Thanksgiving every year heralds in the “holiday season”, with Christmas, Hanukah, and New Years all in close succession. Naturally, it also heralds in a time of rushing and stress, too, with last minute attempts to get everything just right and on time. Thanksgiving in Taiwan was no different, if not even more complicated in its food orchestrations. Some foods we planned on serving weren’t available for love or money in Taiwan, and others had close substitutes that worked, in theory, but on which a conclusion in the matter would not be reached until it was too late to do over.
The first stage was collecting recipes to make, supposedly here was where we were supposed to divulge our families’ secret recipes. Unfortunately it seems our families were not very secretive and left us with a sparse selection of recipes to choose from. Nonetheless, we had our essentials anyway – turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes, and gravy. Without with it would not have been a Thanksgiving meal. We gave the list to Lilly who then gave it to Linda to go and pick up our strange list of sometimes hard-to-find foods.
On the day of the meal, Mark and I arrived at 9 AM to an office full of assorted foodstuffs. Linda had done her job and we had everything we needed. While we were sitting around, calculating the number of hours till we were to eat the meal we were preparing – at this point it was around ten- we figured we should get started. First on the menu was stuffing for the turkeys which had to be sent off to a kitchen by 11 AM. We managed to get some bread toasted and crumbs made. By this point, some Taiwanese students had shown up and were now helping in the process. Put the vegetables on the stove, let them cook, combine them with the bread crumbs, season it, put in a little stock, then stuff the turkeys. Seems simple enough, but, since this was no regular meal, a meal for a hundred hardly ever is, we had to do this in massive amounts with what was a gallon sized pot and a gas camp stove.
We managed to dress the turkeys and get them sent off with minimal fuss and just a little after when we were supposed to with the help of our Taiwanese students, many of whom admitted they had never really cooked before. After that was the long succession of other foods, with little breaks in between. We cooked and mashed the potatoes, boiled the cranberries, made whipped cream for the pie, mixed and made meatballs, and prepared extra stuffing. We spent some time explaining the meaning behind Thanksgiving to the students, something I don’t think I’ve had to do since I was little, but it served as a nice reminder as to what all the cooking and rush was for.
Ten hours later, we had a meal. We assembled a caravan down to the corner to set up and serve the food. The turkeys weren’t back yet, but they would be soon, we were told. The food was set up, the people had started arriving, brought by the idea of turkey and festivities. We waited for a few minutes, eagerly, for the turkey to arrive. And waited a bit more. And then, it arrived. At that point, many were ravenously hungry and wanted to immediately dig in. Alas, we had formalities to observe, namely picture taking, and speech giving, by Mark, the Vice-Principal, and Lanise. Then, came the glorious moment. We would be able to finally taste what we had made together with the Taiwanese students. It was delicious and everything that a Thanksgiving dinner should be. It tasted just like home. Ten minutes later, it was all gone. While I suppose a compliment to our cooking, it was a bit sad seeing ten hours of labor go into ten minutes of ravenous eating. Still, I had the satisfaction of the food I had been missing from America. I was glad I had been able to spend such time with the students and to have been able to bring my culture to them. It might be a few years before I work up the nerve to make a Thanksgiving meal again, but it was worth it – and delicious.
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