Connections: Of Goose and Mousse
Can you believe Thanksgiving is next week? It is a cliché to rhetorically ask where the time has gone, but this autumn, with the dramatic news cycle unfolding at such a breathless pace, it is flying by faster than ever. Don’t you agree?
For me, Thanksgiving is the year’s biggest holiday. Christmas just isn’t as important to me, despite the fun I share with grandchildren. I didn’t celebrate it when I was young and had to catch up as an adult. (The first Christmas presents I ever wrapped, in East Hampton before I was married, were elaborate constructions of paper and ribbons and cards and decorative detailing. Back then, there was plenty of time.)
Over the years, the number of people at our Thanksgiving feast has fluctuated wildly, from the Novembers when we regularly welcomed upward of 30 friends and relations (and the occasional stranger) to eat turkey and ham off plates balanced on laps, down to gatherings of eight or 10 around a dining room table set with our good, old Copeland Spode.
Nostalgia works in funny ways. I just looked at a small scar on my left thumb; it dates to the first Thanksgiving I spent as a Rattray. Ev and I were living then, in the early 1960s, in the house on Gardiner’s Bay that our son David lives in now, and my mother-in-law, Nettie Rattray, for whom my granddaughter is named, was the only guest. We thought a goose would be festive but apparently were not experienced enough to know how to cope with the quantity of boiling-hot rendered fat that a domestic goose releases when roasted. Hence the scar.
In the 1980s and early 1990s, Thanksgiving was a real bacchanal. We would put on some early Sinatra and Dorsey records (“Polkadots and Moonbeams,” and “East of the Sun, West of the Moon”) as the guests began to stream in the door. After dinner, we played charades or sang a bit drunkenly around the piano. Our regulars could be relied on to bring a favorite dish that became traditional, like my friend Joanne Grant’s unforgettable pumpkin mousse, which sometimes came cleanly out of the mold and sometimes didn’t, as we all stopped in the kitchen to watch breathlessly. Or my daughter’s take on her great-grandmother’s Chocolate Sundae Pie, an airy custard dessert so impossible to perfect it was only attempted twice a year. Or our must-have appetizer, Oysters Rattray, remembered with watering mouths by all who tasted it.
Oysters Rattray is a cousin of Oysters Rockefeller, only better, at least in my opinion. Instead of spinach, we use sorrel, which at one time grew in our garden. (Later, we used to reliably find it at the Green Thumb in Water Mill, but — oddly, considering the self-consciously “gourmet” world we live in today, sorrel is harder to find these days.) The recipe also calls for shallots, dill, parsley, and celery, garlic, butter, breadcrumbs, and Pernod. Don’t forget the Pernod.
This year, with the dust not yet settled in a round-robin of house-selling and house-moving — boxes and brooms flying all over our old family house on Edwards Lane — Thanksgiving will be different. Two of my children, and their kids, are heading to points north (Vermont) and west (San Francisco), and we will have a smaller crowd than ever before. My third child is coming with his two kids. He is focusing on a recipe for Indian pudding. I hope to find sorrel for the oysters. Everyone promises that in 2019 we will revive the boisterous party of Thanksgivings past. Next year, on Edwards Lane . . .