Another Thanksgiving in Dublin

A recap of one giant feast, plus: snow!

Please forgive me for this extremely late Thanksgiving essay. This time of year is a busy one for me work-wise, and I write these essays on the fastest turnaround time I can, but in this case it means a bit of a seasonal delay. If you’re in a part of the world that doesn’t celebrate Thanksgiving, just think of this as a recap of an early Christmas feast. Because I can assure you, that’s how my Irish guests thought of it anyway.

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Thanksgiving is deeply problematic and also my very favorite holiday. I love the coziness of cooking a giant amount of butter-drenched food for people, eating in the late afternoon, then sitting around and drinking and playing card games for hours. I love cooking a mix of my family’s traditional recipes plus new ones of my own that I’ve repeated for so many years now that they’re traditions in their own right. I love creating an unhinged multi-day cooking game plan and prepping food for so long that I start to feel kind of trembly, all while listening to the *NSYNC Christmas album (because I’m a 90’s kid). And I love an excuse to entertain people. 

This year marked my second Thanksgiving in Dublin. Last year, I was visiting Ireland over the holiday and prepared dinner for five. Everyone in attendance was an Irish man except for me, and no one had been to a proper Thanksgiving before so expectations were low. It was a lovely, low-key evening: Peter and I scrambled madly around Dublin the night before trying to find canned pumpkin (tip: Fallon & Byrne has it), and I roasted us a giant chicken, which was exactly the right size and turned out to be far more delicious than a turkey.

This year, our world has changed: we’re living in the same house, but all my things have arrived from Brooklyn and we’re starting to decorate. (Peter has very kindly installed shelving in our kitchen for my giant cookbook collection, which feels so luxurious.) Rigby the dog lives here, now, too. And best of all: I now know some people of my own that I wanted to invite. We started reaching out to friends, and before we knew it, we were looking at a group of 16 for dinner. I felt both horrified and exhilarated by that number: I love a challenge, but I also love for food to feel bountiful, and I was having a hard time picturing how to cook for a crowd quite that large.

Here’s the menu I went with: 

• An 18-pound (!!) turkey: I ordered an 18-pound free-range bird from our nearby ~fancy~ butcher, and I had high hopes. I then proceeded to dry-brine it for three days before roasting it at a high heat, à la Judy Rogers. The verdict? It turned out fine. Not amazing, not disastrous, just a pretty average turkey. My main takeaway is that I’m getting a smaller bird next year, because even though some of the leftovers went into a delicious batch of turkey and dumplings, it was just too much. I don’t really care about turkey! What can I say. 

Our giant, un-exciting turkey.

• Gravy: my grandma was an expert at making gravy - it was always her one sole contribution to our Thanksgiving meal - so I have a high standards for myself. This year’s gravy turned out pretty good, but would have been better with a homemade stock. I just didn’t have the bandwidth to go that hard this year! 

• Ham glazed with rosemary, honey and mustard: I improvised a glaze based on this recipe. I only made a small ham since the turkey was so enormous, but it turned out to be so delicious that I wished I’d gotten a larger one. The verdict for next year is: more ham, less turkey.

• Chorizo-cornbread stuffing: if I had to (metaphorically) save one Thanksgiving recipe from a house fire, it would be this cornbread stuffing. To me, this dish is what makes the holiday official. I’ve made it every year for about six years running at this point, and it’s never not been a hit. This year I used Jiffy mixes brought back from the states for the cornbread base, plus some really lovely Spanish chorizo from my local butcher. As always, the results were incredible. This is also the best-ever stuffing to have leftover for breakfast with a fried egg on top.

• Julia Child’s garlic mashed potatoes: do you need to simmer an entire head of garlic in heavy cream in order to make a great mashed potato? No, you do not. But if there’s ever a time to gild the lily, it’s Thanksgiving, and that’s why I have no choice but to make these incredibly extra mashed potatoes. (Note: the recipe linked above is a little different than the one I use, which is from The Way to Cook, but similar in vibe.) They always turn out well - I’ve made them for a couple of years running - and even though this year I lost track of time and let the potatoes boil for too long and they started to go mushy, I still had a salvageable and delicious carb result.

• Glazed carrots with mustard and honey: I’m not married to one specific vegetable dish for Thanksgiving. My family wasn’t big on the green bean casserole, so that dish never played a starring role for me. Last year I roasted a couple of sheet pans of Brussels sprouts, which were delicious but kind of fiddly. This year, since I was cooking for a bigger crowd, I decided to go with a vegetable recipe that could scale. Were these carrots life-changing? No. But I used Mike’s Hot Honey for a nice blend of sweet/spicy, and the entire pan got eaten. I’ll call that a win, even though I will undoubtedly decide to switch things up again next year.

• Bourbon (or, rather, whiskey) pecan pie: I use my dad’s pecan pie recipe, which requires dark corn syrup that I smuggled back from the United States, and it is always absolutely perfect. This year I substituted whiskey for bourbon (because: when in Ireland) and added some flaky sea salt to the top of the pie before baking. Both those changes will be happening again next year. Pecan pie is my absolute, over-the-top indulgent dessert favorite, and I wish I had more excuses to make it.

Pecan pies at the ready.

• Pumpkin pie: to me, pumpkin pie is way inferior to pecan, but in my mind you can’t have Thanksgiving without one. Peter handled the pumpkin pie(s) this year, and they turned out the same as they always do: very nice sliced and eaten with whipped cream. What more is there to say? 

In the end, there was no need to be worried. We had so much food. Katie brought a gorgeous pumpkin Mac n cheese, which was a huge hit with the Irish guests (who never really get pumpkin-flavored things or Mac n cheese, making it doubly exotic). Maura brought cranberry sauce and Brussels sprouts, and there were rolls, too, and chocolates and cheese and crackers and so, so much wine. We lit the fire in the living room, and the World Cup was on, and we borrowed a folding table from a lovely older neighbor to accommodate everyone. A baby even came to the party! The house felt so warm and cozy, and we were all together, and there were candles lit and games of Uno played. The evening was a blur and it was so, so worth it. I was reminded of how nice it is to have the space and capacity and social circle to be able to host gatherings, and that made me feel more grateful than anything else. As they left, several of the guys who’d come to last year’s Thanksgiving said they were already looking forward to next year’s. We’re making new traditions here together, and that feels really good.

~the plate shot~

And, in more recent news: it snowed here in Dublin! 

The view from our office. You can see why I’m brooding.

It is ridiculously cold in Ireland all of the sudden. And it’s a damp cold, too, the kind that seeps in through all the nooks and crannies. The kind that makes it so that our breath shows when we’re trying to eat the kitchen table. The day this cold front swept in, we were also hit with a dusting of snow: an icy, hard layer of it, not really suitable for snowmen or snowball fights. That thin sprinkling is still incredibly exciting for Dubliners, who haven’t had snow in three years. It’s caused our neighborhood to look like a winter wonderland, but it’s also made things incredibly treacherous: the Irish don’t seem to believe in salting their sidewalks, so days later we’re still slipping around on a thin layer of ice. It’s the perfect weather to stay inside, sitting by a window and brooding. So, respectfully, that’s what you’ll find me doing between now and Christmas.