Three Reasons Why You Don't Want to Tinker with Thanksgiving Recipes
Spoiler - it's not about the food.
Maybe the smell of cloves and cinnamon or the mounds of mashed potatoes and overflowing gravy boats conjure comfort at Thanksgiving. The anticipation of tasting the comforts of home is enough to make people board planes or drive long hours to get there. But what are we craving? Is it really about the food?
Perhaps a little voice tells you it would be a good time to experiment with new recipes for such special occasions. Maybe you want to spice things up or try a new recipe you found online. If you have gone down this path before you likely already know that your loved ones can be less than appreciative of your efforts. My family still reminds me of the year I didn’t add pork to the stuffing and how lackluster it tasted. While we think it’s simply about the taste of the food, we would be missing something more significant. Food is visible, but the emotions that accompany them are invisible. This is at the heart of the problem when we change favourite recipes.
A Turn Towards Comfort
What makes one dish a comfort meal while other dishes fail to reach such praise? The key is understanding how food is paired with smell, taste, emotions, and memories in the body. To start, smell is the most developed sense at birth and serves to orient us to our caretakers. Both mother and child can easily find each other through smell within an hour after birth. This is only the start, with smell intertwining with emotion continuously. Smell is housed in the brain's emotional center, and encodes pleasant experiences, forming memories that last a lifetime.
Smells associated with pleasant emotions and memories become comforting, whereas unpleasant ones are linked with discomfort. For food to take on comforting properties, the context for eating needs to include relational warmth, delight, and enjoyment. Our sensory experience of the food becomes attached to memories of the people we ate with in a comforting way.
When we change the ingredients in our dishes, we change the smell and taste, which alters its pairing with memories of comfort. The change seems disruptive and leaves us feeling something is out of place. It’s like returning home to find the furniture has been moved, and the walls are a different colour. While you know you are in familiar territory, something is off and doesn’t feel as comforting.
The key is understanding that Nature has her reasons for pairing smell, taste, emotions, and memories together. When their pairing leads to emotional and relational rest, our body can better digest the food it has been given. More importantly, the meal sets the stage for a place of refuge and creates a reprieve from what awaits us in the outside world. Our feast days and gatherings are meant to be a place to return to so that we can be anchored again despite the sea of separation we face.
A Return to Ancestors
Each dish we serve has a story and a past life. It could be as simple as a recipe from grandparents or parents. It may be connected to our cultural or ethnic identity that tells a story about who and where we came from. The food we serve can be a return to the ancestors who took care of the land 100 years ago so that we could harvest Nature’s gifts and be nourished by them.
There is no mistake as to why we pass recipes on. They are connective threads that tie us to our past generations, culture, and each other. They also connect us to the land and to Nature – who bestows her gifts on us generously. Thanksgiving is a time of gratitude for these gifts. It isn’t just about the food but the relationships that are part of our ongoing sustenance. Sometimes the hands who feed us are invisible, and sometimes silent, as in the case of Nature. When we return to our feast foods, we are meant to be placed back into our relationship with our ancestors, the land, and Nature herself. It is an act of reparation, acknowledgment, and bringing us into gratitude and hopefully reciprocity.
When food stays the same it serves as a bridge to these invisible relationships. The traditions are anchors, the tastes a return to ancestors, and when we pass our favourite recipes on to our family members, we ensure the connective thread between generations continues. To change the nature of a dish breaks this chain and disrupts the connection. While tweaking recipes has always been the purview of the chef, my family would be the first to tell you that a turkey without a side of Yorkshire puddings would seem bare and boring. It’s about what those Yorkshires have come to represent, who and where they are connected to, and how they weave relational threads and stories together. Dishes that stay the same serve as a constant connection to our roots.
A Time for Belonging and Loyalty
To be invited to share a meal on a special feast day such as Thanksgiving is, at best, a relational act. The invitation contains an inherent desire to care for someone. The meal can serve as a symbol for unity, togetherness, and exclusivity. Not everyone gets an invitation, and the nature of human attachment is that we crave exclusivity in our relationships. The more personal and vulnerable a connection is, the more nourishing it can be. We shouldn’t just want to be close to anyone but those we care most for and desire contact and closeness with.
The meal can celebrate togetherness with a sense of belonging created by sharing the same food over and over. This repetition and constant pairing of feasts with favourite people elevate the event to an exclusive one. It creates a sense of belonging, and loyalty – two forms of attachment. The feast becomes part of our identity and intergenerational self. We tell stories of these times and hold onto the promise of returning as the seasons pass each year. The recipes that stay constant bring us back to this place of belonging and the exclusivity it represents. It becomes an anchor, and the stronger your foundation, the more fuel you have to grow from. Exploration and letting go of home is not a problem as long as there is a promise of a return. One of the ways we fulfill this promise is by offering our loved ones the things that do not change --- our invitation for connection and the feasts that serve to celebrate them.
The food we serve matters, yet what matters most to our loved ones is what this food represents at Thanksgiving. These favourite dishes are a gift and a celebration of our relationship with each other and Nature. These recipes pay homage to the interconnection between Nature and our nourishment. In North America, October represents a time of rest in the growing season. The answer to the potential insecurity this creates is to put our faces into a celebration of abundance and security. Our ancestors were wise in passing on the ritual of giving thanks at a time when we would face our greatest lacks and losses for sustenance. It is a time for drawing from reserves, storing and savouring, bidding our time until the sun returns, and brings the promise of growth and replenishment. Until then, the answer to survival is right before as we gather and realize that our togetherness is at the root of our well-being and longevity.
Deborah MacNamara, PhD, is the author of Nourished:Connection, food, and caring for our kids (and everyone else we love), and Rest, Play, Grow. She is the Director of Kid’s Best Bet Counselling Center, and on Faculty at the Neufeld Institute. To read more see deborahmacnamara.com.