Thanksgiving at Twin Oaks Inn
CreditTony Cenicola/The New York Times
NATCHEZ, Miss. — Regina Charboneau, who is much more organized than you are, will host 145 people at her house this Thanksgiving.
She is related to nearly all of them. Her family tree has been growing in this tiny charm of a town on the shores of the Mississippi River for eight generations.
Ms. Charboneau (and, to be fair, an assistant) will make almost every one of the 15 dishes and five desserts on her table, down to the Creole gravy and cranberry-jalapeño chutney. The day begins at 11 a.m., when her family arrives to eat Cajun sausages and tortas made with fresh fig preserves and walnuts. The sausages are a tribute to her father, who was raised in Louisiana and was the cook in the family. At 1 p.m., an uncle will say a blessing. Then Ms. Charboneau will shout, “God bless the cook!” and the guests will sweep into the grand dining room of her 1832 plantation house to eat.
If the day goes according to plan, it will all seem effortless. “I guess it’s the Southern belle in me,” she said. “I don’t like being frazzled, and I don’t like breaking a sweat.”
But indeed, she will have sweated, a little bit every day, since before Halloween, when she began her long march to Thanksgiving.
Do not let Ms. Charboneau’s superior planning skills send you into a spiral of hopelessness. The point is this: A brilliantly executed, low-stress Thanksgiving meal can be yours with a solid game plan, freezer space and some simple but delicious shortcuts.
And it’s not too late to start.
Mrs. Charboneau, 60, has developed an array of tips and tricks that can make the dinner seem elaborate and elegant without countless hours in the kitchen. Think of it as culinary stagecraft with a Southern twist.
“Even if you can’t cook that well, you can take canned whole cranberries and layer them in a pretty glass bowl with some orange marmalade,” she said. “Little things like that make a difference. They add up.”
Almost daily from early October, she takes calls from friends around the country who are deep in the holiday weeds. “People think they can do Thanksgiving all in one day, and that is wrong, wrong, wrong,” she said. “I want people to be one step ahead, always. It’s just the key.”
Planning ahead means less work on a day when the house is filled with both people and expectations. Begin now, she advises, by writing a menu. Then gather all of the recipes, and start filling in a calendar. Make a prep list, noting dishes that can be made this week or the next. Make shopping lists so you won’t be running to the store a dozen times. “You need lists for your lists,” she said.
Hers are rendered in precise detail. In October, she begins saving drippings and making stock for gravy. A week before the holiday, she will bring up the wineglasses from the basement. Next to her notation for the Cajun sausages, she wrote, “Have Jimmy bring day before Thanksgiving on his way to hunting camp.”
For the past few weeks, Ms. Charboneau has been making dishes that freeze remarkably well. Don’t gasp. A good bit of her meal will have been in the freezer weeks before it is served. “The only thing I really sweat is what happens if the electricity goes out,” she said. “I am constantly checking the freezers.”
She has already filled two hotel pans with her beloved Natchez creamed spinach, and several more with two variations of dressing. The caramelized sugar custard and other components for her banana trifle are in there, along with disposable aluminum pans of brisket already sliced and in gravy. (Brisket has become a tradition ever since she went looking for an alternative to turkey, which she doesn’t much like, and decided that prime rib was too expensive.)
Clearly, Ms. Charboneau is not your average home cook. In the 1970s, she took a job making food at a construction site in rural Alaska to earn money to attend culinary school in Paris. In the 1980s, she ran Regina’s at the Regis in San Francisco’s theater district. In the 1990s, she opened the nightclub Biscuits and Blues a block away.
Along the way, she became a biscuit-bearing Thanksgiving fairy to a parade of friends and celebrities, which explains why she has framed snapshots of Robin Williams, Shirley MacLaine, Tim Curry and Lily Tomlin on her bookshelves. Mick Jagger and other Rolling Stones are among her fans, the proof hanging on her wall in the form of Ronnie Wood’s self-portrait.
In 2000, she moved back to Natchez to raise her sons, Jean Luc and Martin. She runs a bed-and-breakfast at her Twin Oaks plantation house, and is the culinary director of the American Queen, a cruise steamboat that plies the Mississippi. Her husband, Doug, recently took a sabbatical from his job in New York as a bankruptcy consultant to open a rum distillery in an old building next to the historic King’s Tavern in Natchez. The couple bought the buildings last year, turning the tavern into a restaurant with craft cocktails and brisket flatbread.
“We just don’t want to be bored,” she said. “When you find yourself watching ‘Dancing With the Stars’ and looking forward to ‘American Idol,’ you think, ‘We need to get busy.’ ”
She took over the family Thanksgiving shortly after they returned to Natchez and immediately upgraded the menu.
Her mother, an expert hostess, had insisted on real plates and silverware; the guest list got so big she had to wash them in the bathtub. Ms. Charboneau has moved to good-quality plastic plates and flatware.
In one of her many nods to convenience over convention, she buys prepared pie crusts from a shop in town. Other shortcuts include using grocery-store hot-dog buns instead of brioche in her mushroom-brioche dressing. She also gets her brother to smoke a few turkeys. (She encourages novice cooks to consider buying a smoked or otherwise prepared bird so they can focus on making spectacular side dishes.)
The Monday before the holiday, she moves frozen dishes to the refrigerator. On Thanksgiving morning, she begins heating them.
The dressing bakes first. Piping hot, she packs it into white Igloo coolers until she is ready to put it into chafing dishes.
With her oven free, she can make her ridiculously easy sweet-potato dish. She rubs the prettiest orange-fleshed sweet potatoes she can find with oil, kosher salt and coarse black pepper and roasts them for an hour or more. Then she slices them in half, nestles them on a platter and adds a spoonful of sour cream and an artful dollop of cranberry-jalapeño chutney. The chutney has been made well ahead of time, of course.
“It’s effortless, and people love them, love them, love them,” she said.
Last, she bakes her biscuits. She makes them in advance, using a laminating technique that leaves streaks of butter. They get cut and frozen. She pops them into muffin tins at the last moment to bake.
Julia Reed, the Southern author, has eaten more of those biscuits than may be polite to admit. In a foreword to Ms. Charboneau’s latest cookbook, “Mississippi Current,” she calls them “the flakiest, most meltingly delicious biscuits I’ve ever tasted in a long and active life of tasting them.”
The biscuits have seduced many guests over the years, including Tate Taylor, a Mississippi native best known for directing the film “The Help.” Last fall, Mr. Taylor was in Natchez shooting the James Brown biopic, “Get On Up.” He and many cast members, including Allison Janney and Chadwick Boseman, ended up at Twin Oaks for Thanksgiving.
“It is extremely organized chaos,” Mr. Taylor said. “She has a rigid schedule she has been working for weeks.”
The results, he reported, were stunning: a glorious Thanksgiving tableau dripping with elegance. “It just appears,” he said. “You don’t see the carnage.”
And that is a perfect Southern holiday.