What a lovely Christmas Day

Christmas has come and Christmas has gone, and we are left with the memories of yet another year spent in the pleasant company of friends, eating, drinking, and making merry.

Turkeys are making their way into the South African consciousness for holiday fare (apparently gammon…ham…is the traditional Christmas dinner centrepiece here) and for the first time in five years I was able to score a turkey of respectable size (15 lbs) for our feast. I saw a bin of frozen turkeys at the market and instantly recognized the brand from its distinctive wrappings: Jennie-O. American turkey in a South African supermarket? Yay!! I grabbed the biggest one I could find and buggered off before anyone could take it away from me!

Finding cranberry sauce was a task and a half! The markets that normally carry this rare delicacy were sold out and it was only by dint of diligence that my husband found some jars of a South African version of the stuff displayed in a refrigerated case in the meat department. So, armed with a big American turkey and a couple of little jars of cranberry jam, I began my preparations.

Thandiswe is on holiday in the Transkei, visiting her family, so my dear friend Linda organized some household help for me. The day before Christmas Linda’s aunt, Cynthia, came in to clean and help with the prep for the Big Dinner. We peeled and chopped and cut and sliced and minced and mashed our way into a fridge full of little plastic containers of ingredients. By Christmas morning, all I had to do was assemble everything and apply heat.

My first Christmas in South Africa was not so easy. I searched for a week for a turkey…not a frozen bird in sight…and eventually settled on a 5kg (11 lb…about half the size I usually prepared in the States) fresh bird from a local market. The neck and back skin had been trimmed away, leaving me no way to stuff the neck cavity and no way to cover the stuffing in the body. The skin was covered with little black pinfeathers that had been been pulled nor singed…I spent hours with tweezers and a barbeque lighter just getting the bird ready to stuff! This year, however, was a snap: I read the labels on the plastic wrapping and came away quite chuffed: this was an American turkey, bred, hatched, reared, butchered and packaged just the way I was familiar with. Ripping open the package I found the wire leg clamps and…wonder of wonders!...a red and white plastic pop-up timer already embedded in the breast! I was ecstatic!

While not as large as the 24 pounders I had so often prepared in the States, this was a respectable sized bird and possessed of all the wiliness common to frozen turkeys. It was slick, slippery, and awkwardly built, and getting it to hold still while I stuffed bread seasoned with herbs, onion and celery up its backside was no small feat. I finally corralled the beast in my lasagne pan and rammed the dressing home, clamping the legs back together to keep it from spilling out. I popped it into the turkey roaster that I had carried all the way from California with me and shoved it into the oven to roast.

When the guests arrived, the bird was already out of the oven and resting, and I had the potatoes on the stove. I am ever amazed and the differences in familiar things here: as I collected the utensils for mashing said potatoes, my friend Sally, a cook in her own right…asked me what on earth I had the hand mixer out for. “Potatoes,” I told her. “I am making mashed potatoes.” She continued to look confused.

Into the bowl I tossed a glop of butter, a small container of smooth cottage cheese (soft cream cheese, for Americans) and on top I poured the hot potatoes. I opened the milk carton and put it next to the bowl, and gave the whole bowl a squash with the hand potato masher. Once each potato piece had been broken up, I turned on the mixer and began to whip the potatoes, adding milk as necessary for consistency, while Sally stood there watching me intently. Until that very moment, I had no idea that South Africans didn’t use a mixer to whip up mashed potatoes!

Eventually the meal went on the table, with Sally’s deft hand making the gravy. I demonstrated the use of cranberry sauce with the turkey meat, and passed around the mashed potatoes. The look on Sally’s face was priceless when she took the first bite and she polished off her serving pronouncing them the best she had ever eaten. I haven’t yet told her how much better they are with some roasted garlic added!

We ate at about four and it was after ten by the time we had our house back. Sally and I and her step mother spent a couple of hours in the kitchen washing up, but we ended up leaving a pile for poor Cynthia, who had promised to come back on Friday to help me clean up. It was the kind of day you look back on fondly, thinking about the wonderful food, the looks on the faces of the guests when they beheld their first golden roasted turkey and appreciatively tucked into the succulent flesh. It was the kind of day that stays in mind, lively conversation, fascinating stories, the house ringing with laughter and good cheer.

It was a terrific day, shared with wonderful friends, that left us pleasantly tired and ready to toddle off to bed, our tummies and hearts full.

Sweet Violet and the Turkey

Christmas 2007

I am accustomed to turkeys that are weighed in pounds and roasted in degrees Fahrenheit: kilograms and centigrade confuse me.

