A carver’s confession

Editor’s note: Fans of the late David Shaw will enjoy the Pulitzer Prize winner’s essay on a Thanksgiving ritual.

November 17, 2004 -- I used to have an editor who insisted that turkey was “dry and boring.” The only reason Thanksgiving dinner was even worth eating, he said, was “to get all those accompaniments and accouterments” -- by which he meant stuffing, cranberry sauce, gravy, yams, pies and the like.

Wrong.

A properly cooked turkey -- preferably one brined beforehand -- is moist and delicious, one of America’s great gifts to global gastronomy. I especially like the dark meat -- the thigh in particular. But my absolute favorite part of the turkey -- my favorite part of the entire Thanksgiving dinner -- is the turkey skin. Crisp, chewy, warm and full of flavor, it ranks right up there with white truffles, foie gras, barbecue ribs and a good, natural-casing hot dog on my list of all-time favorite foods.

In fact, selfish and greedy though it may seem, I try every Thanksgiving -- and every other time we have turkey for dinner, anywhere -- to snare a few golden patches of skin even before we all sit down at table.

How do I do that?

Easy. I volunteer to carve the turkey. I do so every time, whether we’re eating at our house or someone else’s. And then, nibbling as I go, I make sure to rip off (so to speak) several good, big pieces of skin as a sort of carving fee.

If we’re guests at a friend’s or relative’s house, I don’t insist on carving. I can still recall graciously (I hope) yielding carving duties one evening a number of years ago to Michel Richard when he was the chef at Citrus and we were having dinner at the home of a mutual friend. Michel carved the turkey with such speed, dexterity and precision -- every slice was exactly the same thickness as every other slice -- that I considered hanging up my knife permanently that very night.

But my desire for what I’ve come to think of as my EATS (Exclusive Access To Skin) prevailed, and I continue to volunteer, often quite vigorously, for carving duty.

I even travel with my own carving set, from Laguiole, which I keep in its wooden box, permanently in my suitcase, next to my Laguiole corkscrew, in its leather case, available for use every Thanksgiving. I take the carving set to Europe too -- in my checked bag, not my carry-on -- so we can use it in the houses we tend to rent in Europe for a week or two every summer.

Fortunately, my wife knows how much I love skin, so she always reminds our hosts that I used to be a butcher and am therefore well-qualified to carve.

Yes, I was a butcher -- part-time, for three or four years, during high school and college, to help support my ailing father and myself after my parents were divorced. I learned a lot about a lot of things at the butcher shop, thanks largely to my wise and hard-drinking boss, Danny, who took it upon himself to teach me about life, liquor, women and casual conversation, as well as meat and poultry.

I became adept at grinding meat for hamburgers, slicing steaks off a loin and differentiating among short ribs, spare ribs, prime rib and rib eyes. I didn’t carve any roast turkeys at the butcher shop, but I did cut up a lot of raw chickens and, hey, a bird’s a bird, right? To be perfectly honest, my butcher years notwithstanding, I claim no real expertise in turkey-carving. I carve a turkey the same way I speak French in France -- aggressively and with an air of self-confidence that’s not necessarily warranted by the skill I bring to the task at hand.

I have, however, learned a few things over the years. The first is to wear an apron. You’ll need something to wipe your hands on periodically, and no matter how neat and careful you think you are, if you’re carving, you’ll splatter; whatever nice holiday outfit you’ve put on will suddenly look like a Jackson Pollack painting.

Also, it helps if your carving board has either spikes or a rough, knobby surface to hold the turkey in place. With an even, completely flat surface, the turkey can easily -- trust me -- squirt on to the floor. (I once saw a roasted chicken leap from carving board to floor in the kitchen of a three-star restaurant in France when the chef pressed too hard, at the wrong angle, and I’ve been terrified my turkey would do that ever since.)

Given that the light meat/dark meat divide is almost as deep as the red state/blue state divide in this country, I also recommend separating the two and serving them on different platters. If you put all the meat on the same platter, you risk having guests inadvertently stabbing each other with forks while the turkey platter rapidly comes to resemble a Civil War battlefield.

For the last 15 years or so, my wife and son and I have traveled to the Berkshires, in southwestern Massachusetts, for Thanksgiving, spending most of the week at her parents’ old home, now shared by Lucy and her brother.

At first, we had Thanksgiving in that house and invited various aunts, uncles, cousins and other relatives to join us. My contribution was to choose and order the wine and carve the turkey.

Two turkeys

One year, old family friends in the Berkshires invited us all to their house, instead of coming to our house, for Thanksgiving dinner. They are wonderful people, and they certainly worked hard and meant well. But they cooked their turkey in a clay pot, and it took forever. We ate very late. Even worse, by the time the turkey was finally ready to eat, there was no skin -- or, to be entirely accurate, most of the skin was stuck to the lid of the clay pot and the rest had congealed into a greasy, slimy, pimply mess atop the soggy, barely recognizable turkey.

I was depressed for weeks afterward. So we resumed having Thanksgiving dinner at our house when we went back East.

But a few years ago, one of Lucy’s cousins -- and the cousin’s husband -- offered to have Thanksgiving dinner at their Berkshires house.

Since the Thanksgiving dinner group had grown to about 30 by then, it was most generous of them. We accepted, albeit with great, skin-lusting trepidation on my part.

(Of course, Lucy being Lucy, she still made her own turkey, without all the trimmings, “just to have it around for sandwiches over the long weekend.” Sandwiches for everyone else, more skin for me.)

Anyway, with so large a crowd on Thanksgiving itself, our hosts decided to make two turkeys. At least, they said that’s why they made two turkeys. I suspected there was some disagreement about how to prepare the turkey, so Lucy’s cousin made one her way and her husband made one his way.

I can’t recall for sure what the differences were that first year -- I think one was cooked whole, the other in parts, or maybe one was brined and the other wasn’t -- but every year thereafter, we had two turkeys, cooked two different ways. One year, I remember, he deep-fried his, and she cooked hers in the oven.

I came to think of Thanksgiving as “the day of the dueling turkeys.”

The good news for me was that with two turkeys, it was easy for me to commandeer one for carving -- and skin-snatching. Hubby would carve one turkey -- “his” turkey -- and wifey was delighted to have me carve “her” turkey while she attended to other hostess duties. And with two turkeys, I could help myself to even more skin than usual, knowing that it probably wouldn’t be missed.

I didn’t even have to use my own carving set. The cousins have a beautiful, fully equipped house and kitchen, complete with multiple carving sets.

This year, though, I’ll again be using my carving set and we’ll be having Thanksgiving dinner at our house for the first time in several years. The cousins are getting divorced. I can’t speak for any of the other relatives, but I wasn’t surprised, given their apparent inability to agree on something as simple as how to cook a turkey.

We’ll be 11 at table next week, with only one turkey. But my larger problem is that our son Lucas, now 15, is wise to my skin-snatching ways and threatens to expose my “thievery” (as he calls it) to the entire family unless I slip him some skin during the carving.

Lucas recently began volunteering for simple carving duties at home -- a loin of pork, a boneless leg of lamb -- but if he thinks I’m turning over the turkey-carving (and skin-stealing) opportunity to him, he’s nuts.