Guilted Bird

As you read this, America is in the groggy grip of a tryptophan hangover. According to the reliably arcane U.S. Department of Agriculture, of 250 million turkeys produced this year, about 45 million were consumed at Thanksgiving last Thursday. Another 22 million will be slaughtered to furnish Christmas dinner tables.

Yet another reason to be grateful that you are not a large, succulent bird.

Unfortunately, Americans seem to have forgotten how to cook a turkey. My local Whole Foods Market--where you can order a Diestel Organic Heirloom Turkey at one of the computer kiosks, just like the Pilgrims did--is papered with “turkey tips,” leaflet-like crib sheets for the indifferently domestic. Every package of pre-seasoned, pre-cubed bread stuffing has a Turkey 101 section printed on the back, so you can avoid giving your relatives food poisoning. Again. The Food Network seems to have wall-to-wall turkey coverage rivaling CNN’s election-night broadcast. Then there are the help lines run by the pro-turkey lobby: Perdue, Butterball, Foster Farms.

If any of these call centers has been jobbed out to Lahore, India, I wonder what those operators must think of Americans, frazzled and panicky and soon-to-be-glutted, trying to bring in a big-breasted fowl for a landing.

Some may choose to dispense with traditional preparation altogether and resort to deep-frying a turkey. Just remember to move a safe distance from the doublewide.

Only about a third of Americans enjoy cooking “a great deal,” according to a Pew Research Center survey, and that leaves the rest of us baffled supplicants to the bird. Well, I say “us,” but I know how to roast a turkey. Shall I tell you? Pat dry; salt rub (no exotic sea salt brines that can make the bird flesh edemic); two days in refrigerator; let stand at room temp, covered, for no more than one hour; cover and cook breast-side down at 400 degrees; turn over, reduce to 325 degrees, and roast uncovered in last hour; don’t over-baste with pan juices, to allow skin to crisp. Interior temp should be 170 degrees. Let rest 20 minutes.

Nothing could be easier, except going to a restaurant. And why don’t we? Because--and you don’t need to be Bernard Henri-Levy to figure this out--turkey is the eucharistic centerpiece of the American sacrament. I don’t want to hit this too hard, but Thanksgiving is our most willfully naive holiday, the one where we let our illusions about ourselves run wild, beginning with the ur-myth of Pilgrims and Native Americans breaking bread together, as if drawn together with common resolve to tame the wilds. The serpent in the garden is more like it.

Thanksgiving is a harvest feast, right? Celebrating a time of plenty after a season of want. Excuse me, when was the season of want? Thanksgiving has long since devolved into a marathon of gob-packing hyper-indulgence, a time when we dare ourselves to eat miles beyond the point of satiety. Thanksgiving is one big eating disorder.

The other giblet-covered myth: The traditional family is the core of our society. Not so much, actually. The U.S. Census Bureau’s 2005 American Community Survey revealed that for the first time, married households were actually in the minority. There are more than 36 million “non-family” households--unmarried couples, straight or gay, living together, as well as 19 million households with single parents.

I can’t think of a single family whose holiday gathering will be anything less than complicated. My third wife and I will be spending Christmas with my first wife, her third husband, their new daughter and our (mine and wife No. 1’s) 21-year-old son. We don’t need a turkey, we need a scorecard.

And yet, the urge to reconstruct the traditional family around the bird is strong, regardless of how many divorces, remarriages, absent fathers and single mothers are in the mix. There’s nothing particularly metaphorical here. Turkeys are big birds, and you need a lot of people to eat one. The turkey--slaughtered, flightless, hapless--may be the only thing that brings many families together before they fly apart again in a centrifuge of post-tribal restlessness. And so the pitiable refrain: “Can’t we just have Thanksgiving as a family?”

I spent a recent Sunday morning wandering through Whole Foods marveling at the holiday meal overkill. Purple creamer potatoes, garnet yams, cameo apples, heirloom cranberries? Muscovado sugar? Artisanal Danish butter? How big an occasion does it have to be to spend $4.29 for butter? This time of year the grocery store registers are choked with guilt money.

I see those people walking through the aisles with recipe books, their thousand-yard stares and their loaded carts, and I feel a little sad. But I also admire them. They’re going to throw themselves into this meal with all their hearts because, if they can just get the damn turkey to turn out right, maybe the family is all right too.