Recipes and Reminiscences
An Ellen & Delia Thanksgiving: 2021 Edition
Welcome, new Subcribers!
Thank you, faithful old ones.
It is just a little over a year since I began Ellen Kushner’s Bad Advice: a Hawk & Handsaw Emporium for the Discriminating Reader. I intended to do at least one post per month. But then I did some other things instead.
Pause for Question: How frequently would you like Ellen’s Bad Advice to appear in your e-mailbox? Don’t lie. I can take it. And, however often that might be, would you prefer that it appear in a regular, predictable fashion, or as my whimsy takes me?
I’m glad to say that one of the things the forestalled more frequent letters was that I was finishing the first section of a novel I’ve been struggling with for years. Part One of People’s Glorious WIP1 City Year weighs in at 89,000 words, which is nearly as long as some other novels I’ve written. But then, this one has two narrators: Jessica, the bastard daughter of one of the anti-heroes of Swordspoint, and Lily, a Riverside cabaret waitress who wants to be an actor. My new agent, Suzie Townsend of New Leaf (who was acquired about the same time I began this Substack: September 2020 was a pretty energetic time for me, what with all that staying home and getting things done!), is eager to get the new novel out on submission to my next publisher, whoever that may be. And so I’m heading off next week for another valuable Writing Retreat, to put the final polish on some big final revisions before we send it out. (I owe Suzie a letter explaining all this. I hope she reads my Substack.)
Why another Writing Retreat?
I have finally accepted that I just can’t write on a regular schedule. Instead, I must go on frequent retreats, where, like the poet, I roll all my strength and all my potential sweetness up into one ball, and tear my word count with rough strife through the iron gates of my sad little brain. If you’re interested, I’ll do a Substack entirely composed of how I came to this conclusion, and what happened once I did, lavishly illustrated with attractive photos of views from the desks at the places generous friends have invited me on my quest for words. Does that interest you?
So off I go in a couple of days, to an Undisclosed Location near Lake Mohawk. Usually, I go alone, the better to indulge in poor personal grooming and meals eaten standing up. This time, however, Delia says I’m not leaving her alone for Thanksgiving, and she’s coming, too. She could certainly use some peace and quiet for her own writing, and she is an excellent cook.
Do not be alarmed that we have no Thanksgiving Plans! We have family and friends who would be glad to feed us. But we have developed our own Kushner/Sherman family tradition of hiding for Thanksgiving.
I told this story last year, but in case you missed it, I am repeating it below. This time, though, lest you give up before the end, I am beginning with the Perfect Thanksgiving Side Dish Recipe. It is nutritious, delicious, and non-fat, but no one but you will know this. It also features in the story that I will tell, which is about writing a novel and inventing a recipe, called:
* ELLEN & DELIA’S ORANGE SMOOSH *
Roughly 1 part applestuff to 3 parts Yams
APPLES: peel, cut up and cook down some apples, as smooth or a chunky as you want them. If you don’t want to bother with cooking down fresh apples, you can just open a jar of unsweetened applesauce.
SWEET POTATOES/YAMS: peel, cut up and cook down a few.
Crystallized (or Candied) GINGER!!! (not raw ginger) Mince some up.
Mix and heat it all up together. It will need a little liquid to finish it. I warmly recommend just a splash of a liqueur called TRIPLE SEC. You won’t taste the alcohol, but it gives it some zing. Apple cider works, too, and I’m sure plenty of other things you have lying around. Maybe a little nutmeg. That’s it.
It is immensely rich and yumsome and everyone always wants more, because while it is terribly good for you, it tastes utterly sinful.
The Story
Nailed to the last Thursday of November by JFK as recently as 1963, Thanksgiving is not just a a four-day weekend with the opportunity to eat without apology. The whole point of Thanksgiving is that it brings members of a family together at a single table.
This is the story of how I opted out of Thanksgiving and have never looked back.
Before I begin, though, I acknowledge the sorrow of anyone who wishes they could be with family this year. I’m only cavalier about it personally for two main reasons:
I hate crowded airports - or crowded anything, really, including highways. This probably stems from my atavistic belief that if lots of other people are doing something, it probably means I shouldn’t be.
Jews already have our own Thanksgiving, where all the family gathers round a big table, eats a lot and argues. It’s the holiday of Passover, and it comes in the spring. That one, I miss at my peril. But isn’t one enough?
Enough fol-de-rol. The story really starts here:
In November of 2000, my wife Delia Sherman & I were trying to finish the revisions on our novel The Fall of the Kings (a sequel-of-sorts to my novel Swordspoint) to get it in to the publisher so that it could come out on schedule in November 2002.
At the same time, I was working round the clock on my national public radio series, Sound & Spirit, at WGBH in Boston. I was writer, host and co-producer on a weekly hour of dense and thought-out material mixing music and words. (You can listen to some of the episodes here on my website.)
Four precious days of holiday to work at home with Delia was just too great a gift to waste.
So we let our Boston friends assume that we were going home to my family in Cleveland. And let the family assume that we’d been invited to friends in Boston. And we stayed in our jammies and wrote for four days straight, nourished by a big pot of stew on the wood stove!
Delia, however, is a traditionalist. So on Thanksgiving Day she insisted on cooking us a little duck breast. For a side dish I dug out the many jars of home-canned applesauce that she’d brought to our cupboard from her previous life in a very large house with a very large garden. But though they looked all right, I realized that they could have botulism (a scentless, tasteless poison brewed in old canned goods, of which I have been terrified ever since my physician father made us read Berton Roueché’s medical thriller collection Eleven Blue Men2 to scare all his kids into washing their hands regularly). The only sure defense against that was to open and BOIL THEM ALL.
So I did. And when it was done to my satisfaction, only about a cup of highly refined homemade applesauce remained. Not really enough to make a separate dish. So we just threw the apple sauce in with the mashed sweet potatoes, thus inventing our first true, original family Thanksgiving dish, ORANGE SMOOSH (rhymes with Kush), the recipe for which I shared with you above.
Ever since then, we’ve aimed for a Thanksgiving weekend alone, with lots of writing, some duck, and Orange Smoosh.
Finally, my deepest to everyone who showed up for one of my events celebrating the new publication of my old Chanukah book, The Golden Dreidel.
The book is available on Amazon, where your 5-Star rating & rave review can raise its rank from #100 to #1 in “Jewish children’s Holiday Books” if we all pitch in, and on IndieBound, where you can support your local bookstore.
I’ve got plenty more bad advice for you . . . but for now, that’s a good place to stop. If you’ve got holiday recipes of your own to share, I’d love to see them in Comments.
Warmly,
Ellen
Work In Progress
For decades I’ve been absolutely sure that Eleven Blue Men was the botulism story (and that botulism turns you blue!). In writing this up, I have discovered that I am 100% wrong. The botulism story is in a completely different Roueché collection. Which I clearly also read.
Wondering about Yams vs. Sweet Potatoes? https://www.foodnetwork.com/thanksgiving/thanksgiving-sides/yams-vs--sweet-potatoes
Whimsy! Ellen moved by whimsy is always a recipe for pique and delight!