IT’S LEFT OVER!

In home cooking, sometimes leftovers taste better than the first time you eat the dish. I suspect this is so because it sits in its own juices for a while and settles. I find this particularly true the day after Thanksgiving Day, or Part II of the Thanksgiving holiday.

In the old days, when Dad was alive, we all congregated at Mom and Dad’s house for the day after Thanksgiving. That was because some of us couldn’t spend the actual day together because of commitments to in-laws who had holidays too. So that Friday we would all get together and eat the leftover food and share our lives.

We reheated the food, as well as the conversations so everyone was up to speed on the total clan. It was probably almost as nice as Christmas Eve to me.

But that food was good! The turkey especially seemed to come into it’s own, and was a harbinger of sandwiches, soups and any cold pickings I could do.

Mom made an Italian stuffing that could become a sandwich, as well as accompany a dish during the week that wasn’t turkey! But every time I sat down to eat with either the turkey and stuffing leftovers, it took me back to the holiday and the day after and made it festive.

The Thanksgiving Holiday started off with the same roasting pot that Mom used every year. That tradition began in Brooklyn, and I can still remember Mom stuffing the bird and the butter mixture that sat on the outside of the carcass! She had a cover to the pot, and only used the pot for Thanksgiving. Seeing that pot was the start of a historic mental reel that started to run on my projector mind.

Then one year after we had long gone from Brooklyn, Mom didn’t use the pot anymore. There were too many of us, so we had to get a bigger turkey. Suddenly some of the iconic tools of cooking, although utilitarian, were no longer useful. A little bit of me went away with it.

But the years were kind to us, as we married and brought in something to replace the things we no longer had, we had our own families and that meant children. Suddenly, the house that Nana and Grandpa lived in was a meeting hall for all the many cousins and suddenly life was good again.

The Friday after Thanksgiving has given way to even busier lives. We don’t necessarily gather on that day anymore, because we all have commitments. Dad is gone and Nana is 93, and tired. She has earned her rest, and so we allow the holiday to center around her, and we each have our own ‘Friday after’ in which we give her our time. Mom no longer wears her floral apron, no longer stands at the stove and gives orders, no longer teaches her daughters how and what to do. Now like all holidays, she sits at the table and converses, while one of her daughters or grand daughters scurries around the kitchen.