Thanksgiving Goose

My Dad was one of those rare people for whom military food was an improvement. His mother wasn't much of a cook - she was bookish, and thought cooking was a poor way to spend one's time, when there were so many interesting things to read. Cooking for her was mostly a matter of throwing together whatever was easiest to fix, and since the family was poor, choices were limited. Dad grew up eating barely-warmed, mushy vegetables from cans, overcooked fried meat, white sandwich bread with margarine, and cereal with reconstituted canned or powdered milk.

Then he joined the Service, and suddenly here was all this appetizing stuff! There was this drink called "whole milk" that came in neither a can nor a box, didn't need to be reconstituted - and he could drink his fill. There was in addition a chocolate variety. Bread came in several varieties, some with actual texture. There was real butter, as much as he wanted! He had never heard of broccoli, but it was wonderful stuff, and the Air Force served it in huge portions at nearly every meal - with cheese. (He'd never have thought of the idea of cheese as a condiment on his own.) He discovered that mushrooms weren't just an ingredient in soup, and could be cooked so that they were palatable. Swiss steak was a revelation - meat in a sauce, and not burned black! Rice could be eaten without (reconstituted) milk and sugar, in all kinds of combinations, with herbs or vegetables, and it wasn't always white… for him it was a gastronomical wonderland. When he heard the other troops complaining about the food, how it was undercooked, or boring, or overcooked, or insipid, he just didn't get it.

After a while he did notice that the Air Force had a rather limited menu. The food was good, but he began to wonder whether it might be possible to prepare broccoli in some other way, or cook beef with something other than tomato sauce, or maybe serve something for Thanksgiving and Christmas besides turkey with mashed potatoes and dressing. But generally, he was content. The quality of his life had taken a big step upwards. He didn't much care for military life in general, but he was for the first time in his life well-fed.

He was a medic, a laboratory technician, and the Air Force for some reason just didn't have enough of those. Lab technicians were forever being shuffled around from one base to the other, to deal with temporary shortages. On one occasion, he was shuttled off from North Carolina to Texas for three months. There he discovered why it was that the other soldiers complained about the food. Above the level of the ordinary military mess, it seemed, there was an entire world of even more refined cuisine.

For some reason the hospital dietician at Bergstrom Air Force Base had a particularly unmilitary approach to military food. The daily menu at this tiny outpost varied considerably from day to day, and included some things he'd only heard of, and a lot of things he hadn't. Spinach (and not from a can!), unfamiliar salad greens with interesting textures, chicken cooked in exquisite creamy sauces, and pasta! Baklava and other refined pastries on festive occasions … and more than once, duck.

Thus began his lifelong love affair with roast duck in all its forms. As far as he was concerned, duck was the height of sybaritic completion, to be consumed whenever possible. From that day he began to learn how to cook roast duck. It wasn't an easy thing to do in a barracks room - ducks, he discovered, produced enormous amounts of grease as they baked, and this could be difficult to handle when all you had to work with was a toaster oven. But he persevered, and by the time he was finally discharged, he was a competent cook of just one dish - roast duckling.

While he and Mom were courting, he once served her a duck in his tiny apartment (with her mother in attendance - this was after all Appalachia). I don't know that this meal had anything to do with her eventual acceptance of his marriage proposal, but she did acquire his passion for roast duckling. Maybe that has something to do with their long, successful marriage.

Duck, of course, is an expensive dish, and early on when he was in school, it wasn't something they could afford very often. On the other hand, one duck isn't much more expensive than a 12-pound turkey. Since they were bound to have a festive meal at least twice a year - Thanksgiving and Christmas - it made sense to have duck on one of those occasions. They settled on Thanksgiving, since they always spent Christmas with Mom's parents, who couldn't imagine a Christmas dinner with anything other than turkey. Since Mom was a nurse who couldn't always rely on being off on Thanksgiving Day, they settled on the strategy of her volunteering to work on Thanksgiving every year, provided she could have the following day, Friday, off. This proved a successful strategy, and they have ever since served roast duckling on Friday after Thanksgiving Day.

Year after year as Thanksgiving approached, Dad would search the local stores for ducks. This became a yearly ordeal, as ducks aren't always readily available. Often, only one store in town would have them. The ordeal was made more taxing as time when on, and our growing family demanded more and more ducks to serve the burgeoning host. Mom and Dad went from a single duck shared between the two of them, to two shared with their first two children, then three with their three children, and then, as children got married and family friends began to share in the feast, to four, and finally five. And there it has remained, five ducks cooked by Dad on Thanksgiving Friday every year. The number might have grown beyond that had they had a bigger oven.

