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The Christmas Turkey

Pique Christmas Stories
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The tradition of story telling is stronger at Christmas time than almost any other time of the year. Whether stories are read aloud to family and friends, or alone by the fire with a hot cup of cocoa, it’s an activity all cherish during the holidays. In the spirit of sharing, enjoy these stories written by Pique writers for you.

Happy holidays

from all of us to all of you.

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The Christmas Turkey

By G. D. Maxwell



There comes a time in the life of every young man when he comes face to face with the cruel fact he has no clue how to feed himself. For some, that time comes early in life, for others, perhaps never. For me, it arrived unwanted in my second year at university. Having moved out of the cocoon of dorm living, with its ample if uninspiring dining hall, and into what can best be described as the house-you-never-want-to-discover-you-bought-the-house-next-door-to, I abruptly confronted the grim reality that unless I was prepared for a diet consisting exclusively of cereal, peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, and tinned spaghetti, I was in trouble.

I exaggerate but only somewhat. On festive occasions, I could boil real spaghetti. Unfortunately, the best thing I could prepare to dress it with was Hormel chili, Prego having not yet hit the shelves.

Faced with such a bleak gastronomic landscape, a guy has limited choices: dine out; admit defeat and move back into the dormitory; find a skilled girlfriend who paid attention in high-school home Ec and hope she doesn't discover what a loser you are; or learn to cook. Finding myself with limited funds, no desire to leave the animal house and no real prospects in the romance department, I began to learn to cook.

You may be wondering what this has to do with Christmas. You're about to find out.

For the first 21 Christmases of my life, I enjoyed a serenely familiar, North American, middle-class Christmas. Milk and cookies for Santa on Christmas Eve, fitful sleep punctuated by puzzling awakenings wondering why Santa swore like a sailor in the middle of the night and sounded astonishingly like my father, enough excitement Christmas morning to wet my PJs and a thoroughly traditional Christmas dinner — turkey and all the usual suspects.

Being only vaguely aware of my mother's absence from the annual Breaking of the Toys Festival that consumed most of Christmas day, I never gave much thought to how Christmas dinner magically appeared about the time my nose had convinced my stomach I couldn't live much longer without ripping into a drumstick. Christmas dinner just happened; why question the mysteries of life.

In my 22nd year, my parents moved to the other side of the Earth. I was reduced to whimpering enough to have my older sister invite me to her house for Christmas dinner. Her husband at the time, a ne'er-do-well rascal who pined to be a golf pro, but had barely enough talent to legitimately be called a duffer, worked in the commercial food services industry. He supplied most of the victuals for Christmas dinner. I spent the postprandial hours searching for the telltale, segmented, aluminum foil trays I suspected they had come in.

What passed for Christmas dinner the next several Christmases remains, even after years of intense psychotherapy, a mystery to me. Caught as I was in the frequently overlapping vortices of the sexual revolution and the Age of Aquarius, much of the rich detail of those years of my life remain cloaked behind mental cataracts. I'm certain I must have eaten dinner on Christmas day but....

Which, finally, brings us to my 25th Christmas. For reasons which will, I promise, become clear, I organized an Orphans' Christmas among the people I considered friends who were otherwise without family on the most familial of holidays. Some were friends I'd had for years; some were fellow students in the faculty of law, litigious bastards all. The invitation was both simple and collegially potluck: I would provide the turkey, everyone else would bring a dish and a drink.

As the yule approached, the expected number of orphans reached perhaps 18. I began to have doubts about whether I'd have enough turkey, doubts that proved all too true. You see, I had an ace in the hole. Two, actually.

Since the spring, I'd been, well, raising is probably not the right word, but caring, in an offhanded way, for two turkeys. Two living, breathing, pooping, obnoxious turkeys. I can't claim to remember what possessed Martin, my housemate, and me to get two turkey chicks but for much of the spring and early summer, they'd proven useful, eating their weight in grasshoppers that were trying to turn the several feet of our grass yard nearest the fence back into desert.

We lived in a semi-rural area northwest of Albuquerque and having a few turkeys around, while not exactly common, nonetheless went largely unnoticed by our neighbours, one of whom was invited to Christmas dinner. As the turkeys grew in bulk their miniscule brains failed to grow either in size or cognitive ability. Foreshadowing Jim Carey's movie by several decades, we named them Dumb and Dumber.

More apt names never crossed our minds. As animals go, turkeys are not known for their intelligence and these two belonged in turkey special ed. One seemed bent on committing suicide and, as summer turned to fall, would stand atop a fence, face into the howling wind, rain and sleet, mouth agape, threatening to either drown or freeze to death. The other — I never knew for sure which was which — was even dumber. I mean, running shoe dumb.

When it came time to dispatch the turkeys Martin and I discussed the best way to send them to turkey heaven. Neither of us had killed anything more sentient than an insect or bigger than a brain cell but we were guys and killin' stuff is something guys are supposed to know how to do.

"We could wring their necks," Martin said.

"Or we could just chop off their heads," I offered.

There being two turkeys, we decided to try each method and scientifically determine the best. Martin nonchalantly wandered over to the nearest bird, grabbed it firmly around the neck, walked out of the yard so the other one wouldn't witness what happened next and violently swung the bird a full three orbits over his head, slamming it hard to the ground for added certainty.

To our great surprise and dismay, the turkey hopped to its feet, woozily gained its footing, its head nodding simultaneously in all directions like a bobble-head doll, and took off running across the desert, gobbling as though it had had too much to drink.

"Oh shit!" one of us said, as we took off after the sprinting bird.

