How to be a Thanksgiving goddess

IT was the sign at the till that did it. "Order your Unturkeys here in time for Thanksgiving." "What exactly is an Unturkey?" I asked the man at the Whole Foods checkout in Mill Valley, a chichi little town 15 minutes north of San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge that is home to Green Party voters and creative types with money. "It's a turkey that doesn't have any turkey in it," he said.

Interesting, I said, struggling with the concept and wondering why no one else in the queue seemed to think there was anything odd about the idea. Did he have any Unturkeys I could have a look at?

He did indeed and if I cared to wander down the second aisle to my right, I'd be sure to find them.

Yes. There in a freezer cabinet lay a pile of Unturkeys. At least, that's what it said on a collection of brown boxes labelled "Unturkey" and carrying coloured photographs showing what looked remarkably like a roasted, golden turkey but was in fact, a vegetarian's answer to how to celebrate Thanksgiving.

On close inspection, an Unturkey turns out to be a large amount of tofu shaped exactly like a turkey and covered with a soy-based coating resembling a golden turkey skin.

Resisting the Unturkeys, I headed for the exit past piles of sausage meat, frozen turkeys, unfrozen turkeys, turkey slices, turkey rolls and turkey sausages. Past the stacks of red-skinned sweet potatoes, green beans, bright orange pumpkins and bright red cranberries - protagonists all in the annual American performance that is Thanksgiving Day.

Today is a public holiday in America. It is also the day when the country sits down to eat 45 million turkeys. Think about that for a second.

Forty-five million turkeys. It's almost as many turkeys as there are people in Britain.

But Thanksgiving is not just a day; it's a billion-dollar industry. And, because this is America, if you really want to know how to "do Thanksgiving" you take a course.

A few minutes on the freeway north of Mill Valley, at the Corte Madera shopping mall, Alexa Miles, fortysomething professional cook (brisk, coiffed and dressed in chef's whites) is teaching a class of 20 women and four men how to prepare a traditional Thanksgiving feast at the Homechef kitchen shop.

"Welcome to Thanksgiving class!"

she says exuberantly, telling us in the next breath that we are already way behind in our preparations which should, if we are to become true Thanksgiving gods and goddesses, have started two weeks earlier with menu-planning, creating shopping lists and buying essential equipment.

The bad news is detailed in the Homechef Thanksgiving Planners on our seats. One Week Before: make and roll out Thanksgiving pie dough, order turkey, clean and organise your refrigerator, make place cards.

Monday Before: shop. Tuesday Before: make check lists for helpers and polish the silver. The Day Before: pick up fresh turkey, create the centrepiece, clean and chop vegetables, make cranberry sauce, bake pies, check roasting chart.

"The true ticket to the best Thanksgiving is organisation," she announces.

As we're already two weeks behind, it would appear we have blown it.

But things start to look up when her assistant, Rosemary, begins passing round slices of pumpkin pie to eat and a jar of pumpkin butter to look at.

The pie is good but the jar, well, it's hard to know what to do with it, really, other than examine it intelligently and pass it on. I feel the same way about the pur"e press, the bottle of walnut oil, the green bean shredder, the meat thermometer and the sprig of sage that do the rounds.

"Dolly Parton birds are what you want," says Alexa, when quizzed on the merits of fresh over frozen and adding that she does not want to get into a row over stuffed and unstuffed turkeys but leaving us with the distinct feeling that unstuffed is best.

Bernard Matthews, our own turkey king, once told me the best way to cook a turkey was upside down.

Alexa disagrees and says it should be cooked on a V-rack and turned from side to side, a concept which a mous-tached man in the front row finds hard to get his head around.

"Can you marinade the turkey in salad dressing?" he wants to know.

"My mother-in-law has been telling me to put the turkey in a garbage bag, what do you think of that?" Alexa says she does not want to get into a fight with his mother-in-law and moves swiftly on to gravy.

"This is fennel!" she says holding up an enormous fennel bulb that would not look amiss in Land of the Giants and chopping it up for the stuffing. "Is it related to celery?" asks a blonde woman. No, it is not, says Alexa who is now teaching us how to chop an onion.

"Anyone need to see that again?"

she asks. "Gee, you're all so smart!"

After two hours, we have in theory mastered the art of Thanksgiving dinner for a fee of $45 each. Turkey, apple, sausage stuffing, bourbon gravy, sweet potato pur"e, julienne green beans, cranberry relish and pumpkin pie and cr'me fraleche. If we get stuck we can always call the Homechef helpline, we're told. It is manned until 1pm on the big Day.

Back in Whole Foods later that afternoon, I ask the man at the checkout whether he has tried a tofu Unturkey. He looks at me as if I am out of my mind.

"They used to be called Tofurkeys," he says. "That's the thing about Americans, we always have to reinvent the wheel. This time it came out square." No doubt the Pilgrim Fathers would agree.

Copyright 2000
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