Up at the Maine cabin for Thanksgiving, we put our new (since summer) Sears-bought, 20-inch wide gas oven to the test. It’s a tiny workhorse. We cooked on all burners and both oven racks, from turkey to stuffing to clams. (Earlier in the week, I’d called my clam guy at Young’s Oyster Pound and asked him about getting some cherrystones or littlenecks… of course they had plenty of steamers on hand but none of thick shells. He’d have to dig up my order.) Near a wood stove and with icy mist falling outside, I’d decided I needed to make clams like I watched my Uncle Chic do one Thanksgiving. He’s the one who told me he was “the best quahog diver in New England” when he was young, but then he was known for telling incredible sea stories.
The rest of our menu was, as follows: roast fresh turkey (a free-ranger), mashed potatoes made with those Aroostook County potatoes with papery-thin skins, creamed fresh spinach, cranberry sauce, stuffing, gravy, and a tray of roasted parsnips, beets, rutabaga and carrots.
We served everything on the cabin’s motley collection of plates and pans, along with a few things we bought at All Small Antiques in Searsport just before it closed Wednesday afternoon. The curly-headed, grandmotherly clerk there told us she wouldn’t be serving turkey this year. Instead she’d be cooking an eye roast the next day for her family, she said. “Why? I’ll tell you why. For the simple reason that they’ve had too much turkey already.”
– Sandy Lang, November 2007