And so our Christmas dinner started at 7:30 Christmas morning with me searching the internet for the proper length of time to roast a 4.35 kg turkey in a centigrade oven. After a bit of searching I did find the info I needed (1 hr per kg at 160C), but en route I managed to turn up amazing array of unusual, exotic, and even peculiar ways to prepare a holiday turkey.

Much as my liberal heart quails at the admission, I must confess to being a conservative when it comes to my holiday turkey. All these trendy new ways to pimp the bird just make me cringe. A few years back, the rage was deep frying the whole turkey which, I must admit, made me laugh when I first heard about it. At a time we were being admonished more and more to reduce our consumption of cholesterol-laden foods, the newest fad in holiday cooking is to deep fry the turkey! I never took the trend seriously so I don’t know for a fact, but didn’t one recipe include stuffing the bird with crinkle-cut potatoes so that it emerged from a vat of boiling grease with French fries on board?

I’ve been away from American television for some time…and I’ve never been terribly impressed with those poncy, pretentious television chefs, anyway…so I missed the new “brining” trend apparently foisted onto American home cooks by one such fellow. Evidently the hook is that brining supposedly gives the turkey more flavour and makes it juicier… Well, duh! If you soak anything in salty water, the flavour will be enhanced…that is what salt does!

And why is it surprising that soaking something overnight in liquid will make it juicier when it is cooked? I prevent pork chops from getting dry by braising them…cooking them in a liquid. Surely it is painfully obvious to virtually everyone that soaking a turkey overnight in a barrel of water will make the turkey absorb water...especially if the water is salted (hello…salt causes tissue to retain water, remember?). And the more water that is contained in the turkey’s flesh at the time it goes into the oven, the more “juice” in the turkey when it is cooked, right?

But aren’t we are supposed to be reducing our salt intake, not increasing it? My husband has high blood pressure and I make sure he even orders his margaritas without salt…I’m going to increase his sodium intake by soaking his Christmas turkey in salty water? I think not!!

I read an article that advocates cooking the turkey in a roasting pan without a rack and with a cup each of oil and water in the bottom of the pan. Eeeeek! Roasting is a dry process! You can lard the meat or baste it with oils or liquids, but you do not put water in the bottom of the turkey pan and let the bird’s backside boil in it!! This same article advocated marinating the turkey in red wine and stuffing it with ground pork…just what we all want…purple turkey that tastes like pork.

Another article warns against stuffing the bird, citing two reasons: 1) it makes the oven time for the bird longer and 2) stuffing = salmonella. Well, the oven time thing is a no-brainer…and kind of stupid, actually. First of all, a heavier (stuffed) piece of meat, whether turkey or a deboned and stuffed leg of lamb, is going to take longer to cook than a lighter (and presumable unstuffed) one. Secondly, this is a lazy man’s argument that turns the paradigm upside down: the normal, traditional, time-honoured method of preparing a holiday turkey is to stuff the bird and roast it, and the roasting time is based on the weight of the bird (which increases when you put stuffing in it). Omitting the stuffing will reduce the weight of the bird, thereby reducing the time it takes to cook. If you cut a rump roast in half, it will take less time to cook, too, because you reduced its size and therefore the time necessary to cook it. So, yes, omitting the stuffing will decrease cooking time. So will cutting the turkey in half and cooking only one of the halves.

It looks like a little knowledge is a dangerous thing when it comes to turkey, since we’ve been safely eating stuffed turkey for a couple of hundred years or so, and the salmonella thing is a very recent concern. Why has it not been a problem in the past? Because people prepared their stuffing in the morning and stuffed the bird immediately before putting it into the oven. But some bright souls who wanted to have a lie-in on Christmas morning and, doubtlessly following some contemporary trend, took a shortcut from the traditional method by stuffing the turkey the night before and putting it in the refrigerator overnight. Then, trying to steal a march on time and tradition, they popped a bird full of icy cold stuffing into the oven and failed to roast it long enough to thoroughly cook that stuffing, ultimately poisoning themselves and their guests by thoughtlessly deviating from long-established methods.

What is so wrong with preparing a traditional meal for a traditional celebration? It’s not like turkey graces the table so often that one gets bored with it. If you want some variety in the holiday meal, why not change from mashed to roasted baby potatoes, ditch the canned cranberry sauce for a fresh cranberry-orange relish, or substitute a steamed romanesco…a curiously fractal form of broccoli…in place of those limp green beans?

Perhaps the problem is one of ignorance. We grew up eating those succulent turkey dinners at grandma’s house, but nobody bothered to teach us how grandma got the turkey so moist and flavourful and the stuffing so fragrant and tasty. And, instead of asking an older generation of accomplished turkey cooks, we turn to our most ubiquitous modern source of information, the internet and, instead of finding grandma’s turkey recipe, we happen upon a zillion megabytes of misinformation intermingled with trendy ways to ruin a traditional holiday dinner.