But there was one year when I was about 12 that, despite his most persistent and ingenious efforts to locate ducks for the Thanksgiving feast, Dad was unable to find even one. For weeks he roamed from town to town, from one supermarket to another, searching, searching … and although there were all kinds of exotic fowl available, no one had ducks. This was a crisis of immense proportions: a family tradition was likely to suffer a break of observance. The stars would misalign, volcanoes would burst forth in the middle of Kansas farm fields, the New Madrid fault would let loose, and the Kentucky Wildcats would fail to make it to the NCAA tournament. An unimaginable catastrophe with cosmic implications.

As Thanksgiving neared he began to lose hope, finding himself the evening of Wednesday before Thanksgiving at Kroger, reluctantly and half-heartedly perusing the bins of turkeys…when he noticed, off to one side, a bin with a couple of geese. Yes, he should have known better. Yes, he knew that how the bird was shaped probably had little to do with how it cooked, or how it tasted. But he was desperate, and was instantly overcome with a vision of a goose as an enormous duck. They were shaped mostly the same, right? Both had bills and webbed feet, right? Both were water fowl. A goose, he decided, might serve more-or-less when a duck wasn't available.

Returning home, he apologetically showed his purchase to Mom, who was - as usual when confronted with one of Dad's brainstorms - rather skeptical. "I guess that might work," she said, "But are you entirely certain that it cooks the same as a duck?"

Dad admitted he wasn't sure, but since he had no choice, would find out. "After all," he said, "Life is about learning new things, isn't it?" Mom just smiled grimly.

This was way back in the Dark Ages, before the Internet. Back then, you couldn't just google, "How to cook a goose," or "How is a goose different from a duck?" or something like that. Back then we worked from actual reference books printed on paper, called "cookbooks," and we didn't happen to have one with a handy recipe for Roast Goose. Dad finally decided that although he had never cooked goose, it couldn't be very much different from cooking a duck, and whatever happened, the experiment couldn't possibly result in anything worse than those early efforts in his barracks room. The ducks back then had been a bit tough and not always very tasty, but they'd been edible, and hadn't poisoned him or his barracks-mates.

I pause at this moment for a parenthesis about Dad's "friends." Dad knew lots of unusual people. Where he met them is anybody's guess, but he just seemed to collect them. There was always someone around the house who was … unique … and I and my siblings were exposed throughout childhood to human behaviors and verbal patterns most children never experience. I hasten to add that none of them were in any way dangerous - Dad told me (much later) that he vetted these people carefully before they were allowed to even know where he lived, and the "really dangerous ones" were people I would be sure to never meet. I did meet some of these other ones later in life, and I am grateful.

Aunt Sally, of course, took a dim view of Dad's friendships with these people. "If you lie down with dogs," she was fond of intoning, "You get up with fleas. Why your Dad can't be happy with the good, sane, stable Methodists at Church is beyond me. But he just goes out and finds these people. Think of what he's exposing his children to!"

Mom on the other hand wasn't much perturbed by Dad's strange friends. In fact, she had a certain fondness for some of them. Even when she was somewhat dubious about one of them, she nonetheless invited them into her home, and treated them kindly. She did admit that she was a bit astonished the Sunday morning when she got up to discover a young woman, eight months pregnant and homeless, sleeping on the couch in the living room, but she handled even that with kindness and good manners.

Of course, as time went on, when one of Dad's friends happened to have nowhere else to go the day after Thanksgiving, he would be invited to share the feast with us. And so it happened that in the Year of the Goose, he had a friend I will call Gus, who was invited to join us for the celebration.

Gus was tall and thin, a very pleasant elderly gentleman - with the loudest voice, and the strangest sense of humor I had encountered up to that time. In his early years he had been a sports announcer, and he seemed to have never lost the habit. Everything he said was intoned loudly in his deep bass voice, with the same inflection you might hear watching the Superbowl or the latest Kentucky basketball game. Along with a running commentary on the significance of whatever, however trivial, was occurring in the environment around him. With total disregard for the sensibilities of his audience. His verbal mannerisms were a bit unnerving until you got used to them, and more than once I caught Mom wincing when she was sure he wasn't looking.

After nearly twenty years, the business of cooking the annual duck feast had become a science. Only rarely were we able to get fresh, unfrozen ducks, and Dad had learned early on that the amount of work could be minimized by assuring that the duck was thoroughly thawed before beginning to prepare it for the oven. Ducks, like all fowl coming from the store, have their body cavities filled with giblets and sometimes with other things (like orange sauce), which must be removed and discarded before the duck can go into the oven. Removing these things from a frozen duck is virtually impossible. He had discovered that if you put the duck in the refrigerator on Wednesday morning, it should be thawed enough to be workable by noon on Friday, when the preparations always began.

