Thanksgiving’s Odd Medley of Recipes, Rituals

What is it about the Thanksgiving meal, anyway? Even people who can’t heat a Pop-Tart without starting a kitchen fire become hidebound traditionalists on November’s fourth Thursday.

Thanksgiving dinner is the year’s most rigid menu, right down to the sweet midget gherkin pickles that may only be served in the little crystal relish plate that belonged to Aunt Ethel.

The menu defies logic. Most say it is their favorite meal of the year, and also agree that it comprises dishes they wouldn’t dream of eating the rest of the year.

The Big Five, on almost any traditionalist’s list, are turkey, dressing, cranberry sauce, mashed potatoes and pumpkin pie. After that, almost everyone has a nostalgic dish and accompanying ritual that speaks to them of holidays present and past.

For Jody Waxman of Canoga Park it is the yams that make Thanksgiving Thanksgiving--a common dish to be sure, steaming and smothered with brown sugar and butter. What’s unusual about the yams demanded by Waxman and her extended family is that they must be the canned version, slightly too orange, slightly too squishy, bled of many of their nutrients during the elaborate and extended canning process.

Fifteen years ago, a sister prepared both fresh and canned yams, Waxman said. The fresh ones went all but untouched. The carrot-like canned treats were a hit, and remain so to this day.

“Mmmmm,” Waxman said deliciously. “Canned ones are the best.”

Jane McKinney, a Ventura resident who is from South Carolina, also admits to a Thanksgiving fondness for a dish largely bereft of vitamins and minerals, but with a distinctly American flavor: pea-and-asparagus casserole.

“It was brought to my husband Johnny’s family’s house for a funeral in South Carolina,” McKinney said. “It’s what people take to people’s houses after someone died, but we adopted it for Thanksgiving. It’s got canned mushroom soup and those canned fried onions. It’s one step above white-trash cooking.”

Growing up in Kansas City, Anne Scheck wondered each fall about that legendary first Thanksgiving. “I wanted to eat what the Pilgrims ate, sitting outside by Plymouth Rock,” the Thousand Oaks resident said.

“So my mom invented a casserole for me, which is sort of a Kansan’s idea of what they might have eaten up in New England by the ocean: it has soda crackers, a can of oysters and a can of cream of mushroom soup.

“I’ve never made it myself, but mom still does when she comes out to California to visit us on Thanksgiving. This is my favorite holiday--it’s about being a nation of immigrants--it brings us together,” Scheck said.

Virginia Chavez in Ventura said it is impossible for her to winnow her sentimental favorite to just one dish. “It’s two things. My cranberry Jell-O salad, which I made up. Then, the next day, my husband, Eddie, makes turkey tacos from the leftovers. I make the tortillas, of course.

“And we always eat on the set of dishes my adopted grandmother left to me. Usually at 2 o’clock.”

If Thanksgiving just isn’t the same without Skip’s lard tarts or Uncle Yakov’s boiled beets or some other dish that’s best fed to relatives, many families also practice some quirky food-related ritual before the day is out.

For Cristina Arana, 22, Thanksgiving is mostly a day of fasting.

“My father and my mother starve us to death all day until Thanksgiving dinner, around 6 o’clock,” the Northridge resident said with great angst. “Then once we have the turkey sitting in front of us, and we’re very, very hungry and ravenous, my dad makes us pray.”

But the end of the fast is still a half-hour away.

“We have to pray for everything we’re grateful for for the entire year,” Arana said. “If we cut our prayers short or don’t take them seriously, he gives us the evil eye. After our almost 30-minute prayer, we get to eat.”

Lisa Fluekiger’s family manages to mix family tradition with the ethos of a fraternity party.

It starts with whipped cream for the pies. Not any whipped cream, but pressurized cans of the foamy white stuff, in the interest of “trajectory,” as the graduating Cal State Northridge journalism major puts it. It continues with the stashing of the cans under sofa cushions. And it ends with a whipped cream fight--but only between Fluekiger’s mother and older brother.

“My dad and I sit there and eat,” she said. “And we duck.”

Dee Volz’s mother always sang opera as she roasted the turkey, a memory Volz carried with her from East Side New York to Ojai’s east end.

“I was always treated to the last act of ‘Aida’ while the turkey cooked. There was much feeling put into it.

“That, of course, was back in the days when cooking a turkey was an all-day undertaking,” Volz continued. “I’ve been fortunate--I’ve never not had a Thanksgiving dinner. This one will make 75 Thanksgivings for me.”

In Ventura, Kenmere Davidson takes the long view of the holiday, and in doing so, brings up what may be the best part of all about Thanksgiving: the leftovers.

“The first thing I think of is the turkey sandwich at midnight. White bread and a ton of mayonnaise,” she said.

“I even put leftover cranberry sauce on it. The house is quiet by then and the kitchen is usually pretty well cleaned up. No one has ever seen me do this.”

Eric Slater is a Times staff writer and Brenda Loree is a special correspondent.