Last night we shared a beautiful Thanksgiving potluck dinner with friends and colleagues from all over the world. Our friends B, I, and D hosted the giant melee of children (“kids, it makes all of us out here nervous when you barricade yourselves in the room…”) and larger folk hailing from India, America, Spain, France, Australia, New Zealand, Sweden, England.
The morning of the potluck I braved the chilly monsoon rains to shop for ingredients, thinking about how different it would be if I was in the US rather than my hill station in Tamil Nadu for this holiday. Last year I was in LA and my cousin and I had shopped (how distant Ralph’s, Trader Joe’s, and Costco seem now!) and planned and precooked and boiled quite a lot by the time Thanksgiving morning rolled around. Arguably, the weather here is more what I think of as typically November than the eternal sunshine of Southern California, so the drizzle actually helped kindle my holiday mood, despite the fact that Will had to work finishing up grading exams all day. Rather than drag my (just into the 3rd trimester) pregnant self all over town in the cold rain, trying to tote pumpkins, root veggies, and assorted other harvesty goodies around on foot, I got Ganesh the taxi driver to zip me around from bank to vegetable market to supermarket to ‘wine shop’ to health food store to fruit stall to home.
My plan for the potluck was to bring two classic Mom dishes: her orange praline sweet potato casserole and her (no bias) best ever pumpkin pie. Issues arose as soon as I hit the veggie market. No sweet potatoes. ”Coming Sunday, madam,” I was assured by Sheik, my regular vegetable guy. He broke the news to me cheerfully, clearly not getting the significance of yams this particular Thursday.
Sheik has a meter of coir rope hanging from the ceiling of his stall. The shelves of produce line the steps which make up his area. Scales and other untold treasures are in the dark back of the shop, up the stairs from the ground where you stand as customer. Sheik’s rope is there so he can swing down toward you to hand you off a bundle of weighed out vegetables, or a fistful of change. It never fails to utterly charm me. His area is one of several in the vegetable market ‘down the budge’, a part of town full of hardware stores, chicken stalls, sari shops, and much more. Sheik has the most beautifully displayed vegetables of all colors; perfect piles of peppers (capsicums, as they’re called here), onions, potatoes, beet roots, fresh bouquets of lettuce, the occasional prized bunches of herbs, cauliflowers, you name it. Except if you name sweet potatoes on Thanksgiving, of course.
So upon hearing the bad news about the sweet potatoes I did what expats have been doing for generations–I figured out a compromise recipe. It is not an option to not eat the sweet potato casserole on Thanksgiving. Even if you have no sweet potatoes. So I bought an extra couple of kilos of pumpkin, a few regular potatoes, and was on my merry way.
Ganesh clearly thought it odd that I needed to stop at the ‘wine shop’, a literal hole in the wall where a dingy man sells nasty liquor to bloodshot-eyed clientele by the dixie cup. There is no wine for sale in the state of Tamil Nadu, but that doesn’t stop them from having quite a number of wine shops, where you can pick up Kingfisher beer and a few varieties of gin, rum, vodka, and whiskey. I was on the lookout for Old Monk, a less-wretched-than-some brand of dark rum necessary for both my Thanksgiving dishes. Of course Grand Marnier would have been ideal for the sweet potatoes, and usually at home we use Meyer’s rum for the pumpkin pie, but like I said, an expat must compromise in order to get the job done. Old Monk would be fine. Except that the man at the grimy counter said they didn’t have any Old Monk. Oh dear. To substitute a substitute is risky business. But hey, a girl’s gotta do what a girl’s gotta do. Old Kemp XXX Dark Rum it was.
After a few other stops (to the shopkeeper at the spice shop: “What do you mean, you don’t have cinnamon?!”) and plan B’s (in my head: “One of my friends will definitely have cinnamon. Don’t panic.”), I made it home. A mixture of sweet limes and tangerines would do instead of the orange and orange rind needed for the sweet potato (aka pumpkin/white potato) casserole. All would be well.
I was setting up a playlist on the computer for some holiday music that would remind me of my mom and all our crazy feast cooking together (Joni Mitchell, Steve Goodman, Pete Seeger, Laura Nyro, Arlo Guthrie, Judy Collins, Janis Joplin and many more) when I noticed the aromas emanating from the kitchen. Jessie, the woman who cleans our house, was cooking herself lunch. Jessie is a very good cook and I love the part of my day when I come home from lunch at school and something she’s cooking is smelling delicious from the oven. But I must say, on this particular day with all the thinking I’d been doing about Thanksgiving food, it was jarring to suddenly smell sizzling mustard seeds and sambar. I found myself feeling kind of territorial about my kitchen and wound up staying away until all the scrummy Indian powders, seeds, and grains had been eaten or re-stowed in their stainless steel canisters.
I wonder if Jessie felt at all odd with me rummaging around on what’s so often her turf these days, replacing the scent of garam masala with my combinations of cinnamon (my neighbor did have some–crisis averted!), ginger, clove, and nutmeg. Dollops of cream, splashes of Old Kemp, cubes of butter, all went flying about as I made the traditional Thanksgiving mess of the kitchen.
The potluck was lovely, mostly because of all the wonderful people there, enjoying the spirit of Thanksgiving. The table was full of colorful and tasty dishes and the company was loud and happy. We ate spicy Indian aloo, macaroni and cheese, and big melty pizzas. A bird was carved, bread was sliced, and plops of faux sweet potato casserole were served up (it even tasted remarkably similar to the original, believe it or not). Most of us ate Indian-style, with our fingers, because of the sheer number of us giving thanks together. I enjoyed all of it immensely.
When you’re far from home for the holidays, it’s important to have good people around you. Most of the time India does feel like home to me. Thanksgiving is a tough one, though, since it’s such an American holiday, and it’s one that has always had so much family tradition wrapped around it. I thought about the many expat Thanksgivings my family has had over the years, all the amazing ways my parents managed to create and uphold the traditions my brother and I hold so dear in countries near and far. They cooked a feast in Shanghai in 1987 on a lone hot-plate; we put leaves in the table for hoards of hungry Americans in Paris in 1995; pies were baked, casseroles bubbled, and turkeys were basted on several levels of our apartment building in Hong Kong many years running while my mom made sure that everything got to the table steaming and beautiful in time to sing ‘Simple Gifts’ together. This year, here in India, I am so thankful that I have a few traditions I can piece together which make me feel at home. I’m so thankful for the memories of friends and family coming together so many Thanksgiving Thursdays over the years. I’m thankful to have celebrated this year in yet another beautiful iteration of this holiday I love.
