The Drumstick Dilemma

Once, families lived in harmony, the ghosts of holidays past, present and future were in heaven and peace reigned on Earth.

Then humankind discovered the turkey.

All of a sudden, people started waking up at 5, performing arcane rites over giant carcasses. Adults wrestled Crisco-ed birds to the pathetic legs-up position, sewing up cavities to look like mummy faces, while children watched, their formative psyches recording vivid turkey memories that would come back to haunt the next generation’s table.

The clan gathered ‘round and discovered the sad mathematical fact: No matter how you slice it, two drumsticks don’t go into four brothers who want a leg apiece.

And with all this, the wild bird that has roamed the land for 10 million years became an annual occasion for collective national anxiety.

“I have a serious turkey phobia,” says Karen Page, a music-tour manager from Marin County who vows to practice at least three times during the year before putting bird to oven--but she hasn’t done it yet.

“Have you ever been to a Thanksgiving (dinner) with a disastrous turkey? People go on about how wonderful the creamed onions are. . . . Oh! the beans . . . . But what they really mean is, ‘You’re a turkey failure.’ ”

Being a turkey failure is not an easy thing to live down. It means being a violator of Turkey, The Idea, the tribal rite whose passage allows us to march, red pop-up thermometer in hand, into the ranks of the Great American Family.

“We’re hung up on this image--if we don’t do it exactly right, the ghost of Norman Rockwell will come after us,” says San Francisco radio foodcaster Harvey Steiman.

Yet we press on.

Americans will tackle almost 80 million Thanksgiving turkeys this year, with an average cooking time of four hours, which means they will devote roughly 320 million oven hours to a beast that nobody knows exactly how to cook, how to carve or how to deftly rehash for the next four days.

Why? Part of it has to do with the nature of tribal rites: If it were meant to be understood, it wouldn’t be a ritual.

If the pressure of trying to duplicate the holiday cover of Family Circle magazine weren’t enough, try contemplating the problematical reality of the bird itself. Face it: Turkey is a culinary conundrum. Its various body parts cook at different rates. Its sheer unwieldiness makes the most graceful look silly. Its oven time nobody can agree on. Its dark meat nobody wants to eat, anyway.

There should be something suspicious about an edible entity that boasts its own toll-free advice line where trained home economists-turned-crisis mediators answer 1,500 calls a day from frantic cooks dying to pass the Turkey Test.

“We call it ‘turkey trauma,’ ” says Marge Klindera, supervisor of the Illinois-based Butterball Turkey Talk Line.

Turkey trauma survivors say they made it by viewing the process philosophically. What counts is not whether you succeed at turkey; it’s what you can learn from trying.

Something about the subtleties of relationships, for example.

“I took one of my husband’s old T-shirts and slapped it on the bird because I’d always heard you were supposed to cover it with something like cheesecloth or a T-shirt,” says Sally Shepard, a Tiburon mother with grown children and years of turkey behind her. “I was a new bride. He came home, looked in the oven, saw his turkey wearing his T-shirt and turned green. I had no idea this shirt was connected to youth and baseball and everything that made men tick.”

Then there’s the importance of sharing.

“I had 10 people in the kitchen, jiggling the legs, poking it, asking what color the juice was, using all these methods they’d learned from their mothers,” says Sherry Hallgren, an Oakland writer whose maiden turkey experience involved a spate of cookbooks and charts suggesting anywhere from 3 1/2 to 7 hours for the same bird. “We were all trying to make sure we wouldn’t die of underdone turkey.”

With proper analysis, a turkey can offer a window of understanding on the state of the family.

“I remember my first Thanksgiving after my parents were divorced,” says a 32-year-old San Francisco teacher from a nuclear family of seven. “My father wasn’t there to carve the turkey. No one else knew how. We tried. We ended up ripping out the drumsticks. The shards of meat all over the platter somehow symbolized the family starting over.”