If you are a red-blooded American, sometime between Thanksgiving and Christmas you will be having turkey for dinner. Statistically, it's almost un-American not to. Ninety percent of American homes serve turkey for Thanksgiving (!) and 50 percent also serve it for Christmas. (The turkey industry obviously does pretty well but I wonder about the actual turkeys. Do they get their cut?)
Ours is probably the only home where turkey is served pretty much daily from Thanksgiving until Christmas, but that's because I cannot throw out turkey leftovers. Just can't. We eat it until it's gone. At our house turkey isn't just a dinner, it's a journey -- long, arduous and somewhat dry.
We eat turkey in one form or another until we have either: 1) worked our way through every page of my "Thirty Terrific Turkey Dishes" cookbook; or 2) my family cries "Uncle." (Eternity may be "two people and a ham" but "five Westropes and a turkey" is purgatory.)
Why do I make my family eat so much turkey? Darned if I know, but I am not the only one. Statistically every American eats 18 pounds of turkey each year and 30 percent of it is consumed during the Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays. On Thanksgiving, we Americans cook more than 45 million turkeys and eat more than 525 million pounds of turkey meat. So it's not like I'm acting alone here.
But what do we know about this turkey we're eating? Where does it come from? And what is a "giblet," anyway? Here is my exhaustive on-line research, which took me 10 minutes and turned up these and other illuminating facts:
1. Most turkeys come from Minnesota, North Carolina, Arkansas or Virginia. Once they leave home, few go back.
2. A group of turkeys is called a "rafter." A young turkey is called a "poult." A male is a "tom;" a female is a "hen." But it doesn't matter what you call them, they won't come.
3. A turkey's neck is covered with small warts called "caruncles" (no, not "carbuncles") that are defined in the turkey literature as a "decorative feature." We humans should take a tip from the turkeys here. If you have a wart, think of it as a "decorative feature."
4. Most interesting turkey fact: Turkeys actually used to be able to see their feet (as wild turkeys can), but domestic turkeys have been bred to produce large breasts. Over time, this has yielded a bird that looks like an upside down bushel basket with a head and scaly feet. (If you can't see 'em, you can't wash 'em.) Turkeys are now so round and large-breasted that they cannot mate the usual way and have to be artificially inseminated. (Let that be a lesson for us all.)
For this and many other reasons, be thankful this holiday season that you are not a turkey (and if you are, hope no one catches on.)
Reach Betty Werth at bwestrope@hotmail.com.
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