Going Cold Turkey
For one novelist, Thanksgiving leftovers offer all the joy of the holiday - and none of the angst.
 
Text by Susan Choi; Recipes by Barbara Lynch, Jimmy Bradley, Ana Sortun, Reed Hearon, and Barbara Tropp; Portrait by Andrew French; Food Photographs by Beatriz Da Costa - Food & Wine, November 2000

A few years ago, I endured the worst Thanksgiving of my life. It was worse than the year of the Nontraditional Main Dish, when the suckling pig caught fire in the oven; worse than the year my housemate's boyfriend made me cry. It was even worse than the year my father and I ate in the near-empty dining room of a motor lodge in New Haven, Connecticut. My worst Thanksgiving doesn't involve relatives, or lost love, or a kitchen disaster; it involved the withholding of leftovers. The location was, oddly enough, the same place the Pilgrims first dropped anchor: Provincetown, Massachusetts, at the remote sandy tip of Cape Cod. I was living at a writers' and artists' colony there, along with about 20 others. To say that we were very poor, and that in November the tip of Cape Cod - not much more than a little hook of beach with the ocean around it, reached by a long, lonely road - was isolated and cold might suggest that the unhappiness of losing the leftovers has something to do with our lonely, cold poverty. It didn't; but I'll get to that part. Provincetown in winter is beautiful: Though the days end at four, they end in sunset explosions of light and leave immensities of darkness behind. The sense of solitude is total. It goes without saying that when Thanksgiving came, those who could, fled. But a lot of us stayed. A local couple, former colony inhabitants themselves, invited us to join them. They would do the bird and the basics, and the rest of us could sign up for side dishes.

Perhaps it was our proximity to a historic Pilgrim site that made us overcompensate. We all became tremblingly anxious, and we all made too much. There was the young painter who would sleep until six in the evening and then haplessly wander the streets trying to find someplace to buy a can of soup: He was assigned rice. I came across him in an aisle of the A&P clutching a five-pound bag of it and looking wild with fear. He'd never cooked rice; he'd never cooked anything. (In the end, he cooked the whole bag - flawlessly.) There was the poet who made multiple savory tarts, and the poet who made cubic feet of brownies. For my part, I kept my boyfriend on the phone to advise while I mashed enough potatoes for an army. We were all afraid we wouldn't bring enough, but it turned out we'd brought way too much: For reasons known only to themselves, after asking us to help them, our hosts had made everything. There was already potatoes and rice. Six starches, ten kinds of dessert. It was unsettling, but it was also exciting. Think of the leftovers!

I've always loved leftover food, like spaghetti sauce on day two, when it tastes even better. Or last night's surfeit from the nice restaurant, spruced up on a plate of my own. Or the leftover quintessence of one meal when it metamorphoses into the raison d'être of another, like turkey tetrazzini from the remains of the Thanksgiving bird. All sorts of classic dishes - think of shepherd's pie or frittata - have arisen from leftovers, though for me, leftovers aren't about frugality. The joy of the leftover (it deserves a nicer name!) does have something to do with economy and efficiency - in other words, with time. (And it's true that what I like best is the way the leftover sidesteps time completely. It's the comforts of your childhood in adulthood; it's yesterday's party this morning, no worse for wear, and even more buoyant in its unexpected afterlife. It's the yearly ritual without the yearliness - in no case more so than on the day after Thanksgiving.

Loving the leftovers more than the meal is easy, but giving reasons for this preference is hard. I know that I never feel so happily truant as when eating cold Thanksgiving turkey, stuffing and cranberry sauce as a sandwich. Buy why? Why, every Thanksgiving, do I approach the magnificent table with mist in my eyes, unable to see what's before me for my vision of tomorrow's lunch? I don't dislike Thanksgiving - quite the opposite. That may be why. With cherished days, there's a strange tension between the pleasure of the occasion and the fear that the pleasure won't be absolute. Some people are made miserable by their desire to be happy on Christmas morning, or at the stroke of midnight on New Year's Eve. Some dread imperfect joy on their birthdays. I feel it every Thanksgiving: Will the stuffing really have been baked inside the bird? Will we be happy?

Hence the guarantee and consolation of leftovers. In the worst case, they compensate for yesterday's disaster; in the best case, they're pure bonus. That year in Provincetown, the meal was painful. Conversation faltered, heavily dependant for its subject on the small, aloof dog that belonged to the couple. For some reason, a lot of things spilled. But the food was fantastic, and I doubt I was alone in thinking hopefully of the time, not far to come, when I'd be enjoying it under gentler circumstances. I might have been planning a dinner, for some of the survivors, of reheated stuffing and pie. I might have been remembering the first time my father made me a leftover-mashed potato omelet (if you've never tried this, you should). I might have been wishing that everyone would go away, so I could pick at the bird with my fingers. But you've known from the start how this ends: with the leftovers removed by our hosts, never to be seen again. They weren't hoarding; they seemed to think no one would want them, and we were too shy to ask.

A sad story, sure. But there are always other years, when the melancholy of the day, if there is any, is transmuted and redeemed. Years when, at the end of the night, your host bestows on you profusions of foil-wrapped packages. Years when you wake the next morning and realize you don't have to work, and you make some terrific turkey-stuffing-cranberry sandwiches and set off with your friend, or your lover, or your small, aloof dog, for some nice place you don't often go. The quality of this day, like the quality of the sandwich, is unique. It retains the essence of Thanksgiving but has shrugged off the burden of time. I have an aunt who always bring the sweet potatoes to the family meal, and who told me one Thanksgiving, "Every year I make these goddamn things and I see my whole life flash before my eyes." I knew what she meant. But what about the next day's sweet potatoes, reheated, with brand-new marshmallows? They're unstuck from the moment, as are you. You aren't supposed to eat this kind of thing for breakfast, but this isn't a regular day, and perhaps there aren't regular days. Perhaps time has lost track of you. And if the sweet potatoes make you feel this way - wait until you taste the sandwich.

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Susan Choi is the author of the 1998 novel The Foreign Student (Harper Collins).

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