At Thanksgiving, every recipe has a story

The table looked more like it belonged at “A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving” than at a food editor’s house.

The ragtag bunch of Thanksgiving accompaniments covered all the usual suspects – the traditional green bean casserole smothered in fried onions, the weird cranberry mold that could have been ripped from the pages of a 1955 edition of Good Housekeeping, and a rich and velvety pecan pie. The cornbread dressing contained turkey broth and the gravy, so it didn’t exactly match the protein – a ham from a pig named Tweedle Dee, raised by a 4-H-er.

But that’s what a “Signature Dish” Thanksgiving should look like. Every recipe has a history, and every dish is special to someone.

This month, instead of focusing on a single individual’s signature dish, we asked our colleagues to share the holiday dishes that are special to them and their families. Here are their stories and recipes.

— MEREDITH GOAD

I grew up in an Italian-American family, which meant celebrating Thanksgiving was about having not only turkey, but a multicourse meal that included my grandmother’s lasagna. The lasagna was always served before the turkey because the bird was more of an obligation no one cared about on my family’s holiday dinner table. The next day, we inevitably had turkey leftovers with nary a slice of lasagna in sight.

I think this is why I had an open mind when it came to Thanksgiving dinners with my own children. When my youngest daughter was 10, we had several hams in the freezer thanks to a 4-H project she undertook that included raising market hogs to show at the Cumberland Fair. She raised one to sell at the fair’s auction while the other went into our freezer.

That first year she raised pigs – their names were Pulchra and Titus – we found it distressing to have befriended an animal that would eventually end up in our freezer. But my daughter gave those animals a great life and saying a word of thanks at our Thanksgiving table seemed a fitting tribute. The pigs were well-loved, but truth be told, by the time those pigs were 300 pounds and throwing their weight around, we didn’t shed too many tears when they departed our little hobby farm.

The second year of our ham-themed, birdless Thanksgiving dinner, my cousin’s family visited and were less thrilled with our menu’s turkey omission. That year, I caved to pressure and cooked both our homegrown ham and the store-bought turkey they brought.

I mentioned this in a blog entry I wrote in 2007 and received a comment from Lisa Suhay, the author of the children’s book “Pardon Me. It’s Ham, Not Turkey.” Her book tells the story of early settlers in Virginia celebrating a meal of thanks with ham, a year before the Pilgrims landed in 1620 and (supposedly) served turkey at the “real” Thanksgiving. So regardless of my cousin’s belief that turkey was the only legitimate centerpiece, that book solidified my family’s notion that eating ham on Thanksgiving wasn’t so offbeat, after all.

Since then, I have cooked only one turkey (from a friend’s farm) for Thanksgiving. The tradition we’ve created in my family is to eat a main dish of something that we raised, or grew, in our own backyard.

— WENDY ALMEIDA

THANKSGIVING HAM

Serves about 8

3-4 pats of butter

6-7 pound ham

About 20 whole cloves

1/2 cup brown sugar

1/2 cup maple syrup (the real stuff)

Prepare a roasting pan by rubbing the bottom of the pan with butter. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F.

Rub more butter all over the outside of the ham.

Press the cloves into the ham. If the skin is tough, use a sharp knife to poke holes in the ham before pushing in cloves.

Place the ham into the prepared pan. Sprinkle it with brown sugar and drizzle with some of the maple syrup.

Cover the ham with foil. For a 6-pound ham, bake for about 11/2 hours, basting the ham every 30 minutes. Remove the foil for the last 30 minutes of baking. Drizzle with the remaining maple syrup after removing from the oven. Let the ham sit for 15 minutes before slicing.

The dish that makes an appearance at our holiday table is scalloped oysters.

What’s funny is that it comes from my dad’s side of the family – Midwest farm people, who live about as far from an ocean as you can get.

When my folks married – my mom is a Boston native – she learned to make it, although she’d never seen or heard of it before.

As kids, my siblings and I got to crush the crackers for it, a job we enjoyed even though we thought the dish was ghastly.

My dad would insist every year we try it and my brother, sister and I would take a bite, wrinkle our noses and pronounce it disgusting.

Joyful that he wouldn’t have to share, my dad would say, “Well, maybe next year.”

This played out for more than a decade, until I was in my late teens and, after the mandatory bite, I realized it was actually kind of good. I heaped a serving on my plate. My brother and sister soon followed suit.

