Homemade Holidays : An Exile in New York, a military brat, a mom who poached a tree. . .and the search for figgy pudding. ‘Tis the season to remember. With recipes. : Turkey in Lebanon

In my college days, under the impression that the world was crying out for people with no job skills apart from a knowledge of exotic languages, I spent 10 months in a Lebanese village studying Arabic.

The school I was attending was somewhat famous, having been founded by Lawrence of Arabia. It drew students from several countries, including an American contingent of half a dozen college kids and some oil company employees, one of whom later became president of Aramco. But it was run by the British Foreign Office and was doing its best to keep up British tradition, right down to having an official school tie.

It was obviously no place to celebrate Thanksgiving, so the American students decided to put on their own Turkey Day dinner. We gathered at the house of an American woman who lived in a nearby village to plan our strategy. She’d been through Thanksgiving in Lebanon before and had already arranged for a turkey and reserved space in a village bread oven to roast it.

When we started discussing our plans, we discovered, to our astonishment, that not all of us had the same meal in mind. I couldn’t imagine Thanksgiving without succotash; others would have felt cheated if they couldn’t have sweet potatoes; some did not accept the idea that gelatin salad with marshmallows is a traditional Thanksgiving dish. In any case, neither succotash nor sweet potatoes was a real possibility, and the marshmallows in Lebanon were so stale they were as hard as bone. It was going to be turkey with mashed potatoes and canned cranberry sauce or nothing.

Our most serious disagreements were over the stuffing. I had assumed that everybody stuffs turkey with bread crumbs and sage, but there turned out to be corn bread people and sausage people and somebody who believed raisins, or maybe it was chestnuts, had a place inside the bird. Worst of all, the woman who’d bought the turkey wanted oyster stuffing.

Oysters! Most of us were scarcely out of our teens and still easily shocked. We raised an uproar and talked her out of this madness.

Or so we thought. When the day came, we found that into the compromise stuffing, which was partly bread crumbs, partly cornmeal and partly some kind of French sausage from a charcuterie in Beirut, she had inserted canned oysters. It was her bird, after all. “Just eat around them,” she said blandly.

By Christmas, most of the Americans had moved out of the school dormitory and rented rooms in the village, and we had more control over what we ate (in fact, the main reason we’d moved out was to get away from the English food at the school). Some of us wanted roast beef for Christmas dinner and others wanted ham, and I don’t know how well they fared--Lebanese beef didn’t taste much like beef to us, and I suspect the largest hams available in Lebanon came in cans from Denmark--but the turkey fanciers had dinner at my place.

My landlady was an excellent cook, so I told her to make a turkey for us and just do it her own way. It turned out Sitt Wadia’s way meant stuffing the bird with rice, nuts and ground lamb and then stewing it in a pot. She only put it in the village oven long enough to brown the skin.

It wasn’t like Mom’s, but needless to say the meat was very moist, and the stuffing had all the perfumed magic of the Near East. And there wasn’t the slightest hint of oyster.

This recipe, from “Food From the Arab World” by Marie Karam Khayat and Margaret Clark Keatinge, is very close to what I had that Christmas. In Lebanon, some people cook it the other way around: They brown the turkey first, in the oven or in a frying pan, and then pot-roast it. Either way, the bird is mostly cooked by moist heat and doesn’t dry out.

HINDI MAHSHI (Lebanese Stuffed Turkey)

1 (12-pound) turkey

Lamb Stuffing

Water

Salt

1/4 cup butter, melted

Stuff turkey cavity with Lamb Stuffing. Sew openings tightly with heavy kitchen thread. Place bird in large pot, add water to barely cover. Season to taste with salt. Bring to boil over medium heat. Skim off fat. Cover and simmer gently until instant-read thermometer inserted into thickest part of meat reads 160 degrees.

Lift turkey carefully from pot and place in shallow roasting pan. Brush with melted butter and bake at 425 degrees until browned, about 10 to 15 minutes. Makes 12 servings.

Each serving contains about:

714 calories; 233 mg sodium; 202 mg cholesterol; 37 grams fat; 28 grams carbohydrates; 64 grams protein; 0.38 gram fiber.

Lamb Stuffing

1/2 cup butter

4 cups ground lamb

2 cups rice

1/2 cup pine nuts

1/2 cup blanched almonds

1/2 cup pistachios

2 teaspoons salt

1 teaspoon black pepper

1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon

1 cup water

Melt butter in skillet. Add lamb and saute until browned. Add rice, pine nuts, almonds, pistachios, salt, pepper, cinnamon and water. Cover and simmer 15 minutes. Makes about 8 cups.

Note: Excess stuffing can be refrigerated and then reheated.

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