Given the difficulty of finding clear, time-and-kitchen-tested recipes for preparing a turkey the way grandma did, as a turkey-roasting grandma whose Christmas dinner (using a free-range bird, not one of those “pre-basted” factory turkeys) won high praise at the latest family turkey orgy, herewith a traditional turkey stuffing and roasting recipe. Print it. Save it. Use it.

This is for a bird weighing approximately 10 lbs, unstuffed. Scale the portions up or down, depending on the size of the bird (works for roasting chicken and game hens, too).

Traditional Stuffed Roast Turkey

Utensils:
Meat thermometer
Roasting pan
Two thin skewers
Roasting rack*
Aluminium foil (heavy)
Basting brush

Ingredients:

Turkey:
1 turkey, approximately 10 lbs (5 ½ kg), fresh or thawed according to package directions.
½ cup melted butter

Stuffing:
1 cup diced onion
1 cup finely sliced celery, including tops
3 to 5 tbsp Bell’s Poultry Seasoning
2 tsp crushed garlic
1 egg, beaten
½ cup melted butter
12 slices bread, freshly toasted
Salt
Additional liquid if required

Gravy:
Cooked giblets, minced
Broth giblets were cooked in
3 tbsp corn starch (mielie flour)
½ cup water

Prepare the turkey before beginning to make the stuffing: do not cut the band of skin holding the legs in place, and do not remove the turkey’s tail. Pull the legs away from the band of skin to open the bird’s cavity and remove the giblets. They will probably be bagged, but if not, make sure you have all of them removed from the cavity: neck, liver, heart, and gizzard. Set these aside for now.

Rinse the bird’s cavity with cold running water and pat the bird dry with paper towels, inside and out. Place on a large platter or board.

Begin heating the oven (160C or 325F), making sure to remove all unnecessary oven racks. Locate the roasting pan you will use and make sure the turkey fits into it. Place a roasting rack in the bottom of the pan. *If you do not have a roasting rack, make a rope of aluminium foil, fashion it into an oval and place it on the bottom of the roasting pan for the turkey to sit on. Spray the roasting rack with cooking spray (or coat with oil).

Place the giblets in a saucepan, cover with water, add salt to taste and set to boil. Allow to boil for twenty minutes or until they are done. Set aside. Do not discard liquid.

Make the stuffing:
Cut the toast into cubes approximately ½ inch (1.25 cm) square and place in a large glass or ceramic bowl. Make the cubes larger for a dryer stuffing, smaller for a more moist stuffing. Sauté the onion, celery, and garlic until the onion is translucent and soft. Add to the toast cubes and toss well. Add poultry seasoning and salt, toss again. Add butter and egg and mix thoroughly with clean hands. The stuffing should cling together when a handful is squeezed. If it does not, add broth from the boiled giblets a few tablespoons at a time until the desired consistency is reached.

Pack the stuffing into the bird. Most recipes warn against stuffing the bird tightly, but this can be safely ignored. The more tightly you pack the stuffing, the less moist it will be, so let your taste be your guide. I make the dressing fairly dry, as guests who want it moist can add gravy; guests who don’t like wet stuffing can’t remove the moisture. When the cavity is full, lay the bird breast side up and slip the legs back under the band of skin that originally held them. Stuffing will extrude a bit from the cavity, but this is desirable…if the stuffing expands during cooking (it will absorb some moisture from the bird’s juices), this is where it expands to.

You will probably have some leftover stuffing. If so, you have two choices:
1) oil the inside of a covered, oven-proof dish and put the stuffing in it. You will put this in the oven during the last hour of roasting time.
2) stuff the neck cavity. If you choose this option, you will need an additional skewer to secure the flap of neck skin. Also, you can add some cooked mild Italian sausage pieces and some chopped fresh apple to the leftover stuffing before packing it into the neck cavity. This will give you two stuffings for your guests to choose from.

Last steps before roasting: use the skewers to pin the wings to the bird’s side. Try to tuck the wing tips behind the drumstick so they won’t burn. Place the bird, breast side up, in the roasting pan, being careful that the turkey does not actually touch the pan itself (the roasting rack or the rope of foil should keep it up off the pan’s surface.

Roasting the bird
Using a basting brush, brush melted butter over the turkey’s skin, making sure to brush the sides as well as the top.

Insert a meat thermometer into the turkey’s breast, making sure it goes deep into the breast meat but that it does not touch bone.