Now Dad has to share. I’m pretty sure he rues the day he encouraged us to try it.

— CAROL COULTAS

RAY’S SCALLOPED OYSTERS

Full box of saltine crackers

2 cans of oysters (save the juice)

Butter

Salt and pepper

Milk

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F and butter a casserole dish.

Crush all the saltines in a plastic bag (a rolling pin works well; draft any available child for this task).

Drain the oysters, but save the juice.

Put a layer of the crushed crackers on the bottom of the casserole, followed by a layer of oysters. Dot with butter; sprinkle with salt and pepper.

Continue layering, ending with a layer of crackers on top. Dot with butter.

Mix the reserved oyster juice with milk and pour over the casserole, then add just milk, until the liquid reaches 3/4 of the way up the casserole dish.

Bake for 40-45 minutes or until the top browns.

The dish that will be on my family’s Thanksgiving table until the end of time is my mother’s Southern cornbread dressing.

Why? It’s my father’s favorite. If he were on death row, his last meal would include a giant portion of this dressing, smothered in homemade gravy.

Many’s the year I flew home at Thanksgiving armed with stuffing recipes (we call it dressing in the South) from fancy food magazines that included ingredients like sausage, apples, pecans, pears and all kinds of herbs. Yet, no matter what masterpiece I put on the table, my father always asked my mother to make some of her down-home cornbread dressing as well. To please me, he would dish up a small spoonful of my stuffing to put on his plate, but it was usually still there when dinner was over. Sometimes it hurt my feelings, but after it happened umpteen times, I got over it.

As my brother and sister raised their own families in different parts of the country and we started spending more Thanksgivings apart, I began to crave that cornbread dressing whenever the fourth Thursday in November rolled around. If I couldn’t be in Tennessee, this dish at least made my tastebuds feel at home.

Learning how to make it, however, was a challenge. My mother learned from her mother, and she’s not sure who taught my grandmother. I can pretty much make it myself now with no recipe, but being the overly fastidious, can’t-make-a-mistake person that I am, having a recipe in hand is comforting.

So here’s how a phone call to my mother goes. I ask her how much onion to add, and she says, “It depends on how much onion you want.”

How much salt? She guesses a tablespoon, which seems like a lot. “I just sprinkle some in.”

Magazines tell you to bake something until the top is golden brown. My mother’s directions: “You just have to watch.”

The recipe calls for white cornmeal, which Southerners prefer but is interchangeable with yellow cornmeal. As little as five or 10 years ago, I searched Maine grocery stores in vain for white cornmeal, finally tracking down some Martha White at the Shaw’s in Falmouth. Now, lots of other brands are sold here. You can get regular or self-rising white cornmeal; my mother always uses the regular because … well, that’s just the way she’s always done it.

The other thing you have to know about this dressing is it contains more rubbed sage than you’ve probably ever eaten in your life. My father likes a lot of it in his dressing, and my mother always has him taste it before she puts it in the oven. How much are we talking about? If it’s a small container, my mother says, “use most of it.”

— MEREDITH GOAD

WILMA GOAD’S SOUTHERN CORNBREAD DRESSING

To make the cornbread, you can follow the directions on just about any package of white cornmeal. My mother prefers the Martha White brand, so that’s the recipe I use. The cornbread can be made a day or two ahead. I usually double the recipe because leftovers freeze well.

FOR THE CORNBREAD:

1 egg

13/4 cups buttermilk

1/4 cup vegetable oil

2 cups white corn meal

1 tablespoon baking powder

1 teaspoon salt

Preheat the oven to 450 degrees F.

Combine all ingredients and pour into a 9-inch cast iron skillet or an 8- by 8-inch baking pan. (I have also used a 9-inch round cake pan.) If using a cast iron skillet, first add a couple tablespoons of shortening to the pan and heat in the oven for a few minutes. When the shortening has melted and the pan is hot, pour in the cornbread batter. Bake for 20-25 minutes.

FOR THE DRESSING:

1 recipe Cornbread

1-2 tablespoons vegetable oil

1 to 2 stalks celery, chopped (about 1/2 cup)

1 small onion, chopped (about 1/2 cup)

Cooked giblets, chopped into small pieces (optional but they add great flavor)

At least 1 quart turkey broth, plus broth and drippings from your roasted turkey

1 teaspoon salt

Rubbed sage to taste

1 (16-ounce) bag stuffing mix

Preheat the oven to 400 degrees F. Butter a 81/2- by 11-inch baking dish.

