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Some professionals in the food writing business are spent before Turkey Day arrives. Others feel they can finally cook for themselves.
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You could say Thanksgiving has been my Super Bowl since I was around 13 years old.
For those of us in the business of Thanksgiving — food writers and editors, grocery store workers and the Butterball Turkey Talk-Line operators — this is our season. But unlike in a sports game, there’s no winning or losing. As the nearsighted student who always got hit in the face by the football at recess, I found a lot of purpose in this holiday from a young age because it’s the one day that celebrates another kind of athlete: the cook.
As a child of South Korean immigrants, I was put in charge of my family’s Thanksgiving when I was a teenager. In those early years, if I wanted to eat a turkey dinner and participate in the tradition, I had to learn how to cook it myself because my Korean parents didn’t know how.
This meant that growing up, my cousins and I would do all the shopping, the cooking and the cleaning while the adults caught up in the other room over soju and wine. It was an annual role reversal that gave our family a new tradition, one that bonded us closer to what was still, for some of the older generation, a new country.
Now, as an adult, Thanksgiving holds weight for me professionally, too: It’s my favorite time of year to be a food writer. I’ve learned in this line of work that so much quirky American history, rooted in the innovations of home economists, can be gleaned from these dishes that many of us take for granted year to year. Taking a closer look at them can help us not only cook them better, but also understand why we eat them.
Since July, for instance, I’ve been lugging a portable blue ice cooler around the city to transport frozen turkeys from the store to my apartment. When my editors assigned me the Food section’s turkey column this year, I knew the first thing I needed was more space (tiny Brooklyn kitchen and all). My cooler was a lifeline while I worked on a recipe, roasting bird after bird and learning everything I possibly could about Thanksgiving turkey.
Every year at The Times, I spend months just like this — researching, reporting and lugging home heavy groceries to create one new Thanksgiving recipe that honors tradition while hopefully adding something fresh to the canon, a new perspective. This annual sprint is one of the main reasons my pants fit a little more tightly in the summer and the fall. My cooking skills get better, of course. My understanding of the world grows a little, too.
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