I never knew turkeys, especially this turkey, could run so fast. But after several hundred metres, he tired, no doubt from his trauma. When we caught him I apologized. Then I used a pocket knife on what remained of his neck to deliver everlasting peace.

We brought him back and wedged his feet between fence slats. Our hearts were no longer in a holiday mood but since we'd started down this gruesome path, I surgically dispatched the other turkey and mounted him alongside his coopmate. Then Martin and I drank the better part of a bottle of scotch and debated whether turkeys had souls. We decided they didn't.

Which helped when we stumbled out to pluck and eviscerate them. I'll spare you the details.

Having read how you need to hang and age foul to avoid stringy meat, we hung the birds in a cool shed, their former home, planning to let them age 24 hours. We returned the next day to move them to the refrigerator. The smell inside the shed, never pleasant while the turkeys were living there, was enough to gag a maggot. Ironically, there were plenty of maggots to gag.

"Was that part of the 'letting the meat age' process you read about?" Martin asked, in annoying tones.

With Christmas being less than a day and a half away, I didn't have enough time to go buy a reasonably-priced, frozen turkey at the grocery store. I was forced to go purchase a fresh turkey for an amount representing more or less all the student loan funds I had left. No disaster, Christmas being the end of the semester and more debt coming in January, but the money had been earmarked for reasonably fine scotch and that most definitely was a disaster.

When I came home with the 23-pound, fresh, maggot-free bird, Martin asked the question he'd have been wise to ask a week prior.

"You know how to cook a turkey?"

"Theoretically, yes. Experientially, uh, no," I answered.

Do you think we should get someone who does?" he asked.

"It's cool. I can do this," I replied.

"I only ask because...." He let the thought hang between us.

I knew what he meant. It was a not-so-subtle reference to the Swine Incident that took place at our house in September, after the start of the new school year. We pooled some of our loan money and bought a couple of kegs of beer and a pig. We advertised a luau, reckoning we could have a great party and make a little profit. Fifteen bucks bought beer and pig. It was a roaring success... sort of.

Having never actually cooked a pig in a pit with nothing but the heat of hot rocks to do the cooking, our, OK, my pig might have been just the teensiest bit undercooked. It's not like I had a thermometer or anything to prove it was undercooked but it sure looked undercooked in places, okay, all over. And it had a texture that in beef I'd learn later in life to call somewhere between tartar and blue. But we were out in the apple orchard, it was dark, people were drunk and, well, the pig got et. The only ones who got sick blamed it on too much to drink and I wasn't about to dissuade them from that diagnosis, having put the thought in their mind to begin with.

Besides, this time I was using an oven. I knew it got hot enough to cook a freakin' turkey to whatever done was.

And I had a dog-eared copy of Joy of Cooking. What could go wrong?

My nascent confidence was shaken when I read the part about roasting fowl. There was a pointed admonition about not tenting the bird under aluminum foil. Something about steaming it instead of roasting it. The way Joy made it sound, only a miscreant would cook the bird under foil... which was what I'd planned to do.

"You're supposed to soak cheesecloth in melted butter, drape it over the bird's breast to keep that part of it from drying out... and baste it every 20 minutes or so," I explained to Martin.

"What's cheesecloth?" he countered.

I had no idea. And no time to find out. At 25 minutes per pound for a stuffed turkey, the damn thing needed to go into the oven, like now.

"What are you doing?" Martin asked.

"Using a handkerchief," I said, poking the, hopefully clean, square of cloth down into a pan of melted butter.

"That's my handkerchief," he complained.

"You can have it back after dinner."

I'd calculated the bird needed to cook for nine-and-a-half hours. I didn't have that long. The book said to put it in a 450°F oven and reduce the heat immediately to 350°-325°. I figured — hoped — I could cheat the time requirement if I waited an hour to turn the heat down.

Forty-five minutes later, breathing thick, acrid smoke, I wrestled the turkey out of the oven. The melted butter and oil I'd bathed it in had evaporated, leaving something that looked like black shellac in the cheap aluminum roasting "pan." The turkey was blackened at the edges; the handkerchief was going to be a writeoff.

Fortunately, I had another roasting pan, having originally planned to cook two turkeys. I started again, this time turning the heat down immediately.

Basting a turkey with a turkey baster every twenty minutes is an onerous chore. Basting one with nothing but a spoon is simply Dante-esque. Rubbing butter on burns is, I learned later, not good first-aid. The day was spiraling rapidly toward a crash landing. There was nothing left to do but start drinking eggnog.

Long after people began to arrive, each bearing a delicious-smelling dish, many of which seemed to need reheating, I decided the turkey was "done." Without benefit of a thermometer I tried the tips listed in Joy. I pricked the skin of the thigh to see if the juices ran clear. Juices? I jiggled the drumstick to see if the hip joint was loose. The leg and thigh came off in my hand, bearing an uncanny resemblance to turkey jerky.

This was when I re-read the instructions and discovered the cooking time for turkeys weighing over 16 pounds was, like, 15 minutes per pound, not 25. Oops.

"Yup, that's done," I said to no one in particular.

What Joy of Cooking didn't say about saving Christmas dinner when the centerpiece is woefully overcooked I already knew. I emptied the remaining half bottle of 151 proof rum into the eggnog.

Everyone had a great time. No one was poisoned. But no one had a second helping of turkey... not even the cats.

While the experience didn't convert me to vegetarianism, I've never attempted to raise turkeys again. I have, however, become reasonably proficient at roasting them. But as the day approaches, there is always, at the back of my mind, a kernel of fear. And nearby, a carton of eggnog and a bottle of over-proof rum.



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