Dishing With Ruth Reichl

Still, it's an offering on your part: "I'll share who I am with you." The idea that we don't have the courage anymore to be that naked with people, to show them that part of ourselves is a very bad sign.

PT: What about the idea of having the meal in your home, but having all or portions of it catered?

RR: How hard is it to put a turkey in the oven, for crying out loud? One of the great things about the Thanksgiving meal is that it's extremely easy to cook. It's been road tested for a hundred years.

Now obviously, there are things you aren't going to make, maybe the salad dressing, maybe the pies. But it seems to me that you ought to cook something.

PT: You've written that when you were growing up, you went home for the holidays but hated them. What were they like?

RR: At Hanukkah we couldn't find the menorah, ever. At Christmas, every year we'd have to buy a new stand for the tree because we couldn't find the old one. And the food was always a disaster. My mother just couldn't get it right.

One of the things that you want with a holiday is the sense, especially with Thanksgiving, that you belong to America. My mother would forget obvious things like the gravy. And the turkey would come out raw because she was so terrified of over-cooking it.

My mother, who was manic-depressive, also had a terrible time with organization. So we would be frantically running around the house trying to clean it up two seconds before people would arrive. It was a nightmare.

On the other hand, I'm glad we had those holidays. Much as I resented having to go home for them and would think of any excuse on earth not to, when I think about my family, what do I think about? I think about these family events. That is my family, dysfunctional as it was.

PT: Is there a difference for you, psychologically, between Thanksgiving and Christmas?

RR: Yes. Christmas is problematic.

PT: In what way?

RR: Well, it's a Christian ritual in a nation that is not entirely Christian. I tend to think of it as an ecumenical holiday myself, and we always celebrated Christmas when I was growing up. I am Jewish, but we didn't really celebrate Hanukkah. We meant to every year, but we never did! But every Christmas morning when I was growing up, we had matzo for breakfast.

PT: That's one way of adapting the holiday. Do ethnic groups have special ways of changing American holidays?

RR: If you ask people what they had for Thanksgiving when they were growing up, they usually say, "I had what everybody else has." But when you question them closely, it turns out that every culture adapts the holiday to incorporate some of their own foods.

So you'll find that a lot of Chinese-Americans will stuff the turkey with sticky rice, water chestnuts and shitake mushrooms. Many Mexican-Americans stuff the bird with corn bread and jalapenos. Native Americans often use wild turkeys.

There are all kinds of little signposts on people's Thanksgiving table that give away who they are. Christmas is much the same, and even Easter has become an American food holiday

PT: What's the distinction in your mind between eating out and eating at home? What should be the difference?

RR: Restaurants should be for a grander experience. They should give you something you can't get at home. You can pretend that you're rich if you're going to a very fancy restaurant. You can learn about a culture if you're going to a Chinese restaurant. For me, going to a restaurant means playing out a fantasy.

Eating at home, on the other hand, above all else should be comfortable. That means being able to put your elbows on the table and spend a really long time at the table. It's about not having to worry that other diners are waiting for you to leave.

One of the great things about having people to your home is that you have that luxury of time, of space, of not clearing the table, of saying, "Well, maybe we won't eat right now. Maybe we'll just talk. I'll take the food out of the oven for now and we'll eat later."