Senior center soup will not be made with rainwater

In “Who’s to Judge?” a 2015 New Yorker article on ranking the world’s best restaurants, we learn that at one of those top-rated restaurants you can get your venison served tartare with maqui berries, along with a soup of Patagonian rainwater served on a bed of moss.

The prospect of eating at such a restaurant brings to mind a worry Elizabeth George expressed in “A Suitable Vengeance”: “Which fork do I use when I eat shrimp?”

At Monday Munch at the Charlotte Senior Center, your soup won’t be made with Patagonian rainwater, and you won’t have any silverware worries.

Pumpkin is on the senior center Nov. 25 menu. Pumpkin is the state squash of Texas, but, according to the Illinois Department of Agriculture, 95 percent of the U.S. crop intended for processing is grown in Illinois. Nestlé, operating under the brand name Libby’s, produces 85 percent of the processed pumpkin in the United States at their plant in Morton, Illinois.

Founding Father Alexander Hamilton didn’t seem to worry about pumpkin, but he did declare that “no citizen of the United States should refrain from turkey on Thanksgiving Day.” Turkey became such a common main dish at Thanksgiving dinners that the day has long been colloquially termed “Turkey Day.” The New York Times suggests that you can roast it, smoke it, deep-fry it, slow-cook it, render it in a bundt pan, or spatchcock it (open it up, press it flat and brine it).

Of course, The New York Times’ John Hodgman has some advice on post-COVID turkey: “Please stop eating a whole roast turkey and stuffing for breakfast. That time is over.”

In a letter to his daughter, Benjamin Franklin wrote that instead of the bald eagle, which was adopted as the U.S. national bird in 1782, the turkey should be our national bird. He pointed out that the turkey is a native of North America and is “much more respectable.”

More than 350 years after turkey was eaten at Plymouth Rock in 1621, vacuum-packed roast turkey was one of the ingredients eaten for Thanksgiving on Skylab 4, the 1973 U.S. space mission.

Not everyone is sanguine about this fine-feathered bird. In “Gobble squabble,” Washington Post columnist Jonathan Yardley carped, “Festive turkey? Who dreamed up that oxymoron? A turkey is about as festive as a wet chicken.”

He concludes, “Perhaps we should be grateful that cows are smarter than turkeys. If the Colonists and the Indians had come back from the hunt with a slaughtered heifer, we might have had filet mignon, but this is based on the assumption that the people doing the carving knew what the good parts are. If they didn’t, we might have ended up with a Thanksgiving custom even worse than the one we now endure: a 12-pound cow’s liver, trussed and basted and stuffed with Brussels sprouts.”

There are alternatives to turkey. Calvin Trillin starts off his essay collection “Third Helpings” (1983) by describing his campaign to change the national Thanksgiving dish from turkey to spaghetti carbonara.

My claim to fame: At an annual meeting of the National Council of Teachers of English, which is held every year right before Thanksgiving, I ate lunch with Trillin’s wife Alice. A small group of us asked her to choose the restaurant, which is why we enjoyed a pre-Thanksgiving meal in a Chinese restaurant.

Thinking about our recent election, it seems worth mentioning that on Thanksgiving Day 1947 there was no pumpkin at the White House. Pumpkin pie was out because it contained eggs. In a radio address broadcast on Oct. 5, 1947, President Truman asked Americans to join him in observing a weekly schedule of voluntary food rationing. Meatless Tuesdays and Eggless Thursdays were part of the president’s food conservation drive.

The president’s foreign-aid task force, the Citizens Food Committee, had come up with everyday ways for conserving 100 million bushels of grain for redistribution to a war-ravaged Europe. Reducing consumption of meat and eggs was the most efficient way to achieve this goal.

Right now, it’s kind of mind-boggling to consider a president leading people across the country in voluntary food rationing so that “foreigners” could eat better. Consider a typical dinner order for another president (as reported by two top staff members): two “Big Macs, two Fillet-O-Fish and a chocolate malted.” (“Let Trump Be Trump: The Inside Story of His Rise to the Presidency”)

In the above-mentioned novel, Elizabeth George offers advice worth thinking about: “When you’re lost, you may as well head somewhere.”

Monday Munch
Nov. 18, 11:30 a.m.-12:30 p.m.
Shepherd’s pie, roasted glazed carrots, garlic bread and brownies.

Monday Munch, Nov. 25
11:30 a.m.-12:30 p.m.
White bean and ground turkey soup, green salad and pumpkin pie.

Note:

• Lost or not, head on over to Monday Munch at the Charlotte Senior Center on Ferry Road.
• Take a child you care about over to the Little Free Library for Kids at the Grange, 2858 Spear Street. That child is sure to find a good book there.
• My recent book, “Trump, Trump, Trump: The Swan Song,” contains info on Joe Biden’s tradition of volunteering at the Philadelphia Foodbank and items sold at trumpstore.com, including $18 for a 12-ounce bag of coffee and a $16 bag of jelly beans.