What single dish defines your holiday?

November 14, 2020 by
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US Thanksgiving is less than two weeks away, but this year it is going to be celebrated much differently than usual. Extended family gatherings will be supplanted by more intimate dinners. Our usual crowd of 8 to 10 will only be two this year, because none of our usual dining companions is in our ‘bubble’. Even though we cannot be with our loved ones, I will make at least one dish that graces our table every Thanksgiving: cranberry relish. It has been the one constant that my husband insists upon each year. Most people have a food item that defines the holiday, and Food & Wine recently asked several people in the food and entertainment worlds which one dish makes them feel at home.

The answers included a range of dishes from sweet potato pie to ambrosia to cranberry sauce from a can. (Whether to have fresh or canned cranberry sauce is a debate for the ages.) Aaron Hutcherson said that cornbread dressing is the dish that will ground him this Thanksgiving. Food & Wine Best New Chef Daisy Ryan has a completely different take: for her family, Thanksgiving kicks off Manhattan-drinking season.

My most cherished holiday memories involve Thanksgiving at my grandparents’ farm. The cranberry sauce – which I wouldn’t touch back then – came from a can, but we did have three kinds of home-baked pie, boatloads of mashed potatoes, an overbaked turkey with plenty of gravy to drown it, and what I then considered a fancy hors d’oeuvres tray that preceded the meal. The tray had canned black olives, radishes, pickles, and celery sticks. We never had it any other time than holiday dinners, and when I was a kid, I thought it was the height of sophistication. Never mind that my cousins and I stuck an olive on the end of each finger. I won’t get to see my grandmother this Thanksgiving, so maybe in addition to making cranberry relish, I’ll buy a can of olives and place them on my fingers, just for old times’ sake.

Photo of Ted Allen’s Cointreau cranberry relish from Food Network Magazine by Ted Allen

Category: Holidays & Celebrations

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2 Comments

  • goodfruit  on  November 16, 2020

    Stuffing is my single dish that defines my holidays. Growing up, my grandmother, who had three sons, always made Oyster Stuffing in a separate dish to the regular stuffing.
    Every year it was the same, at least one of the three sons walking into the house for Thanksgiving or Christmas, would say, “Did you make the Oyster Stuffing.”
    On my own, I’ve made many varieties of stuffing and I still like Plain Ol’ Stuffing the best.

  • Mrs. L  on  November 19, 2020

    Creamed onions. Which I actually would never eat grown up. These days everyone can make a different type of stuffing, or put something weird in the cranberry sauce (don’t ask) but the recipe for those creamed onions has stayed the same.

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