Ringraziamento

Although we mostly try to partake of local culture when we're in Fidenza, and not be the sort of expats who spend all their time pining for peanut butter, shredded wheat, and other U.S. treats that are hard to come by here, we made an exception for Thanksgiving. It's  Danny's favorite holiday (lots of food, no presents), and he loves the traditional Thanksgiving meal. Thus we were going to cook a big turkey dinner and find some people to share it with.

We invited Pam and Romano to join us, our upstairs neighbor, Pia, and my language-study buddy Franca and her husband Gianluca. Aside from Romano, none of the Italians had ever had an American Thanksgiving dinner before. Italians are notoriously leery of eating anything too different from what they've grown up with, but we deliberately made this meal as authentically American as possible, with no concessions to local foodways.

Turkey is eaten here, but only in pieces; thighs and necks seem to be the most popular, while the breast mostly shows up as cold cuts. To get a whole bird, Pam had to go to the halal butcher down the street and order one a week in advance. She also volunteered to make the cranberry sauce. I've never seen fresh cranberries here--"red blueberries," the Italians call them--but Pam has figured out how to make excellent cranberry sauce using dried craisins.

Our menu was pretty basic: roast turkey with bread stuffing, Pam's cranberries, and gravy, plus mashed potatoes lightened with celery root, squash gratin, sweet-and-sour onions, buttery green beans, and--a staple from my mother's family--Perfection Salad, a melange of finely chopped cabbage, celery, and red pepper suspended in vinegar-and-sugar gelatin. Most Americans below a certain age find this last item unnerving, and I could only imagine how weird it would look to our Italians.

As usual, Danny started preparing the meal days in advance. He'd brought wild rice from California for the stuffing and had been saving up dried bread for weeks. (His recipe also includes onions, celery, butter, pine nuts, raisins, and fennel seed.) He bought a few turkey necks and made broth for the stuffing and gravy. He cooked the onions and soaked and precooked the wild rice. He found fennel seed at the Chinese store. The night before and the morning of he got everything ready and put the turkey into the oven.

What would Thanksgiving be without a crisis? About a half-hour into the 17-pound turkey's sojourn in the oven, the power went out in our apartment. That meant we'd gone over our electricity allowance. In Italy electricity is expensive and you can choose to either get a cheaper plan, with a lower upper limit, or spend more and not have to worry about it. Since we're not mining bitcoins or running a server farm, we usually can get by on the cheaper plan, but every once in a while our American tendency to just turn things on pushes us over the line. On Thanksgiving Day we discovered--after Danny ran down to the cantina under the building several times to fiddle with the electric meter--that we can't run the oven and the dishwasher at the same time. So the oven went back on, and the full load of dishes had to be washed by hand.

Then our guests arrived and it was showtime. When Danny brought out the turkey, there was general astonishment. Franca had never seen a whole turkey before, let alone a whole roasted one, and insisted that Gianluca take a photo of this marvel.

Gianluca's portrait of the turkey.

And here are the side dishes.

Onions, stuffing, squash, gravy, potatoes, Perfection Salad with mayo. (Camera shy: green beans)

(Note that, like all serious Thanksgiving aficionados, Danny cooked most of the stuffing inside the turkey, as I'm pretty sure the Constitution requires. That dish of stuffing in the photo is extra, suitably moistened with turkey juices. Note also that Perfection Salad is supposed to be presented unmolded, but this was my first time using leaf gelatin instead of powdered and the salad ended up a little too squishy to stand up on its own.)

I'm happy to say it was all really delicious.

The Perfection Salad is the green blob at 2 o'clock.

For us Americans, though, it was delicious in a very familiar way. For the Italians, the meal was downright exotic. As expected, the Perfection Salad was viewed with trepidation, but Franca--who's both an Americophile and an unusually adventurous eater, for an Italian--tasted it and loved it, and that convinced Gianluca to sample it and admit it wasn't bad. (I'm not sure Pia ever actually tried it.) [Postscript: she insists she did, and liked it.]

Another Gianluca photo. Romano isn't slapping me, just doing some Italian gesticulating.

Later Franca told me that although Gianluca dislikes turkey and they never have it at home, he tried Danny's and then went back for seconds. And she was crazy about "the stuff...no, the stuffing! I love it!" That's what we call winning hearts and minds. And stomachs.

Dessert awaited--Pam's pumpkin pie and her apple crisp, plus some gelato from the gelateria across the street, But first we went for a little walk in hopes of sharpening our flagging appetites. We watched a few kids stagger around the ice rink that had been installed a few days earlier in Piazza Garibaldi and looked in the windows of the shops. They were mostly closed, not because of Thanksgiving, of course, but for the Thursday-afternoon riposo that most businesses on our street observe every week.

This post is really highlighting my deficiencies as a foot photographer.

Back at our place we tucked into Pam's desserts. You can buy neither ready-made pumpkin pies nor canned pumpkin around here, but Pam, an expert casalinga, roasted her own to make the filling for her beautiful crust. The pie was wonderful, and so was her buttery apple crisp. Though they're very different from Italian sweets, our Italians seemed to love them.

Both desserts were eaten or carried off by our guests, but we still have most of the tub of fiordilatte, pistachio, and hazelnut gelato to work through. We've already managed to polish off almost all of what was left of the turkey and sides, and there's turkey soup for dinner tonight. Then I hope to get back to eating local. Starting with that gelato.