Make a tent of foil and, shiny side down, place over the turkey. Secure the foil to the sides of the pan, making sure it does not touch the turkey. Leave the ends of the foil open…you want to tent the turkey to prevent the breast meat from cooking too fast and drying out, not seal the bird into a steaming vessel.

Place pan in oven and shut the door. Do not open again for at least 3 hours. During this time, mince the giblets into teeny-tiny bits (you can discard the liver if you don’t like the taste of liver). Place the bits back into the broth they were cooked in.

After 3 hours of cooking, open oven, slide oven rack forward, and uncover the bird. If there are juices in the bottom of the pan, use the basting brush to baste the bird, If there are no juices, baste with melted butter (or a 50-50 mixture of olive oil and butter), replace the tent, and return to oven. Do this again every 45 minutes until it is time to remove the tent.

A rule of thumb for figuring out approximately how long it will take your bird to cook is to allow about 25 minutes per pound (1 per kg) of unstuffed bird. This will give you an approximate starting time for preparing the additional dishes that will be served. About an hour before the turkey should be done, remove the tent, baste the bird, and baste again every 20 to 30 minutes until the bird is done.

Turkey is done when it reaches an internal temperature of 190F (87C). Hold the turkey at that temperature for 20 minutes to ensure doneness throughout. When finished, remove the turkey from the oven onto a warmed plate. Allow the bird to stand for 20 to 30 minutes to “set.”

Gravy time

During this time, make the gravy. Place the roasting pan across two burners on the stove, light both burners and set to low. Add a cup of broth from the giblets and, using a wooden spoon, stir the water, scraping at the browned bits stuck to the bottom (and possibly sides) of the pan until they dissolve into the liquid add the remainder of the broth and giblets, stirring until they come to a boil. Cook for a minute or two, then pour the entire contents into the saucepan in which the giblets were boiled, setting aside the roasting pan (careful! It’s hot!). Return the mixture to a boil.

Mix the cornstarch with the plain water in a measuring cup, stirring until the cornstarch dissolves. With your dominant hand, stir the boiling broth mixture and with your other hand, slowly pour the cornstarch mixture into the boiling liquid. Depending on the quantity of the boiling liquid, you may not need all of the cornstarch mixture. Add only until the liquid thickens to gravy consistency and then remove immediately from the stove. If you use all the cornstarch mixture and the gravy seems too thin, just keep boiling and stirring. It will reduce and thicken in no time.

As soon as the gravy reaches the desired thickness, remove immediately from the heat and pour into a serving dish or gravy boat.

And there you have it: a traditional roast turkey with bread stuffing and brown gravy.

Enjoy!

Christmas on the Other Side

Americans don’t seem to know a lot about South Africa. In fact, some Americans can’t tell the difference between Africa (a continent) and South Africa (a country on the continent along with Namibia, Botswana, Zimbabwe, Sudan, Nigeria, and a whole lot of other places you’ve probably never heard of, either). I suppose I shouldn’t be too surprised since it is widely rumoured that I share breathing space and citizenship with people who can’t tell the difference between Mexico (a foreign country) and New Mexico (an American state).

Anyway, a certain amount of ignorance about South Africa is to be expected, I suppose. The apartheid years saw news blackouts in both directions, and American schools don’t go into much depth regarding the less developed world. So, if you are labouring under the misconception that South Africa still has apartheid, or that lions and tigers roam the streets, or that South Africa is a dangerous, undeveloped poverty pocket where half-naked, skin-draped natives make war on each other and the witch doctors hold sway, you aren’t entirely alone.

I knew about Johannesburg and Cape Town being large, cosmopolitan cities, but in my circle of acquaintances, I seemed to be in the minority…a rather scary observation when you realize that the vast majority of the people I associate with are highly intelligent, reasonably well-educated individuals. Some of the questions I fielded when I announced my intention to move to Cape Town: “Is the water safe?” “Are there paved roads?” “Are the animals still loose or have they been put in parks like Yosemite?” (Yes, yes, and www.krugerpark.co.za/)

Now that I’m here, I still get some odd questions from friends and acquaintances back in the States. Like, do we celebrate Thanksgiving here? No, actually, we don’t. Thanksgiving is an American holiday, ostensibly commemorating that first feast between the Pilgrims and Indians. There weren’t any Pilgrims in South Africa, and the Indians here are from India.

South Africa is a largely Christian nation, the missionaries of old having done their jobs well, bless their little black hearts. There is also a large Muslim community here, and Durban has more Hindu temples than you can shake a stick at. Many of the black people still worship ancestors or adhere to animist beliefs, sometimes simultaneously with being church-going Christians. And yet despite all of this religious diversity, Christmas is almost universally celebrated here.

