For my Cultural Production Project I want to learn more about how Thanksgiving is cooked and prepared in my household. I’ve always done a lot of eating at Thanksgiving but this time i’m taking a peek behind the curtain and diving into how the food actually gets made and all the effort that goes into it. I’ve helped out before, but never in a significant fashion and this time I will focus on learning not just the steps of how to make food, but the traditions and thought process behind them.

While my Dad is incharge of the turkey on Thanksgiving, its my mom who is incontrol of everything else. She is the overseer of the food and not only makes a lot of it but makes sure that everything has been, or is being made and will be ready on time. I took my instructions for this Project from her. My Mom isn’t a stereotypical stay at home mom spending all her time in the kitchen, and my Dad is the one who often cooks nowadays, but she holds all the traditions together at the holidays and knows all the little secrets about how to make some of the weird and old recipes that are only brought out around the Holidays. When I told her about this project she was happy to have the help and seemed relieved of a bit of the all the stress this Holiday can bring.

Obviously before making food there has to be a trip to the grocery store, and man was it packed. Thanksgiving weekend is always a busy time at the store, and this year was no different. There was no time to take pictures or document this part, just focusing down the isles searching for every last ingredient and snack needed for the throngs of people that would be descending on the house this Thursday. At the end of the ordeal my Mom and I came out with two full shopping carts. It’s a wonder how many different pieces go into making some dishes and that some brands could be swapped out for others, and how it was utterly imperative that we get the exact brand of boxed stuffing. It turns out that a lot of cooking involves more shopping than standing by a stove.

My Mom decided that the two best dishes to teach me were making mashed sweet potatoes, and cranberry relish since the Yams are a traditional recipe that my great aunt had when she was growing up and the relish is something new that my Mom makes. Now with the yams its a two part process. First cook and peel them then mash and sweeten them. Throughout this whole process my Mom would be telling me how she remembered being in my spot as a kid learning how to do these things from her mom and aunt. There was a fondness when talking about those memories and a happiness that she is passing down these skills. One trick I found odd but is obviously very useful was the stabbing of the sweet potatoes. You have to stab all the sweet potatoes before cooking them in the oven or else the skin might burst out and make a mess while they are cooking. Oddly, even though this was a very useful trick my Mom downplayed it and made it seem like it was a silly thing to do as if knowing cooking tips was a useless hobby.

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Once we got the sweet potatoes ready it was time to mix in all the delicious sweetness. This part was a lot less structured than I expected, it involved mixing together butter, brown sugar, cinnamon, salt, pumpkin pie spice, and ground cloves. The only thing measured was the two sticks of butter that were melted to make the base of the sauce, everything else is just eyeballed and measured in “pinches” and “scosches”. “That’s where that secrete ingredient of love comes in. In those unmeasured measurements that you know are just right” is what my mom often says when making food like this. It was also getting a bit late and my Mom told me not to worry too much about getting it perfect. It seems that even though this is an old recipe and we were sticking to tradition that the real value in it was that the dish was made with the traditional intentions at heart and that it didn’t have to be perfect if it was inconvenient to keep working at it.

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Now in our household we have a lot of traditions and one of the newer ones on thanksgiving for my family is having three types of cranberry, and by new I mean within the past 25 years. There was only ever store bought canned cranberry relish and cranberry sauce, and my Mom who loves fresh cranberries found an old recipe in our ancestral recipe booklet for a far more colorful and delicious recipe to make cranberry relish. Now my Mom wanted to make the new relish but also values keeping that old tradition of having the canned cranberry so we now have three different types every year, even though everyone prefers the freshly made relish.

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When making the relish with my Mom she took over more of the work, as opposed to the sweet potatoes where I did everything and she told me what to do. Since it was more “her” dish it seems there was more value in getting it the way she wanted than sticking to the tradition of how the other dishes were made. When talking about the relish it really opened up to me how her making this dish is like part of breaking away from tradition and showing that something new can be good. I also helped a lot more in other ways helping get ready for the Holiday, with other dishes and setting placed and bring out food. Getting first hand experience making the food made it all that much tastier this year!

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