It was Wednesday evening that year before Dad returned from the store with the goose, so he was already behind. Hoping for the best, he popped the goose into the refrigerator. It should, he thought, be mostly thawed by Friday noon, and he knew a few tricks for dealing with partially-frozen fowl. That problem solved, he got a good night's sleep and began Thursday morning, as always, preparing the desserts for the feast.

He worked throughout the day making various preparations for Friday dinner, and towards the evening checked the goose to see if it was softening a bit. It wasn't, but that didn't worry him much. He had until noon the next day, and his experience over the years had taught him that the thawing process often wasn't apparent after just one day. And he knew those little tricks…

On Friday morning, though, the thing was still frozen rock solid. It suddenly occurred to him that a goose carcass has a much greater volume than a duck's, and hence would require a significantly longer time to thaw. Realizing that he was running out of time, and not at all sure his usual tricks would work on a bird that size, he cast about him for ideas about how to thaw this thing to the point that he could prepare it, without risking infecting everyone at the yearly feast with salmonella.

Technology marches on, but not at an even pace. There was no internet back then to instruct us on the proper way to cook a goose, but cooking technology had undergone considerable improvement in recent years. A few years earlier, a financial windfall had permitted my parents to invest in what was then a fairly expensive gadget, a microwave oven. Dad never really got the hang of using the thing, but he did understand that it had a "thaw" function. Deliverance was at hand.

Of course he had no way to gauge how long it would take, but he reasoned that if the gadget would thaw one thing it should be able to thaw another. He needed to get across town to pick up Gus, and he figured nothing could go very wrong in the 45 minutes or so it would take to do that. So he put the goose on a platter, placed it in the microwave, put the setting on "thaw" for 45 minutes, and then drove off to collect his friend.

When he and Gus came through the door, the first thing he did was check the goose - discovering that it was still quite hard. This puzzled him, as he thought 45 minutes should have thawed just about anything, but he shrugged. This was a first time effort after all. He still had a lot of work to do preparing the side dishes, so he set the microwave for a further 45 minutes, while he went to work preparing the rest of the meal.

In truth, 45 minutes in a microwave oven would probably thaw the arctic ice cap if you could fit it in there. More importantly, everyone - except Dad - knew all too well that if you didn't carefully wrap the object in the microwave, it would dry out. When he again opened the microwave, he was astonished to discover that the goose was still rock hard. Taking it out of the microwave for inspection, he discovered it was rock hard because it had turned to jerky.

Gus, looking over his shoulder, remarked, "LOOKS LIKE YOU REALLY COOKED YOUR GOOSE THIS TIME."

Dad glared at him, then laughed ruefully. "What I've got here, I think, is a mummy."

By now other members of the family had drifted into the kitchen. My brother, who was a big, ungainly kid, was the first to arrive. To his inquiry about what was going on, Gus replied, "WHAT WE HAVE HERE IS GOOSE-ANK-ATEN!" Mom, coming in just behind my brother, winced.

My brother bent closer to inspect the thing, and being large and ungainly, accidentally brushed it with his arm, knocking it off the table. The platter, of course, shattered on the floor, but the goose … bounced. Several times. Mom shrieked, I think more over the destruction of one of her favorite dishes than over the fate of Thanksgiving dinner. The family dog, who had come running to investigate the commotion, sniffed the goose suspiciously, then turned her nose up at it. Gus intoned, "PRETTY BIG ACCOMPLISHMENT, COOKING SOMETHING EVEN A DOG WON'T EAT!"

My sister, arriving just ahead of me, said "Ewww!"

I just stared. No duck this year. How could we live with this tragedy? I looked over at Dad, thinking I might find some way to console him. He just stared right through me. I realized there was nothing I could say that would help.

Mom, finally getting control of herself, said in a sort of controlled fury, "What are we going to do about dinner?"

Dad just stood there. Of the many defeats in a life predicated on a willingness to try just about anything, this was the worst so far. One could not eat a Thanksgiving dinner composed entirely of side dishes - that would make it a vegetarian Thanksgiving, and that would be sacrilege! No amount of family humor could overcome this disaster. Finally, he screamed "AUGH!" and stormed out of the house.

All was quiet for the next 30 minutes, as we all moped around the house, unable for once to find any way to soften the blow. Then the door opened, and there was Dad, with a large Kroger bag in his hand.

In the bag were six Cornish game hens, one for each of us. We all tiptoed about for an hour as he prepared them, unwilling to confront him with the shame of failing at so important a task. Thanksgiving dinner that year was consumed in total silence, even by Gus.