silver polish. Then I sharpen the blade, pulling it again and again across a diamond stone until I am satisfied. I finish this minor chore with the steel, slowly stroking the blade across the steel on this side, then that, gradually gaining speed and confidence.

Almost by definition, an occasion that demands my great-grandfather’s carving tools had best be introduced by a few lightning-fast strokes of carving blade across honing steel, the butcher shop attention-getter. Practice reduces the likelihood of slipping in public and slicing open a finger.

There must have been a time when fathers passed on the art of carving to their sons, but I grew up in a house with an electric carving knife, so I learned on my own. My father tells me that he didn’t learn to carve a turkey until he was confronted by the first one he could call his own, cooked by his young wife. It rested before him at the head of the table, and with wife and guests looking on with admiration, there was nothing to do but have at it.

My father was a dental student in Chicago at the time, and if his carving today is any reflection on his carving then, I suspect he had just finished his human anatomy course. My father carves a turkey in much the same way he would dissect a cadaver.

While contemporary carving isn’t necessarily a masculine chore, in my grandfather’s day the task underscored his position at the head of the table and as head of the household, the winner of bread. The dual-career households of today don’t support such obvious lines of demarcation, and carving occurs in the kitchen as often as it does at the table.

A substantial part of my grandfather’s responsibility as the carver, however, was to glorify the careful and, at times, tedious labor of his wife, the cook. My grandmother would have found her mortification inexpressible had she ever delivered to the table a turkey less than perfectly roasted. She learned her cooking skills as a child at a wood-burning stove and oven, then made the transition as an adult to coal and electricity. By the time she could adjust oven heat with a dial and count on the accuracy of the thermostat, she was set in her ways.

Her pride, her cook’s self-esteem, preceded a world polluted by packaged stuffing and Butterball turkeys. She must have felt a personal challenge to produce a roasted turkey that was in every way a match for a husband who carved so well, while the dinner guests watched attentively. And my grandfather, I am sure, did his best to honor the cook, his wife, with carving of consummate grace.

He would separate the leg and thigh from one side of the turkey, an effortless act if the bird is properly cooked and if the carver strikes the joint in just the right place, a wrestling match otherwise. He would then part the thigh from the leg and set them aside before doing the same on the other side of the turkey. Then he would slice the breast meat, laying out each perfect piece on a warmed platter. Overcooked breast meat or breast meat on a turkey not allowed to rest 20 minutes after roasting tears in ragged chunks for all to see.

When he had finished carving the white meat, my grandfather would cut the dark meat from the thighs, adding it to the platter. Turkey drumsticks were small enough in those days to leave whole and pass with the platter. Then he would scoop the dressing from the cavity of the bird and mound it in an ornate bowl.

Once everyone had been served, all that remained would have been the saying of grace. On Thanksgiving in 1946, the grace probably had a lot to do with the war coming to an end, like the Great Depression had before it. The gathered families no doubt felt stronger for the struggle.

The camera moves from face to face as the meal begins. There is no sound, but the laughter and the warmth come through, right across the years. My grandfather takes his seat, then looks at the camera for a moment--at me. The long fingers of his right hand rest on the carving knife that had come to him from a time before.