My Thanksgiving Pet Turkey

My mother sewed pilgrim costumes for us to wear to every Thanksgiving dinner when I was a child. I’ve stained many an oversized white collar of a black dress with turkey gravy and cranberry sauce. But it was another of my mom’s holiday quirks that lived on for years in our  dining room… and backyard.

Normal people associate Thanksgiving with the aromas of turkey skin crisping, bread baking, perhaps onions caramelizing. My earliest memories of it smell like dung, hay, and feathers. That’s because every year, on or around the last Thursday of November, my mother packed me into the car and headed to our nearest live poultry market. Not to buy the bird we would roast, but to rescue a turkey or two.

Why? “Because I’m a bleeding heart,” Mom told me in a recent phone call. A vegetarian for most of her life, my mother decided when I was four or five that in exchange for the life of a supermarket-purchased oven stuffer that the rest of the family would consume, we must rescue at least one bird from the meat market not far from our home. It was our personal version of freeing animals from a kill shelter. 

As a small child, I didn’t note the irony that we were feasting on a mass-produced animal, while saving a local one. Mom did try buying a turkey from a farm for our dinner one year, but says it pained her to see the living animals at the property, ready to meet their fates. Like most Americans who prefer to keep where their meat comes from at more than arm’s length, she says that the plastic-wrapped disconnect provided by the grocery store suited her better.

The live poultry market was lined with cages filled with fowl, but also occasionally dwarf rabbits that also became our pets. We would go to the counter and lead the man working there to the cages of the animals we had selected. “Do you want me to kill it for you?” he’d ask. He’d put the living selection in a bag with its feet protruding, looking more than ready to be released once in the car.

This happened annually for at least half a decade. At our peak, we had six White Holland turkeys that cohabited with a smattering of chickens and ducks in a small henhouse. The difference was, the turkeys lived partly inside. Did I mention that this took place in Greenwich, Connecticut:  the bastion of upscale WASP society? But we were already the weird neighbors long before large, white birds started pecking at the door wanting to join us on the couch. “I felt sorry for them because it was cold out,” Mom recalls.

I have strong memories of sitting on the kitchen floor with a turkey named Lily in my lap as I did my homework. Her warm, bald head leaned on my shoulder while I practiced my multiplication tables. People compare birds to dinosaurs (which is biologically correct), and turkeys get the worst of it when it comes to insulting avian intelligence. But I didn’t have as powerful a connection with the cats, dogs, gerbils, guinea pigs, or hamsters that also called our old farmhouse home.

I’ve built a career (and some would argue, my personality) on my obsession with meat. I’ve interned as a whole animal butcher and gotten to know terminal beef cattle personally, before and after slaughter. I trace this bent back to eating my favorite pet chicken when I was five. I didn’t deal with the realities of slaughter as much as a true farm kid, but was still always conscious of the fact that I was eating a dead animal, not a magic piece of protein grown in a lab. I have never even contemplated vegetarianism. 

A meat-eschewing reader once called me a “helpless addict” when it came to consuming animals and I can’t argue with that assessment, but unlike many meat eaters, I go into the process conscious of what it means. To some, I’m sure that’s even worse, that I’m willing to end an animal friend’s life for my own sustenance. I prefer to think that this at least gives me respect for the sacrifice. 

But as a teenager, one animal’s flesh became anathema to me. Turkey, I would say, tasted like death. The very idea was akin to consuming a sibling. It was simply too close for comfort, the way many omnivores say they would draw the line at dogs or cats.

Our turkey population first took a hit when neighborhood dogs attacked the henhouse. The police had to come and put a few birds out of their misery. One cop came to the door to ask if we wanted the meat. My mother is still traumatized. And I think that’s when I started eating just rolls and mashed potatoes at Thanksgiving.

It wasn’t until I was an adult food writer that this started to change. And it didn’t start with deli meat, which seems like the most obvious place. Instead, it was chicken thighs. After long fearing the tough, connective-tissue-laden cut of meat, I learned from eating Brazilian rodizio that it can be both tender and crisp when prepared correctly. I went from rubbing them with rock salt and roasting them to braising them before crisping them under the broiler. 

But bone-in chicken thighs are a relatively small meal. One day, I saw a much larger poultry thigh at the grocery store. My interest was piqued—this would be a far more substantial repast. That was the moment I decided to experiment with eating turkey again. 

Why? I had finally had a reckoning. If I was going to eat meat, it seemed silly to make exceptions, especially when I was buying it at a local store that specialized in sustainably raised animals from area farms. I could only hope the turkey I ate led a life that included, if not math homework, then some degree of affection from humans or other turkeys. 

I braised the pair of thighs in chicken stock with a collection of homegrown herbs. I reduced the sauce with lemon and just a touch of butter while I crisped the thighs in the oven. The result wasn’t unlike a giant chicken, but somehow richer and more satisfying—it didn’t taste like death at all.

And that year was the first in almost two decades that I ate Thanksgiving turkey. There were no pilgrim costumes or trips to the live poultry market, and my vegetarian relatives were surely scandalized. But I can live with that. I remember my pet turkeys with love, but once or twice a year, I’ll forgive myself for being a part of an American institution.