My wife said to tell Simon that anyone who doesn’t like pumkin pie is un-American and ought to be shipped out of the country. I told her that I didn’t think that it would be a big problem given Simon’s present lattitude.
The whipped cream part is OK, but the pumpkin clashes with roast seal.
My best friend and her (american) husband got married on Canadian Thanksgiving a few years ago, and since then I’ve cooked the festive seal and we’ve had a party at their house every year. I like to cook and don’t like to vacuum, so it works out. They live downstairs from me, so the catering is easy to manage.
Her husband’s also the cook in her domicile, but he comes from Cincinnati, and from a family in which most food came from a can. I think that his first year here was the first time in thirty-odd years of life that he’d had scratch-made gravy, and it came to him like a religious experience. He’s convinced that I’m magic, and every year he comes to watch me do it, as if he doesn’t quite believe such a thing could be done, or that it could SO much better than canned chicken gravy.
This year I also astounded him when asked what side dishes he was used to besides turkey. He admitted to glazed carrots. I asked how they made them, and he told me it was another can. “Oh,” I said. “Well, I can manage glazed carrots. It’s just butter and brown sugar*.”
He watched me like a hawk.
*I threw in some maple syrup just to show off.
Hmm. I’ve been thinking about your problem at some length. How would you feel about a pecan streusel topping? Chopped pecans, a bit of flour, with BUTTER to stick them together in crumbly bits? Quite tasty!
While I tend to think of sweet potatoes as being at their best when unadorned (butter is not adornment), I would certainly not recoil at this. It sounds quite good, and it wouldn’t trammel the native dignity and appeal of the sweet potato. Thumbs up.
Whatcha still talking Thanksgiving for? It was weeks ago! 
Turkey. Don’t like them alive, either. Narsty critters.
That’s why I cook them.
My wife hates to clean freshly procured birds from the wild, so I am left that task, seems like woman’s work ta me though. Confuses the whole hunter/gatherer thingy.
Oh, most of those were favorites of other families, not mine. It was a distressing experience to discover the oddities that everyone else ate.
My family ritualized roast Butterball turkey, Arnold’s white cubed herb stuffing made with turkey stock, celery, and sauteed onions, Ocean Spray canned cranberry jelly, canned green peas, canned glazed carrots, canned or fresh (!) green beans, mashed potatoes (instant when my mother thought she could get away with it), canned candied yams with brown sugar, cinnamon, and marshmallows, an iceberg lettuce, cucumber, and tomato salad with olive oil and vinegar dressing (that’s all, just oil and vinegar–no spices), Arnold’s white rolls, and a supplementary tray or two of celery stuffed with peanut butter, cream cheese and/or pimento cheese spread (the kind that came in a juice-glass jar), cucumber spears, canned black olives, and green olives stuffed with pimento, and canned, dyed-red (sometimes green!) candied cinnamon-y apples or apple slices. No one ever ate those apples. Dessert was always one each of Mrs. Smith’s frozen pumpkin and apple pies with spray whipped cream.
For hors d’oeuvres, there would be a Sputnik-like, tinfoil-covered grapefruit stuck full of colored toothpicks bearing cubes of swiss cheese, canned black olives, and green olives with pimento, and Ritz crackers spread alternately with cream cheese and . . . yes . . . more pimiento cheese spread.
Beverages were iced tea, made by pouring boiling water over about 10 Lipton teabags in a stainless steel bowl, and percolated Maxwell House coffee. Sugar and half-and-half were available as additives, with the addition of lemon for the tea after I got uppity and developed airs. Water was never served, I think in an attempt to limit the condensation that soaked the table.
Christmas was same, sometimes substituting a ham for the turkey. Said ham was scored with a knife in a diamond pattern, the surface was rubbed with brown sugar and stuck with cloves, and canned pineapple slices were affixed with toothpicks. There was the addition of a Mrs. Smith’s mincemeat pie and Christmas cookies.
Ii remember introducing my mother to sweet potatoes that didn’t come in a can. What happened to cooking in the 1950’s-1970’s?
Now wait a minute - that’s NO reason for him to not know how to cook.
Just watch if he offers to make you “chili”, especially a three way or a coney (it’s an genetic thing that you have to be born here to appreciate…)
If you mean “what happened?” in the sense of “where did it go?”, well, I don’t know about you, but I have my figurative hands around its figurative throat and am squeezing HARD, myself.
If you mean “what the hell were they thinking?”, I think we’d probably need some sort of scholarly thesis to explain THAT little bit of history away. But come to think of it: canned goods prevailed in a day when shipping fresh was the dicier proposition, and more expensive especially in regions like ours. Canned goods are kind of like lutefisk, when you think about it, only not necessarily as awful.
