Hungry Holidays
No advent calendars? No Christmas crackers or silly paper hats? Not even a designated day to gorge on leftovers and nurse festive hangovers (aka Boxing Day)?! Christmas in the US suddenly didn’t sound so fun. But if I’ve learned anything while living here, it’s that Americans love a good holiday (there are still Halloween pumpkins up in our neighbourhood)… So I needn’t have worried. While in the UK everything revolves around Christmas at this time of the year, in America the celebrations are more spread out across a number of significant festive celebrations. Hence: Happy Holidays, plural. Of course, as with all food stories, holidays are deeply bound up with family and cultural traditions. What is traditional for one person isn’t for another. However, the common denominator of all holidays is surely the food. What is Thanksgiving without a table at which to give thanks? And so this year was a perfect opportunity to explore some of the festive food traditions across the pond.
Thanksgiving
I’ve had a couple of people here ask me whether we celebrate Thanksgiving in the UK. Um, what would we be giving thanks for? (And this year of all years...) But it shows the importance of this holiday here that they couldn’t immediately imagine people not celebrating it. Despite fairly shaky evidence, the celebration is strongly linked in the public consciousness to a meal in 1621 where some of the first westerners in New England (i.e. the pilgrims) celebrated a successful autumnal harvest with members of the native Wampanoag tribe. While Thanksgiving meals continued to be held by various groups in the next couple of centuries, it was not cemented in the national calendar until 1863 when Abraham Lincoln proclaimed a unifying “day of Thanksgiving and Praise” among the backdrop of the divisive Civil War and an increasingly diverse population. Given these origins, this holiday revolves entirely around the food (oh, and I suppose giving thanks for things, but this is not a blog about being thankful for anything apart from food). But what did the original Thanksgiving-goers actually feast on?
The food most closely associated with Thanksgiving is surely turkey… images abound of a family sat around a giant golden bird ready to be carved. While wild turkeys are native to North America, they actually would have been familiar to the pilgrims already; earlier Spanish explorers had discovered and brought the bird back to Europe, so it had been enjoyed there for decades before the Mayflower had set out for the Americas. Indeed, the pilgrims actually brought domesticated turkeys with them when they first came to New England. Despite all this, there is no evidence that turkey was actually eaten at the original Thanksgiving feast. More likely (based on the two eyewitness accounts that survived to tell the tale) they enjoyed venison and shellfish, both of which would have been abundant in the area. Indeed, many of the foods now associated with Thanksgiving would not have been available in 1621, including potatoes, and the flour and butter needed to make pies. Instead, sides would have included native fruits and vegetables local to their new home, a likely menu being something along the lines of venison, mussels, lobsters, corn, grapes, pumpkins and cranberries.
Some of these native American foods have percolated through the decades as traditional Thanksgiving accompaniments: sides of corn, yams and cranberries (sweetened as a sauce) are all common. However, given the sheer diversity of American climates and cultures, it’s hard to find other “typical” items. For example, in Maryland – a coastal state with a large population of German descendants – you might find crab cakes and sauerkraut on the menu. In some of the southern states, with their strong links to Latin American cultures, pumpkin empanadas are common. In Italian-American families in New Jersey or New York you’re likely to have a pasta dish before the main event. For my own foray into a traditional family Thanksgiving, I was lucky enough to be invited to my husband’s boss’s house (my husband was invited too, I should add). Given some of their family had connections to Kansas, our meal included southern-style white gravy and biscuits. Similar to British scones, the biscuits were light and flaky and indeed are most likely derived from types of bread brought over by early British settlers. The combination reminded me a little of Yorkshire puddings with bread sauce in the UK: there will always be room on a plate for something carb-y designed to soak up the other flavours of the dinner, along with a richly savoury and creamy sauce. We had other sides of mashed potatoes, sprouts, stuffing and green beans: all familiar winter dinner flavours but with a distinctly American slant. Interestingly, we had lamb instead of turkey (our hosts declaring turkey to be “trash”). Perhaps more of a personal preference than an American tradition, it does serve to show how the meal will vary hugely from family to family… after all, the key to Thanksgiving isn’t what you eat, but who you eat it with. While I think we were particularly lucky that our host was such a good cook, the best thing about Thanksgiving was being invited to share it with a family when ours were so far away.
