Happy Thanksgiving!

It's been a while since SC has done a commemorative holiday post, but Thanksgiving is just...stuffed...with opportunities. A few points to ponder:

1) While most people will sit down to a traditional turkey -- which was unquestionably part of the original Thanksgiving celebration -- disciples of legendary Cajun chef Paul Prudhomme will be eating something known as a "turducken". The word is a compounding, with some contraction, of turkey, duck, and chicken. As prepared by Chef Prudhomme, it involves three kinds of stuffing to go with the three birds. Frankly, it strikes SC as a bit over the top, but then, so does the new Hardee's Monster Thickburger (which your host learned about here). As National Review's Steven Hayward points out, it's a good thing Chef Prudhomme didn't use pheasant instead of duck.

2) SC has no special wish to be perceived as an antagonist of Southern cooking -- he's got a signed copy of Emeril's TV Dinners, and the local Chick-Fil-A's cashiers have taken to giggling about how long it's been since they saw him yesterday -- but he feels compelled to warn people against deep-frying turkeys. Click here to have a look at Underwriters Laboratories' video of a typical turkey fryer under test. Any interest that SC ever had in trying this out himself was quashed some time ago when he saw a fryer that advertised that its power cord was UL-certified, a nice way of saying that the rest of it sure wasn't. Yikes! (For a defense of this practice, see here.)

3) Forget all the nasty debates of the last month -- Bush vs. Kerry, SC vs. Lakoff, single-malt vs. blended -- it's time to focus on the real controversy: canned cranberry sauce or homemade? Partisans of the can, the onus of explaining how you could possibly eat that stuff after watching it jiggle as it exits the can falls firmly on your shoulders. There is simply no way the Pilgrims would have been grateful to anyone for a food item so disturbingly, perfectly cylindrical in shape. To help you get started on your rebuttal, note that cranberry sauce of any sort is an anachronism unreflective of the original celebration.

4) On a somewhat more serious note, the Wall Street Journal has a 43-year-old tradition of running this editorial every year at Thanksgiving. Proof of its timeless appeal can be found in the stunning aptness of its description of American society, as though it were written today; even if America is not the country you would like it to be, take a moment today to give thanks for the country that it is.

Comments

[Fried Frida]

My dear SC,
Where is the thrilling polymath your devoted readers know and love?

Paul Prudhomme did not come up with the idea of Turducken - it is an ancient recipe. Earlier versions had tiny nuthatches at the core. If you look in later cookery books, you may find this dish done with a Bustard as the outer bird. Prudhomme is a bad man.

Further, it does not count as fried turkey if the fryer has some sort of power cord. The mind boggles. Who is filling your head with this nonsense?

And finally, it is not thanksgiving unless you have at least two kinds of homemade sauce and some from a can for the family fusspot.

Are you even SC? The style remains the same but the content is alarming. Alarming!

[Semantic Compositions]

Oh, don't worry, I'm quite myself. I was "starved" for ideas for a Thanksgiving post, and went back to my Valentine's Day post for inspiration. Perhaps not one of my finer moments.

I could be wrong about the provenance of the "turducken"; I took the WordSpy article linked above as reliable, but it might not be.

But I won't argue that the content here has perhaps not been all it could be lately; I don't want to say that I'm out of things to write about, but sometimes there's what the Rolls-Royce engineers call a "positive surfeit of adequacy" in topics, and sometimes...there isn't.