Shut Up and Eat This Sub-Par Bird

In defense of a mediocre Thanksgiving

Currently, my refrigerator contains a 12-pound raw turkey swimming in three quarts of buttermilk in a plastic bag large enough to suffocate a mule. In accordance with Samin Nosrat’s recipe, I have spatchcocked the bird (Latin for “fuck it up, boys”) by removing the backbone and splaying the limbs indecorously across a sheet pan. This is ostensibly to ensure the dark and white meat cook evenly, but really, it’s to exert an animalistic, dominating force over the bird.

If you’re spatchcocking a turkey this year, savor it. This is the only time in the turkey-roasting process where you will have the upper hand.

Look, I don’t know why we—the Western colonizer “we”—decided a dry bird the size and shape of a dress form was the best way to convince our families to feel grateful. I don’t know why we spend so much time agonizing over techniques and brines that will yield marginal benefit at great personal cost. Most of all, I don’t know why we’re still pretending we want “crisp skin” on our turkeys. “Crisp” turkey skin has the texture of shellacked fruit leather. It’s tough enough to stretch across a drum.

And yet here I am, taking better care of this turkey than I have of myself for the past 8 months, swearing that maybe this time, the breast meat won’t taste like the inside of a Build-A-Bear.

This is, of course, a delusion. Turkey breast is bad at a cellular level. Only 10 percent of the muscle fibers in a turkey breast are red (compare this with a duck breast at 80 percent. Duck is, in a literal sense, a red meat, which is partly why it’s so delicious). Why am I doing this?

*Shania Twain voice* “Let’s go, girls.”

Economists like to talk about “sticky prices”—the idea that prices are slow to adjust to changes in the economy and tend to stay stuck at the same level for longer than might be…ideal. I think we ought to talk about “sticky traditions.” This year more than ever, I felt myself digging in my heels over my family’s traditional Thanksgiving spread, committed to recreating the experience for an audience of one. I wanted one thing not to change while the world’s tectonic shifts were breaking everything else apart. I wanted to experience the old, familiar comfort of being disappointed by something I saw coming a mile away.

So I bought a snooty, free range, private school turkey from the butcher. I didn’t feel like supporting Butterball, who has covered up coronavirus outbreaks at its plants and forced employees to work shoulder-to-shoulder without PPE, or Tyson, who gave 10 percent of my hometown coronavirus. I feel OK about eating this particular turkey because I know it was probably insufferable in life—the kind of bird that belonged to the Daughters of the American Revolution and Mensa simultaneously and pronounced “Ibiza” with a lisp.

Maybe you’re in a different headspace this year. Maybe your family traditions are different, or maybe you feel like bucking tradition entirely—go, you! A few years ago, my mother-in-law made salmon for Thanksgiving. It was an excellent salmon, and were I a small Kodiak bear, I would have been delighted.

As for me? On Thanksgiving, I want my dreams to be crushed by poultry. I want to spend hours making something mediocre that no one much cares for (you could call this “a theme”). I want to be Martha in that old Sunday school parable of Martha and Mary, clattering around the kitchen and ignoring Jesus. Of course the meat was never the point. But someone’s got to make the meat.

God help me, I love this big, dumb, terrible bird.

Happy Thanksgiving, wherever you are.