Crumble the cornbread into a big bowl. In a medium-sized frying pan, heat the oil, then sauté the celery and onion just until soft (no need to brown them), 5 to 8 minutes. Add to the cornbread. If you’re not using all your giblets to make gravy, add them to the dressing mixture now.

Add turkey broth, along with drippings, to the cornbread until it reaches the consistency of wet cement (trust me). Add salt and sage to taste. (Do not be timid with the sage. It’s hard to overdo it in this recipe. When I double the recipe, I use an entire 1/2-ounce bottle.) Mix in about half the stuffing mix. (Save the leftovers for another use.)

Pour the dressing into the prepared baking dish and bake for 30-45 minutes, until the top is lightly browned.

I love telling this story.

Gravy is an afterthought. When people talk about Thanksgiving, the gravy is simply assumed. It’s brown, it’s fatty and you drown your plate in it.

After all, it’s a simple recipe. But my Grandma had a secret ingredient that was the root of a years-long family argument.

My brother and I were oblivious to most things cooking. But in our wildly rebellious teenage years, we picked up on something: Grandma’s gravy tasted better than Mom’s gravy. In fact, it wasn’t even close.

“I make it just like she taught me,” my mom would insist, both amused and annoyed by our claim that her gravy wasn’t up to Grandma’s level.

At age 19, I demanded to watch Grandma make the Thanksgiving gravy. For the first 20 minutes, it was classic. Take the turkey drippings and get the skin and gross stuff out. Put the turkey pan on the oven and heat it. Add some cornstarch until it thickens up.

Grandma always loved a conspiracy. She had heard my brother and me insisting her gravy was different. As the gravy thickened, she elbowed me in the chops. “Get the hot sauce out of the cupboard,” she said quietly.

I was stunned. “Seriously?”

She just looked at me. She was serious. Just two or three shakes ought to be enough. Three dabs of Tabasco sauce went into the gravy. I stirred and tasted. Perfect, just like always. Mom is still in disbelief.

I’ve lived in six states and moved 16 times since that Thanksgiving 20 years ago, but I’ve made that gravy every year. A little dab of a simple ingredient can make all the difference.

— JAMES PATRICK

GRANDMA’S MODIFIED GRAVY

Turkey drippings/fat

2 cans cream of chicken soup

Cornstarch

Tabasco sauce

After the bird is pulled out of the roasting pan, pour the drippings into a pot and heat on medium-low.

When the drippings are simmering, add a can of cream of chicken soup and stir thoroughly.

Turn the heat off.

If the gravy is not thick enough, add more cream of chicken soup or cornstarch.

Add three shakes of Tabasco. Stir and serve.

It begins with the hum of an electric can opener, followed by the breaking of the foil seal on a container of French’s French Fried Onions. You know where I’m going with this …

My family’s Thanksgiving meal, though delicious, features nothing fancy – just a traditional turkey dinner with all of the basic trimmings. Yet – I am almost embarrassed to admit – failure to serve a green bean casserole at any holiday table where my family is seated is tantamount to sacrilege.

I get that there is nothing high-end about this dish. It is usually a concoction of canned and processed foods, layered in a casserole dish and then 350-degreed into a bubbling mass of goodness. But there’s just something about the way this oft-traduced dish seems to elevate everything else on the plate around it that keeps us coming back for more.

I always “volunteer” to make this dish for our family feasts as a defensive move, lest we end up with a “fat-free” or “lower sodium” version laden with chemicals and lacking in flavor.

Years ago, a distant relative hosted the holiday meal and served her version of green bean casserole. Her recipe included canned green beans, cream of mushroom soup, cream cheese and … nothing else! Where were the requisite crispy fried onions and other embellishments?

Horrified looks were exchanged at the table, followed by an awkward silence. To avoid insulting our hostess, I took the smallest possible serving of her casserole and swallowed it like a champ, trying not to react like I was a contestant in some horrific food challenge on “Survivor.”

But I made an inner vow that day (cue scene of Scarlet O’Hara, fist raised in the glow of a burning Atlanta): Never again would I silently stand by while someone ruined Thanksgiving for our family!