But an American might have a bit of difficulty recognizing the Christmas spirit in South Africa. The Dutch are a frugal people and their Afrikaner acorns have not fallen far from the Dutch tree. One of my first impressions of the white community here was how tight they are: little ad papers proliferate here and people advertise…and actually expect to sell…their old toilets, window frames, kitchen curtains, and closet gleanings…and for extraordinary prices, too! The concept of donating to charitable organizations like Goodwill or Salvation Army or St. Vincent DePaul is not very well established here. It is no surprise, then, that the American tradition of buying a boatload of gifts for the family, particularly the immediate family, has little traction in South Africa.

We don’t have live Christmas trees, either. South Africa is a semi-arid climate and arable land (and the water to irrigate it) is at a premium…and used for food production. There are few natural forests here, and the planted forests are primarily eucalyptus and the property of paper companies. In fact, wood is scarce here compared to the US and costly. Houses are built of clay or cement bricks, rather than stick-built like in America. Trees, particularly those trees that can grow tall and become timber, are not sacrificed for a couple of weeks of display.

Of course, we can’t discount the frugal nature of the South African: not having the emotional attachment to the tradition of a fragrant, gew-gaw encrusted pine in the middle of the living room as Americans have, South Africans find the reusable fake tree to be the optimal choice. Our table-top fibre optic tree has served us for four years and will be pressed into service again this year…rather a bit of an irony, considering that my father has a Christmas tree farm in Oregon!

Despite the fact that South Africans tend not to give each other…or their children…teetering mountains of Christmas swag, the malls are presently jammed with throngs of harried shoppers who brought their credit cards and shopping lists but left their manners at home. A large number of these people are vacationers, Cape Town being one of the favourite summer holiday destinations in this country, and while they jam the malls and parking lots, their teeming numbers don’t necessarily translate into piles of presents under those fake trees. Johannesburg is South Africa’s answer to LA when it comes to traffic, and the vacationing Joburgers don’t leave their combative traffic habits at home when they take their holidays in Cape Town…which they snarkily call “SlaapStad” (“SleepTown”)…which turns navigating our laidback roadscape into a knuckle biting experience. It isn’t much different in the parking lots, malls, or shops, either. So the holiday experience here, at least where shopping and driving is concerned, isn’t too different from my experiences in Silicon Valley.

My first Christmas here, five members of Hubby’s family…including my newly-minted mother-in-law…came to visit and I prepared a traditional American Christmas dinner. Well, that was the plan, anyway. I had my first taste of culture shock when I went shopping for the 22 pound turkey that was my customary centrepiece of the meal…no turkey! Seems that South Africans are only just developing a taste for turkey meat, preferring chicken or ham for their Christmas dinners. Eventually I found a turkey…a puny 11 pounder…and found myself with another surprise: the pinfeathers had neither been plucked out nor singed. Spoiled American that I am, I grumbled as I sat at the breakfast bar with pliers and stick matches, plucking and singeing and getting the turkey ready.

Shock number two came when I tried to put the turkey in the oven…the roaster was bigger than the oven! So, I lined a flat cake pan with foil and plopped the gobbler in side, folded up the sides to make a tent, and took it to the oven.

Surprise, surprise! The turkey…a puny little 11 pound turkey, barely larger than a fat chicken…wouldn’t fit into the oven. It was too tall! Right…the top edge of the turkey breast was literally touching the top of the oven! I managed to get the thing flattened down a bit and then get the beast roasted, but thank goodness I couldn’t find the 22 pounder I had originally been after!

Nobody knew what candied yams were, although mince pie (which is called a “tart” here) was recognized and eagerly wolfed down. Then, as a nod to South African Christmas traditions, we had a Christmas pudding (which is more of a fruit cake than anything else) with something called “custard” poured over it. Now, when you say “custard” to an American, we get a mental image of a firm-textured yellow milk-and-egg thing that, when cut, holds its shape. Not so South African custard…here, the word custard is used to describe a kind of custard-coloured, vanilla-flavoured thick sweet sauce with the consistency of pudding that failed to set. You can pour it…in fact, you do pour it. Now, I’m not particularly a fan of either fruitcake or custard, so the appeal of the dish is lost on me, but Hubby’s family was enthusiastic in their demolition of it.

The English custom of pulling Christmas crackers, completely unknown in America, continues to be indulged here. Wikipedia explains Christmas crackers so much better than I can: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christmas_cracker . Despite my husband and his family being Hindu, we exchange Christmas gifts and everyone seems to be enthralled with those Christmas crackers.

I’m an American. I don’t get it.