Thanksgiving, Italian Style

Ah! Thanksgiving.  That treasured time of year where family and friends gather around the table to partake in that most traditional of feasts where the turkey is the centerpiece, the piéce de resistance.  Unless of course you happen to be Italian-American.

Here’s what our traditional Thanksgiving feast looked like.

First course:  Fruit cup.  This was typically Delmonte, out of a can.  However, sometimes my mother got a little fancy with it, added some coconut on top and called it Ambrosia.  I called it fruit cup with coconut on top.

Second course: Italian Wedding Soup.  However, we never called it that.  It was just called Escarole Soup. And if you really wanted to pronounce it correctly it was ‘scarole, with a rolled r in there.  The first time I heard Italian Wedding Soup, I was like, oh, what is that?  Oh, that? That’s ‘scarole.  

In my opinion, this was the piéce de resistance.  My favorite.  This soup takes hours to make.  I would help my mother make it, and by help, I mean did most of the grunt work.  Washing those escarole leaves by hand under the running tap water, leaf by leaf.  You had to make sure to get out all the grit and dirt.  Then gently tearing the leaves into bite sizes.  Boiling the chicken with the onion, celery, and carrot to make the stock.  And then once the chicken cooled, pulling off all the meat, tearing it into bite size pieces and putting it back into the soup.  Making those little meatballs.  OMG that took forever.  That mountain of ground beef, pork, and veal which would normally take no time to diminish were you making regular sized meatballs seemed like it would never diminish when making them small sized.  But oh! When this soup was done, and you sprinkled it on top with some grated Locatelli cheese? Mwah! Delizioso!

Third course: Ravioli and meatballs.  Faked you out, didn’t I? You thought I was going to say Turkey.  Nope.  Not yet. This was my next favorite course.  I mean, who doesn’t love ravioli and meatballs? Everything home-made of course.  Except the ravioli.  We bought them frozen.  But the sauce (which we called gravy back then) and the meatballs, were home-made. 

Fourth course:  Ok, here it is.  The turkey.  And all the sides.  Mashed potatoes, green bean casserole, broccoli rice and cheese casserole, candied yams, cranberry out of a can, gravy, green bean salad, regular salad. A real ‘medigan’ (American) meal.  Except for the green bean salad.

Fifth course:  Pies and nuts that you had to use nutcrackers to crack open.  Does anyone crack walnuts and other nuts these days?

Growing up, I never realized that this wasn’t what most people’s Thanksgivings looked like.  Until my sister’s boyfriend, who was Polish-American, started coming to the house for Thanksgiving dinner.

Poor guy.  He sat there as the courses started coming out.  One through three.  He passed on them all.  There we were slurping it all up and he sat there.  Patiently.  Plate and bowl empty.

“Bob,” I said, “Don’t you want to eat some of this? It’s really good!”  I was just so perplexed.  How could anyone pass on this goodness?  And of course, that Italian part of us of wanting to feed people, “mangia, mangia”, was baked into our  DNA. It was torture to watch someone sit there and not eat.

He’d reply back politely, “No, I am good, thanks.  Just saving room for the turkey”.  The turkey?   The least appealing part of the whole meal in my opinion.  Who was this guy? Maybe my sister needed to find someone else.

Thankfully, she didn’t. She married him. And it didn’t take too long before he was diving into courses one through 3 like the rest of us.  How to take a Polish-American and make them Italian-American. Have them join you for Thanksgiving dinners. Eventually they will get too hungry to wait for the turkey course. I’ll never forget the joy I felt when he took his first taste of the Escarole Soup. Oh yeah.  We had a convert.

These days, if I am hosting Thanksgiving or Christmas (Christmas was a repeat of Thanksgiving. Easter too, except swap out the turkey for a ham), I’ve dropped off courses one and three.  No fruit cup and no ravioli and meatball.  Some years I do not make the Escarole Soup if I just don’t have the energy.  But thank goodness for Wegman’s who has the escarole already washed and trimmed.  Talk about a time saver.  And I don’t even own a nutcracker. So just pies for course number 5.

Ah well.  No one seems to miss it too much (except me, lol).  These days, we are just so happy if we can all be together.  But now that we have a grandchild, our first, I am thinking it might be a good time to resurrect some of these food traditions.  How else will she know what a real Thanksgiving, Italian style, looks like?