Melting-Pot Holiday
What’s not to like?
Unlike all those holidays whose raison d’e^tre seems to be guilt induction, Thanksgiving is about--food!
No wonder new Americans take to it like sage to stuffing.
Although sage is not necessarily what you will find on local holiday tables. Turkey, yes, and often mashed potatoes as well. But every one of the 100 or so ethnic groups represented in the Valley does Thanksgiving with its own twist. Today local tables will groan with fried plantains as well as candied yams, accompanied by soy sauce as well as the cranberry variety.
Take Elizabeth Kazanchyan, for example. It’s been 10 years since she left what was then Soviet Armenia and came to the United States. Now a resident of Van Nuys, Kazanchyan will spend Thanksgiving with her husband and young daughter at the nearby home of her in-laws.
The Kazanchyans will forego the creamed onions and string-bean casserole, complementing their roasted bird with two Armenian favorites, mitchkou kufta (a kind of meatball stuffed with cooked meat) and blinchik (an Armenian empanada).
Like many other relatively new Americans, the Kazanchyans provide evidence that pumpkin pie is an acquired taste.
“We don’t make that,” she says. They will have baklava and honey cake instead.
Kazanchyan said she and her family embraced Thanksgiving at the first opportunity. It’s an occasion with almost universal appeal, she says. “I think it’s because it’s not like it’s a religious holiday. It’s people being nice to each other. It’s people giving thanks.”
Whether the turkey on your table is jerked, Caribbean style, or enlivened with cardamon and other curry spices, it is a potent symbol of America at its least divided. Charles Camp, who is the official folklorist for the state of Maryland, studies what he calls food events, including Thanksgiving (he has also scrutinized Southern “cemetery cleanings,” at which people top off a long day of sprucing up the family plot with a boffo picnic eaten among the headstones). Indeed, Camp is fascinated by everything that happens at the intersection of food and culture, “from why at a nice restaurant they conceal the check in a fancy leather thing . . . to why women are overwhelmingly more likely to eat unbaked cookie dough than men.”
Of Thanksgiving, Camp says, “There isn’t any other time or occasion when everyone in America makes the same cultural statement.” Even as Thanksgiving allows us to sing the same cultural song, it gives people the opportunity “to graft onto it or weave into it their own ethnic identity or taste.”
The turkey is the least of it, in Camp’s view--”a large and bland bird” that is less important for how it tastes (“if we wanted to have a day we identified with the food we like, we’d have pizza on Thanksgiving”) than for its ability to bind us together. The magic is in the culturally specific stuffings that no one can get enough of.
“Stuffing is such a wonderful, vacant term,” Camp enthuses. “It means anything. . . . People do what they like, indulge their own taste, while appearing to follow the same script.”
The sense of doing what everyone else in America is doing is one of the pleasures of the holiday for Adel Sidrak of Northridge, co-owner of Jasmine Cleaners in Van Nuys. Because of religious differences, not everyone can participate in other American holidays, such as Halloween, notes Sidrak, a Coptic Christian who came here from Egypt 15 years ago. Sidrak, who closes the shop for Thanksgiving, says he has much to be thankful for, and “it’s nice to celebrate it at the same time” as his neighbors.
The Sidraks’ turkey will be stuffed with a crumbled flat bread popular in his native North Africa. There will be stuffed grape leaves as well as mashed potatoes and gravy. In lieu of cranberry sauce, the turkey will be accompanied by a cool dip made of yogurt, cucumber, garlic and mint.
Folklorist Camp thinks of Thanksgiving “as a kind of census at which you measure time” as you note the changes in the faces at the table. Many immigrants say one reason they adopted the holiday so readily was because their children wanted to celebrate it just as their classmates did.
But it is also, Camp notes, one of the few American holidays in which children are reminded of their junior status in the family. Camp vividly remembers being consigned to the children’s table, “where you have a different kind of party with your cousins and the other kids while you’re waiting to grow up.”
The sense of participation may be more important than what you actually overeat today. “We don’t celebrate Thanksgiving in Indonesia, but because we live here we try to do the same as everyone else,” says Sylvia Wisman, a saleswoman at Northridge Fashion Square and a native of Jakarta. While she loves the idea of Thanksgiving, she doesn’t like turkey, so the Wismans will be having roast chicken instead. And forget the pumpkin pie. She prefers cheesecake.
A gossip columnist reports that pasta and marinara sauce is on Frank Sinatra’s Thanksgiving menu. Many Asian families will be eating their turkey (or chicken) with rice. Like many other Latinos, Marcos Peno, from Guatemala, will be having tamales on the side.
Peno is manager of Versailles restaurant in Encino, known for its Cuban food. Raymond Garcia manages the original Versailles on the Westside. Garcia’s turkey was marinated, Cuban style, in lemon juice, with lots of garlic. Alongside it will be a leg of pork, brown rice, yucca with garlic sauce and fried plantains.
In Garcia’s view, today’s feast will be as American as, well, salsa and apple pie.
“We’re here in America; that’s the way we celebrate, only with our own little flair.”
As for cranberry sauce, he speaks for many when he says, “We can live without it.”
