The Best Part of Thanksgiving, Bones and All

Thanksgiving, as it tends to be celebrated, is the most honest American holiday: all appetite, no apology. Every other event on our civic calendar asks us to remember something noble, or to mourn something tragic, or to celebrate something grand or abstract, but Thanksgiving just asks us to be hungry together, and then to eat. In any year, this would be a potently simple path to commonality; it might be the last truly unifying experience available to us as Americans. This year, sitting down for a feast in a time and a place and a nation that seems to be actively working to become more brutal, more indifferent, more willing to make people suffer for the sin of being poor or sick or born in the wrong skin or to the wrong parents or on the wrong side of an arbitrary line, the absurdity of it all is amplified. We feed others, we feed ourselves, and what else is there? At the table, at least, we can control something: the menu, the rituals, whatever small ferocious beliefs we hold about the holiday itself.

Its name notwithstanding, Thanksgiving, to me, is less about thanks than about belief. I’ve given up believing in the story of the day, the scrubbed mythologies of happy colonists befriending happy Native Americans, and I don’t want to interrogate too deeply what might remain of any belief that I have in America as an ideal. But I do believe in the less lofty fact of the meal itself: I believe priority for the turkey legs should go to those under the age of six, because it makes for terrific photos, and that the bird’s cook and its carver should claim their spoils—the crispiest bits of skin, the loveliest little morsels of breast and thigh—while they work, not while the meat is being served. I believe in offering guests only one cocktail option, and that it should be stiff and batch-made. I believe that you must always make a point of complimenting either the cranberry sauce or the potatoes, that the correct number of pies is half the number of guests plus one, and that whoever will be doing the dishes should get to make his plate first. I believe that soup has no place on the Thanksgiving table, where its slow slurping deadens the momentum of both dinner and conversation; if it’s got to be served, it should be ladled into tiny teacups or sturdy little glasses, and sipped (no spoons!) as a standing hors d’œuvre. I believe that going around the table and itemizing what we’re thankful for is a terrible practice, inevitably competitive and a model of poor game design: it unfairly disadvantages both the person assigned to go first, who can’t one-up anyone, and the person who goes last, since by then all the obvious big-ticket gratitudes are spoken for.

Above all else, I believe that all Thanksgiving traditions—the menu, the gathering, the entire pursuit of the Norman Rockwell fantasy—are optional, and that like any ostensibly rigid framework they provide fertile soil for artful riffs and willful rebellion. Within the confines of the holiday convention, though, I believe in the supremacy of the turkey carcass. Just as the agonies and inadequacies of the meal itself are necessary steps toward the glorious leftovers to come, to me the bird is simply a prerequisite for its bones. For most home cooks, a once-a-year turkey is a gastronomic absurdity, needlessly idealized, inevitably formidable to prepare. We shouldn’t make a Thanksgiving turkey at all, really, except for the fact that, after its time in the spotlight, it becomes a turkey carcass, and that carcass is one of the greatest gifts of the entire blessed year, because, as soon as the meat is carved and the bits are picked, you can throw it into a pot and cover it with water and put it on the stove and make turkey stock. Few things in the world are better.

I have written before about my love of stock, and with each passing year my passion only intensifies. I like the practice of making it, the metaphor within its pragmatism: nothing wasted, even the most picked-over bones having something left to give. Mostly, I love the stock itself, dark and rich and stickily collagenous. A turkey’s meat is mostly forgettable, chicken with the volume turned ever so slightly upward, but in water its flavor transforms and deepens to create something of heady, chest-thumping bravado. There’s no need for a recipe: collect all your turkey detritus in a big pot, toss in any vegetable or herb scraps that seem appealing, add cold water, and set the mixture to simmer for as many hours as you like. As the skeleton softens and yields, the kitchen fills, for the second time that day, with a warm, meaty aroma—but the nervous edge that attended the earlier roasting is gone. There’s no buzz of chaos this time, no clock-watching, no spreadsheets to anxiously monitor. By the time the stock is done—two or four or six hours later; you can let it go forever, really, just skim the scum and top it up with water if the level looks low—the leftovers from the earlier meal are stored away. Maybe all the guests are gone; someone else, I hope, was assigned the dirty dishes. The simmering post-Thanksgiving turkey stock is a meditation, a cleansing, a gentle reclamation of the home.

We are a small, slightly unhinged fraternity, we devotees of the turkey’s glorious second life as soup. I count among my brothers Michael Dukakis, the former Massachusetts governor and onetime Presidential candidate, whose zeal was so great that he would solicit the bones from the Thanksgiving tables of family and friends, and eventually from the public at large. “Michael Dukakis would very much like your turkey carcass,” the Boston Globe wrote in 2015. (Five years later, after an overwhelming response, the city’s public-radio station provided an update: “Mike Dukakis is no longer accepting turkey carcasses.”) I’ve always been tempted to follow his example, maybe by taping up a note in the elevator of my apartment building saying that, if anyone has turkey bones they won’t be putting to use, I’d be glad to pop by and pick them up. This year, I think I’ll finally do it. A neighbor’s picked-over bird carcass, saved from the quiet ignominy of the trash, is something to be thankful for. This, too, is something I believe: within the end of one feast lies the beginning of the next. ♦