Talking Turkey - by Mary O'Rourke

With apologies to the the author if some of the punctuation didn't translate properly across our versions of Word...

The turkey, as you know is a bird. A North American bird if I'm not mistaken. Which seems to be what my mother had against it.

I'm not talking abut the jolly gold and red cardboard birds that show up in department store windows every fall, or even the smaller orange and brown table-top ones with that kind of webbed paper center. I'm talking about the real thing, the actual bird - or more precisely the dead bird, which traditionally graces North American dinner tables at least once and, more often, twice in fall and winter, at Thanksgiving and Christmas.

A Britisher from the gritty industrial North, Mum could not see the point of turkey and she never let us forget it as long as she lived - all 89 years. Celebratory turkey was unheard of in Britain in her time. With charming Lancashire bluntness she'd ask, "Why do you want that dry old tasteless thing when you could have a lovely goose or roast beef and drippings?" Channel Coronation Street and you get the idea.

I'm not sure my mum was ever a good cook, even before living through rationing and World War Two. The few times she did try to get with the program and cook Canadian, the turkey was definitely less than succulent. And just thinking about the leftovers seemed to bring on a nervous breakdown, not to mention the same boring annual recitation about what a trial it was. Clearly, Mum's reserve of festive cheer didn't run to cheerily skinning and gutting the carcass and whipping it into a delightful potage.

And there was no pumpkin pie at our house either. Mum was convinced my older sister had caught food poisoning from it at a neighbour kid's Halloween party. "Ooh, imagine eating vegetable marrow with sugar and spice and things. No wonder her tummy was all funny."

This was pretty rich coming from someone whose idea of good nutrition was 'mince', or ground hamburger meat stewed in a watery gravy of onions and potatoes. Spam sandwiches with Kraft salad cream were a regular lunchbox delight, long before Monty Python got onto the spam shtick. But then the Brits have never been renowned for their irresistible cuisine.

"Enough with the turkey talk, already" we said as we got older. "Cook whatever you want and we'll eat it." By the seventies, roast beef was getting to be a bit of a luxury, not the regular Sunday dinner we'd all grown up on. And we were bringing wine to grease the wheels or drown the taste, if necessary.

One sister married a Brit who grew up with roast beef Christmases, so he didn't expect turkey. A second sister moved to Ireland. And a third sister (me) stayed home. She didn't go to market, although she did develop a taste for a nice turkey dinner, without ever feeling the particular urge to master it herself. Until her Canadian husband the traditionalist started to insist, that is. By now Mum had moved to my city and was living in a nearby senior's residence.

Thanks to divine intervention and the web, a Thanksgiving miracle occurred in my humble home in 1999, just a month before she died. I'd found an online recipe for a turkey basted liberally with a mixture of soy sauce, apple juice and a few seasoning. We had all the usual trimmings, fluffy mashed potatoes, cranberry-orange relish, broccoli and even Brussels sprouts for my anglophile sister. Grandma not only enjoyed the turkey, she asked for seconds!

But she was still on turkey patrol in daily life. A few weeks later at her residence, we attended a 'care conference', an opportunity for frank dialogue between residents and staff. "How's the food, Mrs. Smith?" asked the nice young woman in social-worker speak. "Do you have any concerns you want to share with us?" Mum shook her head to indicate no. (Actually, I know she was thinking, why don't they teach you to speak plain bloody English in those fancy universities of yours, but I digress.)

"That's not what you told me", I nudged her. "Why don't you share?"

"Well, I did wonder if you had shares in a turkey farm" she replied, alluding delicately to the frequency with which turkey appeared on the residence menu. Sadly, nobody laughed.

Humour is what got the Brits through the war, in spite of all those soggy Brussels sprouts. Too bad humour isn't on the curriculum for all those earnest social workers and geriatric carers.