Leftovers

I pulled open the refrigerator door and looked over the remains of Thanksgiving dinner. Leftovers had been stashed in plastic and glass containers: cranberry sauce, stuffing (with sausage and cranberries), gravy, mashed potatoes, sweet potato casserole, turkey legs and wings, and a slice of my granddaughter’s cheesecake. Yum.  I started foraging, contemplating a turkey sandwich.

Some items were wrapped in tin foil. I recalled my days as a graduate student living in an efficiency apartment on Chester Avenue in Philadelphia. On Sunday evening, I would cook a mammoth meatloaf, the sole dish in my repertoire outside of bacon and eggs. For the rest of the week, I would nosh on the meatloaf. Wrapped in tin foil, it would dwindle, reduced to a wrinkled ball by Friday.  Nothing left when I unwrapped the ball, I would take the trolley to Smoky Joe’s for a beer and a burger.

This past Thanksgiving Day, fifteen of us bellied up to a bodacious buffet. Being an old hand at the Thanksgiving business, I knew not to squander plate acreage by overloading on any one item. Turkey is not at the top of my culinary list, being boring all by itself. One slice of turkey is all that is required. Next door I plopped down a generous mound of mashed potatoes. A dollop of gravy on both? Of course. Stuffing and cranberry sauce became parentheses around the mashed potatoes and the slice of turkey. I frowned. I was running out of real estate. Sweet potato casserole and green beans loomed ahead on the buffet. What about a fresh-baked, hand-curated roll? I went to the table with my plunder. I sat, surveyed my plate. My fork hovered, prepared to pounce.

The meal reminded me of a map of Eastern Europe, with many equal-sized but separate countries mooshing up against each other, the green beans being Slovenia, the sweet potato casserole Croatia. I considered how restaurants today pile the goods on top of each other like a gastronomic stone roadside marker, asparagus riding on top of the risotto, a short rib teetering overtop everything. Eating requires excavation.  I prefer food segregated, separate but equal. Some intermingling between cranberry sauce and green beans is a fact of life, cannot be helped.

My father was ahead of his time, food-stacking early in the game. His burgers rode tall in the saddle over a plate – toasted bun, mayo, ketchup, pickles, tomato, a major chunk of lettuce, cheese slice and quarter pound of ground chuck that had spent just enough time in the fry pan to become acquainted with heat. On one occasion he was happily chowing down on his burger, half through, when he wailed, “Damn, I forgot the meat!”

My mother, the platoon sergeant, did some stacking of her own. One of her specialites du maison was chicken curry over rice. We did DIY stacking from small bowls of chopped up peanuts, crumbled hardboiled eggs, bacon bits, shredded coconut, and raisins. The final topping was chutney, a vestige of her southern heritage, used to cover up dicey meats. Her mango chutney lived in a jar lurking deep in the bowels of the refrigerator. The screw top had a dried crust and was difficult to twist off. There was no “sell-by” date.

Oatmeal is an exception to my separate but equal philosophy – stone ground, please, slow cooked. Here, I am stout on integration. Bananas, blueberries, almonds, and brown sugar or maple syrup are married by half-and-half into a happy multiethnic blend. Like the turkey slice at a Thanksgiving meal, oatmeal just transports the real goods. It is a porridge, for which Oliver Twist begged, “Please sir, I want some more.” I am with Oliver.

Since there was a crowd this Thanksgiving and we didn’t have a Hogwarts-sized banquet table, my daughter-in-law set up tables in two rooms. I sat with several collegiate types, a pleasure for this octogenarian. They were full of beans and looking forward to getting on with life. No plans to stay home after graduation, they were going to “light out for the territory” like Huck Finn. At big Thanksgiving spreads my parents set out a tippy card table in a corner of the living room for the kids. We ate in exile, poking each other and squabbling. I overheard the conversation of the adults at the big table and wished I was there. I liked their jokes and laughter and the smell of their cigarettes after dinner. When I was finally admitted to the adult table with the cloth napkins, the silver forks, knives and spoons, the cut glass stemware, the wedding china, and steaming bowls to be passed around, I knew I had made it to the big leagues.

So now I was checking out the leftovers. I lifted lids, peeked in each container and considered my feast for lunch. Turkey, check. Cranberry sauce, check. Lettuce, check. Sourdough bread, check. Mayo, check. But what about dessert? The cheesecake had to be saved to go with a cup of morning coffee. I pushed aside some bowls and at the back of the fridge, hiding behind the sweet potato casserole, I fingered a lone slice of pecan pie.

Perfect.