Tastes Like Turkey
A Geezer’s Notebook, By Jim Foster
January 6, 2019
The Christmas season is finally over and once again we are faced with the same dilemma Mrs. Cratchet struggled with back in 1843, what to do with the carcass of the family’s fowl dinner (or ‘foul’, depending on who was doing the cooking). Although her problem might have been a little more severe since the refrigerator had yet to be invented and as I recall old Ebeneezer sent over a goose twice the size of Tiny Tim.
This was back in England and there weren’t that many recipes available and most of them called for eels. As a result there were rarely any calls for seconds on her turkey casseroles — or firsts either. I expect the Cratchets were in for a solid month of turkey soup.
Her plum pudding was the talk of London if we remember the fuss Bob made at the family dinner. Although I read later the old dear was called before an investigating tribunal from England Health concerning her secret blend of herbs and spices after a weed called marijuana was found growing in her back yard. Their oldest son, Peter, would later spend a year less a day in the Tower of London for selling the stuff to an undercover bobby. Whether Peter was under the covers or the bobby or both is unclear, but he did time anyway.
There is a strange thing about human memory whenever we look back on our childhood. Things seem to grow or shrink depending on whom we are trying to impress. I’m sure you know what I mean. For us city folks, the distance we had to walk to school increases by a block or two each year until the morning plod to the schoolyard is now just shy of the distance from Toronto to Hamilton and we came home for lunch.
Country folks usually have memories of more perilous trips. Wolves are often involved and occasionally a black bear will be thrown in if the listeners are city dwellers and particularly gullible as most of us seem to be. Davy Crockett killed a bear when he was only three. His feat pales in comparison to the epic battle of a pack of wolves and a tiny miss from Cooper’s Falls under a full head of steam. The county paid a bounty back then and rumour has it she put herself through university on the proceeds.
The Christmas turkey is usually at the top of the list of exaggerations when recalling your childhood, especially the number of hours your mother left it in the oven. Twelve or fourteen hours would be fairly normal if the bird was the size of the family budgie, but the big bruisers required days and often the big blast furnaces at Stelco were involved.
This may be one of those urban legends, like the one about a Canadian Senator who supposedly stayed awake all day, but I remember hearing about a man in Barrie who won a turkey in a Christmas raffle. When the fundraisers delivered his turkey it was alive and whoever was doing the delivery just opened the front door of the guy’s house and pushed it in. If the prize turkey were as big as the one grandma cooked at the farm it would require an OPP SWAT team to bring it down.
The story may not be true, but I know several people from down there and they are (let’s be kind) different. When Orillia annexes Barrie sometime in the next two or three years we plan on having a number of their prominent citizens hauled in for a psychiatric assessment. Orillia, the Jewel of Central Ontario, really doesn’t want Barrie, but most of us figure the only way we will ever get a new ice surface is to take over one of theirs.
But none of this solves our problem of what to do with twenty pounds of leftover turkey and a bag of giblets. The giblets we can donate to CSI Miami as props for the next autopsy, but the turkey itself will require a bit of thinking and possible a whack of imagination. And one more thing, there is a ton of mashed potatoes. Just why you felt it necessary to cook a market gardener’s entire crop for one meal is a mystery and let’s not even start on the bowl of turnip. Our problem turkey problem though can be summed up in the immortal words of Tiny Tim, “Turkey soup again! God bless us everyone.”