Christmas
Our Thanksgiving hosts described the main difference between American Thanksgiving and Christmas as the former being all about the food while the latter is more about presents. However, while Christmas in America may be less focused around food than Thanksgiving, it’s still pretty darn important. A lot of the traditional festive foods were actually originally brought over from the UK, including things like ham and root vegetable sides, which would still be enjoyed in a lot of New England and some historic southern states like Virginia. However – as with Thanksgiving food – the sheer diversity of the US accounts for significant variation in foods typically enjoyed across the country. For our own Christmas Day, we decided to follow a very New York tradition of… eating out. In a city where there are more restaurants than you can shake a candy cane at, and one with a huge number of families that don’t celebrate the traditionally Christian holiday, I knew it wouldn’t be hard to find a good lunch… And so Christmas Day found us heading to Little Owl in Greenwich Village (whose claim to fame - beyond its good food - is its location in the apartment block used for the exterior shots of the Friends apartment). Despite embracing a different type of Christmas this year, something in me found it hard to stray too far from festive food traditions, so I went for the most “Christmassy” things on a fairly non-festive menu: turkey meatloaf with Brussel sprout home fries, both of which were also gratifyingly American options. Given it was technically a brunch menu, the turkey meatloaf came with a side of a fried egg, and a seasonal hash of beetroot and greens. It definitely didn’t taste like Christmas, but was delicious nonetheless, the turkey all moist and beautifully savoury (given I tend to agree with my Thanksgiving hosts that turkey can be trash, perhaps the best thing you can do to it is pound the hell out of it and then cram it full of spices and seasoning). What more could you ask for on Christmas Day than delicious food in lovely surroundings, with a hoard of Friends-obsessed tourists gawking and taking photos of you through the window?
Of course, Christmas isn’t Christmas without something sweet. Given there were no Christmassy options on the Little Owl menu, I went for the most delicious-sounding thing (always a good back up), which were the raspberry and Nutella beignets. Normally associated with Creole cooking in the US, they are essentially deep-fried choux pastry balls, like hot doughnuts. These ones were deliciously fluffy and airy inside, the outsides crisp with the tang of the oil and a dusting of sugar, pared perfectly with thick, sweet chocolate and a sharp raspberry coulis. As a dried fruit-hater (mince pies? Yuck.) I’m always on the lookout for alternative sweet options for Christmas and these definitely did the job. Given this is the only time of the year that it’s acceptable (nay, essential) to eat chocolate for breakfast, I also required something sweet to have in the house for Christmas week, and I opted for a food that was next on my list of must-tries in New York: chocolate babka. A sweet Jewish yeasted bread originally from Eastern Europe, these loaves are traditionally filled with either cinnamon or chocolate. Of course, this wouldn’t usually be enjoyed for Christmas, but this time of year also includes an important holiday for Jewish communities: Hanukkah, the Jewish festival of light. Given the importance of oil to this holiday (the lighting of the menorah commemorates the miracle of a one-day supply of oil lasting eight days) deep-fried foods – such as doughnuts – are often eaten during the festivities, so I’m retroactively declaring that the beignets were a nod to this holiday too. Regardless, babka is the sort of delicious food that should be eaten at all occasions, and – indeed – can be eaten at any time of day (it reminded me a bit of pain au chocolat so would make a good breakfast treat even when you don’t have the excuse of Christmas) … It was simply delicious, and not as heavy as traditional Christmas puds. This is definitely one to seek out in London next year.
Despite all these diversions in my Christmas menu, I found that I couldn’t dispense with personal traditions entirely. My husband simply had to have pickled onions for Boxing Day, which we found in the British section of our local grocery store (next to the Heinz baked beans and the jars of Marmite). And I had to make bread sauce from scratch, something I have at no other time of the year; the smell of the milk steeping with onion, cloves, black pepper and bay leaves is an essential component of the festivities for me. Food is intimately bound up with nostalgia, and at no other time is that more important than in a season in which comfort and companionship are central. So what am I thankful for? The two months I have left to try some more food in New York, of course. Happy Holidays, everyone!
Turkey meatloaf from Little Owl.
Brussel sprout home fries from Little Owl.
Beignets from Little Owl.
A slice of chocolate babka from Breads Bakery.