OK … so it’s just a green bean casserole, but I do have standards. My recipe includes fresh steamed green beans, homemade cream of mushroom soup, Cooper Sharp American cheese and the aforementioned crispy fried onions. It’s a little more work, but totally worth the effort.

— DEBORAH SAYER

GREEN BEAN CASSEROLE

FOR THE CREAM OF MUSHROOM SOUP:

6 tablespoons butter

1 medium-sized sweet onion, chopped fine

11/2 cups white button mushrooms, chopped fine

6 tablespoons flour

1/2 teaspoon dried thyme

1/2 teaspoon garlic powder

1 teaspoon salt

1/2 teaspoon pepper

2 cups vegetable or beef broth

2 cups whole milk

FOR THE CASSEROLE:

3 pounds fresh green beans, trimmed and cut into 2-inch pieces

10-12 slices Cooper’s Sharp American cheese

1 (6-ounce) container French’s French Fried Onions

To make the cream of mushroom soup, melt the butter in large skillet over medium heat and sauté the onions until translucent, 3 to 5 minutes. Add the mushrooms and cook 5 to 10 minutes. Sprinkle in flour and seasonings, stirring constantly. Cook 2 minutes. Gradually pour in the broth, whisking constantly to avoid lumps. Add the milk, whisking until smooth. Bring to a simmer and cook, 10 more minutes. The soup will be very thick.

To make the casserole, preheat the oven to 350 degrees F. Steam the green beans until tender, about 10 minutes. Put the beans in a 9- by 13-inch baking dish. Pour the soup over the beans, adding more milk to thin it as needed. Top with cheese slices.

Cover the pan with aluminum foil and bake 30 minutes or until bubbly. Top with fried onions and return to oven, uncovered, for 5 to 10 minutes.

My mom, who is Canadian, did not grow up with Thanksgiving. It was an American custom she acquired at the same time she acquired my dad. She acquired him, officially, on June 13, 1954, which, I suspect, is roughly the vintage of her Thanksgiving cranberry mold recipe.

It calls for dark red Jell-O (note: a color, not a flavor); canned cranberries (although, my mother says, “fresh are better”), and chopped celery, apples and walnuts. My mother makes the cranberry mold in a copper-colored dish that has a hole in the center – picture a bundt pan. For Thanksgiving dinner, she sets a small glass Pyrex dish filled with Hellmann’s mayonnaise inside that cavity.

For a number of years, the cranberry mold caused Thanksgiving friction. At least for me. I had become obsessed with cooking in my teens and early adulthood. I held multicourse sit-down dinner parties for high school friends. I worked at splashy restaurants. I stayed up all night to make beet-tinted fresh pasta and spent long afternoons baking elegant, many-layered nut tortes with European buttercream. I faulted my parents for failing to subscribe to Gourmet magazine.

Naturally, neither Jell-O salads, nor molds, nor mayonnaise sat well with me. I had all kinds of extravagant ideas about cranberry sauce in those years. One Thanksgiving, I spent hours de-seeding kumquats to make cranberry-kumquat sauce. Another time, I made three sauces, one not satisfying my idea of a bountiful Thanksgiving table. Do we have to have that outdated, icky-sweet cranberry mold? I’d whine year after year.

But Susan, my oldest sister, demanded it, and for my mother, it wasn’t Thanksgiving without the cranberry mold.

My mother doesn’t remember it like this. Her memory isn’t so good these days. Today, as it happens, she turns 87, and when I asked for the recipe, she not only absolved me of poor Thanksgiving behavior; she didn’t recollect it.

“Was I obnoxious?” I asked her over the phone last week. “Yeah,” she said and then instantly retracted. “No. Maybe we made both? Didn’t we do that for a couple of years? The two kinds?”

Yes, we did. We do. After years of bickering – that’s the real Thanksgiving tradition in my family – we compromised, or rather I grew up. At Thanksgiving dinners of recent vintage, Mom’s cranberry mold has co-existed peaceably with a fresh cranberry relish that my sister Carolyn and I love.

We’d planned to make Mom’s version together when she visited Portland earlier this month so I could write about that, but despite several reminders, she forgot to bring the recipe.

Over the phone, she read it to me, and I asked if she toasted the walnuts.

“Never,” she said, as she thumbed distractedly through her recipe file to see if she could figure out the mold’s origins. A Jell-O promotion? A magazine? The version she makes is written out on a recipe card in her own hand; the original grew so old and stained, she recopied it.

