There are two Thanksgivings, for some of us. There is the one that will unfold in the real world, the Thanksgiving that involves transportation snarls, hours of televised football, family members stunned into a comatose state by rivers of gravy and lagoons of mashed potatoes, testy spats over the thermostat and, over all, a rigid adherence to the Way Things Are Supposed to Be Done.
Then there is a Thanksgiving that we keep tucked away in our hearts: the Thanksgiving in which, like the daydreaming lead character in “Brazil,” we take flight, soaring into the potato-colored clouds and leaving unbending tradition, family expectations and dietary totalitarianism behind. Zak Pelaccio, a chef at Fish & Game, a restaurant in Hudson, N.Y., has envisioned just such a feast.
If Mr. Pelaccio were free to “live this bacchanalian dream,” he said, there would be fire pits in a clearing in a Hudson Valley forest. There would be oysters and wild mushrooms grilling over the heat, and turkeys twirling on rotisserie spits, and stuffing in cast-iron pots, he said.
Why stop there?
“Leaves are falling on the table, and there are lanterns hanging from the trees,” he said, as this rustic utopian vision (part “Lord of the Rings,” part Laurel Canyon in the 1970s) began to take shape in his telling. Dr. John would perform live, and “dervish-like dancers” would frolic in flowing Stevie Nicks-ish garb. “The nymphs in the woods who are dancing for our pleasure as the dark blanket of night descends,” he explained, and sighed, and laughed.
There would be joy in the hearts of his guests, and presumably no bickering with Uncle Bob about the midterm elections.
A man can dream, can’t he? Of course he can. In many ways, Thanksgiving is the most hidebound of holidays, with a preordained bill of fare that feels as though it hasn’t changed an iota since the pilgrims. But if you ask people what sort of Thanksgiving they would stage if they didn’t have to follow the rules, the responses suggest that much of the country possesses a roiling, repressed fantasy life.
What do some Americans want for Thanksgiving dinner? They want lobster. They want Alaskan king crab and West African peanut stew, Peking duck and pad thai, Neapolitan pizza and Brazilian feijoada. In some cases, they want any form of meat that doesn’t gobble: osso buco, rack of lamb, suckling pig. For Tenaya Darlington, who lives in Philadelphia and blogs about cheese as Madame Fromage, nothing would beat “a Raclette party: quick prep, followed by satisfying stink and a long supper around a warm oven,” she said.
For Sandra Beasley, a poet and author, “the glory of Thanksgiving is the all-day graze,” she said. She imagines a marathon nosh built around a stuffed and roasted wild salmon: incorporated into a salad at 2 p.m., served as a fillet near dusk, circling back as a sandwich later in the night.
Shelley Simons, a nurse practitioner student in Birmingham, Ala., responding to a query on Facebook, can’t help but think ahead to mess avoidance: “Alaskan king crab claws, grilled asparagus and a fresh salad of baby greens, goat cheese, sugared pecans and dried cherries,” she mused. “Takes zero time to prepare, zero time to clean, and all my time can be focused on my guests.”
And what’s getting in the way of their gustatory longings? Why can’t they just hit the reboot button and wake up in the Thanksgiving of their transcontinental dreams? Start by asking Joseph Johnson, the chef de cuisine at the Cecil in Harlem, who has apparently been taking culinary risks since he was a teenager. Back then he lived in Pennsylvania; an uncle would visit, bearing crustaceans from the Chesapeake; Mr. Johnson took to mixing their meat with cornbread.
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“When I was a kid, I used to make a crab stuffing, and my mother was always opposed to it,” he said. “We ate the same thing year after year after year. My mom’s like, ‘tradition, tradition, tradition.’ ”
The Thanksgiving he imagines, when the constraints of tradition are removed, could be seen as an echo of the food he cooks at the Cecil, where the spices of Africa, Asia and the Caribbean converge. Deep down, Mr. Johnson wants oxtail chili spooned over herbed rice. “Let’s have fun,” he said. “Let’s cook things that we want to cook.”
The chief obstacle? What the rest of us want to eat. Thanksgiving isn’t necessarily the time when it makes sense to inflict one’s culinary whims upon family and friends. (Better to save those whims for New Year’s Eve, when family and friends are too lubricated to notice.) Just as the nation splits politically between conservatives and liberals, Thanksgiving cravings can be charted on a spectrum that goes from super-traditional to let’s-just-order-burritos.
Gavin Kaysen, the former chef at Café Boulud in New York, who’s preparing to open a restaurant called Spoon and Stable in Minneapolis, has a desire to dodge pie and stuffing (because of severe celiac disease) and complicated feelings about turkey (“because turkey is really an awful bird to cook,” Mr. Kaysen said). Also, he hasn’t really celebrated Thanksgiving at home in almost a decade, because he was always working, which meant that he has had plenty of time to fantasize about a Thanksgiving that wouldn’t leave him feeling groggy and slow. For that he’d want socca chips, fashioned from chickpeas and capped with anchovies, fennel and caramelized onions; shrimp and oysters; grilled lamb.
Camille Becerra, the chef at Navy in SoHo, wouldn’t mind doing away with a menu altogether.
“I love the idea of going somewhere and not knowing what you’re going to make,” Ms. Becerra said. “It would completely be of the moment.” She envisions a brisk morning on Martha’s Vineyard, a foraging expedition in the sylvan glade, fresh fish and oysters, all the ingredients coming straight from the island that day.
“I’d want it to encompass all the senses and have it be this great adventure,” she said. Perhaps guests would bring hiking boots and shucking gloves instead of pies.
Amanda Freitag’s Thanksgiving fantasy might require gloves as well. Ms. Freitag, the chef behind Empire Diner in Chelsea, covets a Korean-style feast, one in which all turkey, stuffing, cranberry sauce and sweet potatoes would be jettisoned. This would be “the polar opposite,” she said. “I would love to have this whole fried fish splattered with spicy sauce. Everybody tearing that apart instead of tearing a turkey apart.” Bottles of cold beer. Little cups of pickles and condiments. Deep red gochujang. “My mom would probably not be happy, because she’d think it’s too spicy,” Ms. Freitag said. “She would probably want me to make a separate turkey with some bland mashed potatoes.”
But could she persuade her mom? Could minds be changed? Could Thanksgiving assume a different form without turning into a smorgasbord of family resentment and rancor? Is there another way?
“You’d still have a carcass at the end of the meal,” Ms. Freitag went on, getting swept up in the idea. “It would still be super-festive, and you’d have this beautiful fish on the table. Put a skewer through the middle, make it look like it’s swimming. Wait a minute. I might actually have to do this.”