By Russ Allison

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This year is the first time that I have had anything to do with putting on a Thanksgiving meal. I feel compelled to write a technical manual for the novice having to cook a turkey.

In preparation for buying a turkey, the freezer must be vacated. All of the freezer burned vegetables have to be tossed out. If the fish sticks are still edible, eating them cannot be put off any longer. Throw out the grease can. Once the freezer is completely emptied, it is time to force the frozen turkey in with an aggressive thrust.

You’re supposed to thaw the bird in the refrigerator for three days. There is no room. The refrigerator is too packed with the raw materials that make up the rest of the apparatus that compose the great day of overeating. Therefore, at five o’clock in the morning, my wife and I had the bird in the kitchen sink under cold running water.

You can’t just leave the turkey sitting on the counter. It has to be handled like plutonium. If the bird sits too long, it is deadly no matter how long you cook it, like a mad cow burger. If you throw the bird in too soon, it will not cook evenly and you’ll have to delicately pick around for the cooked parts. Any mistake would be just as fatal.

I don’t know if all turkeys these days come with an unsightly neck, but ours did and I wanted to get rid of it. My wife’s sister-in-law said that the neck was chopped off and stuffed back into the bird. A friend of mine concurred that the neck was disconnected and said that you have to “wiggle” the neck around as it thaws and it will come free. I trusted their advice.

There was no wiggling. The neck did not budge. The only explanation I could come up with was that the neck was frozen in place. And so I kept running the bird under water and became more and more aggressive, gradually making progress. The closer I got to success, the more I could see that the neck was, in fact, part of the skeletal structure of the turkey. After much wrestling, I finally got the neck off. Of all the turkeys put through a guillotine, naturally ours came from a processing plant that didn’t bother to take that step. They did take the time to wrap the giblets in wax paper, though. Don’t forget to pull them out of the cavity after the turkey is thawed and before you put it in the oven.

More experienced chefs use the giblets to make gravy. Giblets and gravy is an overrated delicacy. Don’t bother trying. Throw them out and use gravy out of a can.

I don’t know where people learn that turkey cooks 20 minutes per pound; we must have learned it from somewhere. This begs the question, how many pounds does the turkey weigh? After what I went through with the neck, I had to go through the ordeal of figuring out how much the turkey weighed. The weight was not stamped on the packaging. I had to dig through our bathroom linen closet to unearth an old, rusted bathroom scale that we never use, weigh the turkey and plan to cook it erring on a time longer than the scale reading, knowing full well that the accuracy of it couldn’t be trusted.

As the bird was in the oven for a couple of hours, my wife insisted that we take it out to see if it needed basting. I was not confident that she actually knew what a bird in need of basting would look like. I just assumed that it was a self-basting bird the way that self defrosting freezer technology took over half a century ago.

When we got it out, my wife was distressed by the fact that the turkey was sitting in a bathtub of juices. She was concerned that it was sitting in a potential cesspool of bacteria. I trusted her assessment. Luckily we had a backup tin foil pan. Like a crane lifting a steel beam from the ground up into place of a skyscraper under construction, we jammed forks into the bird and carefully lifted it up, across and into the new pan sitting in the kitchen sink. Then it went back into the oven continuing to cook the 20 minutes a pound.

At the eleventh hour, it was time to carve. I got out an ivory handled fork and knife handed down to us by my wife’s parents. With great confidence in these utensils, though never having used them, I attempted to gracefully carve the bird. I did fairly well with the breast, but there was a lot that I had a hard time getting off, the knife mysteriously not as sharp as I would have expected. Managing the dark meat was sheer impossibility. Frustration mounted and I wound up tearing the bird apart with my bare hands. The entire day of tension, anger and frustration over the bird nearly culminated in a murder suicide.

By the time the first guest arrived, things had calmed down and the great struggle I had with the neck came up during conversation about all of what we had been through and she said, “You should have just ignored it and cooked the turkey, neck and all.” Without hearing from her, it had been demoralizing enough to learn that all my effort to get rid of the neck was a big waste of time. As more guests arrived, we had dropped the subject and this whole ordeal was swept away by holiday cheer. I hope the rest of you had an easier time than we did.