IT'S A RUNNING JOKE in my large family that every year, along about Oct. 1, my wife starts trying to sabotage Thanksgiving. This has gone on intermittently for many years, and here's how the trouble generally starts:
"Can't we have something different this year?" Anne asks. "I'm so tired of turkey. How about cassoulet?"
"Cassoulet!" I yelp in protest. "You mean that greasy French stuff with lamb and beans and sausage? I hate lamb. And besides, cassoulet is downright un-American at Thanksgiving."
"Well, what about fried chicken? I hate turkey. Or prime rib? The children all love prime rib," she says.
"Yeah, we could do prime rib. And all it would cost for 20 or so people would be $400," I say.
My financial argument, though, is a smoke screen. The truth is, Thanksgiving dinner -- meaning roast turkey, old-fashioned cornbread dressing with sausage and sage, mashed potatoes drowned in gravy and assorted accompaniments -- is my favorite meal of the year, as indeed Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday. Maybe it goes back to my childhood growing up in a Southern orphanage, when Thanksgiving was the only good and plentiful meal of the year.
But while I come from a countrified culture, Anne came from a non-traditionalist California one (her parents were both actors), and besides, there always was the matter of the boring turkey, and she is a world-class cook of many sophisticated dishes.
"Why can't we do it at somebody else's house this year?" she asks from time to time. Anne and I and our yellow Labrador, Dixon, live in the same small, white wooden cottage in West Los Angeles that I made a down payment on as a wedding present to her 36 years ago.
At that time, I had four sons by a first marriage, and Anne was one of two daughters of divorced parents. When we married, our then-called nuclear family settled into a friendly holiday routine: Thanksgiving dinner would be at our house and everybody would come. My boys would go to their mother's house for another Thanksgiving dinner on Nov. 27, which is her birthday.
This holiday routine was happy and harmonious, and it continued comfortably in this manner through the years as my sons grew up, got married and began to have their own children.
Somewhere along the way, though, Anne began to weary of the turkey -- and, she alleged, of the terrible mess I made in the kitchen. After I am done baking a big cast-iron pan of cornbread and assembling the dressing -- that is, adding the butter, the turkey and chicken stock, the sausage and sage, and making a dark roux and adding plenteous stock for the gravy -- the kitchen looks like a tornado hit it.