But the food stylings that arose out of the days of befinned Buicks have indeed become a tradition, and I know people who are lost and adrift during the holidays without it.
Yes, I think it had something to do with the problems inherent in delivering fresh, seasonal goods. Cans seemed to be attractive because they were “modern,” and I think they may have seemed quite the ticket for women who had spent hours slaving over a pressure cooker and canning jars in late summer, risking botulism with every jar. Marketing convinced them that canned was the way to go. All you needed was a can opener. The cooked-to-death consistency didn’t bother them because their own canned (jar) products were cooked-to-death and then boiled to smithereens before consumption. You could eat commercially canned stuff straight from the can!
To this day, my mother thinks that canned and, now, frozen produce is “safer” than fresh. There is no cleaning, no trimming, and no waste. She worries that people might have touched the fresh stuff and she is concerned that the store might have bought it from somebody who grew it in their back yard over the septic tank. Or worse. Bird’s Eye, Marie Callender, Libby’s, and Del Monte would never do that, she’s sure.
Those are the reasons I have heard before, the thing is, sweet potatoes travel well, so I do not see that as a compelling reason to buy those canned. The thought that it was more “modern” and that it was quick and easy seem to be the only things that apply.
I watched part of an interesting show on Thanksgiving morning. In the US anyway, canned goods definitely became popular because of the convenience and time saving factor. Frozen foods didn’t become popular until WWII, when women went to work and the metals that canned goods were made out of became scarcer and therefore so did the cans. I can’t remember the exact years now the TV show used, but in something like 1900 it took a woman over 8 hours everyday to prepare meals for her family, and that went down to like 3 hours somewhere in the 1930’s or 1940’s.
I don’t know, but if it took me over 8 hours just to cook everyday (and I like to cook), I would be happy to reach for a can of something rather than have to do all the prep work myself.
I guess one of my questions is was it constant work, or was it intermittent. Making bread, pot roast, and baking beans takes time, but much of it is unsupervised. 8 hours every day, I wonder how that was split up. 1 for breakfast and 3 for lunch and 4 for dinner? I do have a few meals that are weekend only recipes. Chili, gumbo, jambalaya, pot roast, kebab with chutney and nan, baked chicken, and several others all take time, but I can usually get other things done while they are cooking.
I also wonder about the change of family size. Cooking for 10 is different than cooking for 3.
I cooked for seven until I graduated high school. If the ingrediants didn’t all fit into one pot it didn’t get made. Sometimes I’d pull another pot out to make rice or pasta just for the halibut. Prep time: 30 minutes, cooking time: until it looked done. One of things I hated about this Thanksgiving was trying the find a clean pot the morning after for porridge. The lazy punks said they would clean-up, I just forgot to ask them when.
I realize. His mother was very ill for much of his life, because she was a cancer surviver who also needed a transplant, and her insurer demanded that she prove she’d survived the cancer by living for ten years before they’d authorise the kidney operation. Basically, she had to endure until dialysis failed before they’d allow her son to donate a kidney.
I think that one result was that her husband suddenly had to figure out ‘food’, without much help, and he went for what seemed obvious.
I’m sure rural electrification helped, too.
Not so! Temperature conditions for maintaining optimal sweet potato quality are apparently tight. From page 7 on this link to an HTML of a PDF page:
A temperature of 40 degrees Fahrenheit, although more than 10 degrees above the freezingpoint of the sweet potato is definitely harmful. When sweet potatoes are chilled, even thoughnot frozen there is a very marked increase in their susceptibility to infection by certain rot-producing organisms. If the temperature stays as low as 40 degrees for 3 weeks or more, 40to 90 percent of the sweet potatoes may rot. One of the difficulties in connection with rotting asa result of chilling is that the damage does not appear at once but several weeks after theproper storage temperature of 55 to 60 degrees has been restored.A second effect of chilling is an internal discoloration and breakdown of the root that mayoccur even though it is not attacked by rots. This trouble also may not develop for severalweeks after chilling unless the sweet potatoes have been held at a temperature near thefreezing point. An exposure of only 4 days at 40 degrees Fahrenheit has resulted in thedevelopment of this discoloration.
Trucking uncanned, raw sweet potatoes without temperature control - especially in late autumn or winter in the northern climes such as ours - would almost guarantee at least some ruined product, depending on transit time and time from purchase to preparation.
I stand corrected, I was thinking of problems of being crushed and the fact that they don’t seem to need refrigeration.