Mystery Menu

Several years ago, I took a UC Extension class with food writer Jeannette Ferrary. Our assignment for the Tuesday before Thanksgiving was to describe a typical Thanksgiving meal at our childhood home. The class would then try to figure out where each of us had grown up.

The class performed fairly well, accurately pinpointing one member from the South (Knoxville, Tennessee), whose family always served cornbread dressing and biscuits; and another from Hawaii (Honolulu), who never served a Thanksgiving meal without a bowl of white rice.

They were pretty stumped by my family’s menu, however. My childhood Thanksgiving dinners weren’t the same every year, but my best approximation was the following: barbecued turkey, Paul Prudhomme’s sausage and cornbread stuffing, homemade rolls, homemade cranberry sauce, baked Brussels sprouts, mashed potatoes, and pumpkin pie made from the recipe on the can. The only thing they could figure out was that I grew up somewhere warm enough to barbecue a turkey.

Their confusion makes sense. My parents were raised in Portland, Oregon, which lacks a distinct cooking tradition. After moving to Berkeley, they were swept up in the cooking revolution of the Gourmet Ghetto, which erased their 1950s sensibilities. So we created our own Thanksgiving traditions—a combination of haute cuisine and kid pleasers.

Photo by Tom Curtis