When I made the cranberry mold last week, I found myself arguing with it, or perhaps with my mother. I toasted the walnuts. I added salt. I threw in chopped fennel with the celery and apples, along with lots of fresh, grated ginger and lime zest. Next time, I made a mental note, I’d skip the Jell-O – even the smell was cloying and fake – and use unflavored gelatin.

Sorry, Mom.

— PEGGY GRODINSKY

LEBA’S CRANBERRY MOLD

2 (3-ounce) packages of dark red Jell-O

4 cups hot water

1 (14-ounce) can cranberries or 2 cups homemade cranberry sauce

1 cup chopped apples

1 cup chopped celery

1 cup chopped walnuts

Brush a large (8 to 10 cups) decorative mold lightly with oil or coat with cooking spray. Set aside.

Whisk together the Jell-O and the water in a large bowl until the Jell-O dissolves. Combine with the canned cranberries or sauce. Cool the mixture in the refrigerator until it is very softly gelled.

Stir in the apples, celery and walnuts. Refrigerate several hours or overnight to gel firmly.

When it’s time to serve, if the cranberry mold doesn’t release easily, dip the outside of the mold in a large bowl of hot water very briefly (otherwise the Jell-O will melt). Turn out onto a lettuce-covered platter and serve in slices with mayonnaise.

Thanksgiving in our family meant pie. Not a single pie, mind you, elegantly presented on a stand after the turkey was cleared, but multiple pies in metal tins, and a variety of different toppings, arrayed on the counter with paper name tags: mince, walnut raisin, pumpkin, pumpkin-cheesecake, sweet cherry, sour cherry, low-sugar cherry, peach, sweet potato, apple. Oh – and pecan, which was the only pie popular enough to disappear in its entirety every year.

What about the others? November after November they remained rarely touched – or barely touched. Soon after guests headed home, Mom wrapped the pies in foil and returned them to the freezer (she had a very close relationship with her freezer) for use at a church supper or a board meeting.

One year we finally asked why she baked all the less-than-popular pies. “They represent our history and traditions and those who can’t be with us,” Mom explained.

When my sister asked for a complete rundown, we discovered that the walnut raisin was for a grandfather who’d tried it in England during World War II, the mince for his mother who’d “gone to glory” not long after, the pumpkin for our beloved Aunt Betsy, low-sugar cherry for an in-law with a sugar problem (he joined in a few Thanksgivings but disappeared after a messy divorce). “Enough,” my sister shouted. “I get it.”

Those pies composed a sort of edible family tree, and you can’t simply lop off a branch of your family tree. No matter how hard you try.

I never cared for the walnut raisin. Sweet cherry was gloppy, sour cherry runny, the sweet potato (honoring relatives from Virginia and North Carolina) was too dense. And the mince? Too weird. I mean suet – really? But our mother’s pecan pie was spectacular: sweet and rich and dark and sticky and beautiful (she always saved the prettiest pecans for the top of the pie). And it tasted creamier than any of the pecan pies I’d try later at restaurants in both the North and South.

A few years ago I finally stole a copy of the recipe from the cabinet near the microwave and discovered that she added a few teaspoons of whipping cream to the butter, brown sugar and corn syrup, ensuring that silky filling. And I found a note appended to the top of the recipe card in 1972: “James’ favorite. Always make every Thanksgiving.”

— JAMES H. SCHWARTZ

MARGERY’S PECAN PIE

Serves 8

1 all-butter pie crust

1/4 cup unsalted butter

1 cup firmly packed dark brown sugar

1 cup light corn syrup

1 tablespoon whipping cream

1/4 teaspoon salt

3 large eggs, at room temperature

2 tablespoons vanilla extract

11/2 cups unbroken pecan halves

Preheat the oven to 400 degrees F. Partially bake the pie crust, 12 to 15 minutes, until the edges are barely golden.

Melt the butter and sugar over low heat in a double boiler, then add the corn syrup and cream.

In another bowl add salt to the eggs and beat until light. Stir well into first mixture.

Add the vanilla and pecans, making sure to use unbroken pecan halves.

Pour the warm mixture into the prepared pie crust and bake at 400 degrees F for 10 minutes. Reduce the heat to 350 degrees F and bake approximately 25 minutes more, or until knife inserted in center of filling comes out clean.