Of all the holidays — Jewish and otherwise — Thanksgiving is our hands-down favorite. It’s all about food and family. We’re thankful that it’s not about synagogue attendance, atonement or plagues. You could call Thanksgiving a pilgrimage festival. After all, in 1620 the Pilgrims sailed to their new home in America on the Mayflower. This…
I think it’s safe to say that a lot of U.S. governors — 31 at last count — have very different Thanksgiving dinner conversations than I do. “Guess who’s coming to dinner? Not Syrian refugees!” It’s enough to make me think we should have a national holiday celebrating the rescue of refugees fleeing religious persecution,…
This is a wonderful pudding-like soufflé for a winter night. The cinnamon, nutmeg, and cloves are a natural pairing with pumpkin and the warm spices adding depth to every bite of soufflé. Prepare in an attractive oven-safe dish, as you will be serving it directly from the baking dish. It should have tall sides as…
This parve cornbread stuffing starts with homemade dairy-free cornbread, which gets its moisture from easy-to-make creamy corn “milk.” My family’s Thanksgiving stuffing tradition is Pepperidge Farm. Those salty croutons flecked with a mix of herbs and spices, tossed with cooked celery, onions and mushrooms, and drowned in broth before being toasted in the oven (we…
Thinkstock Growing up in Montreal and Toronto respectively, neither my husband nor I celebrated Canadian Thanksgiving. According to my parents, it was a Christian holiday. In my imagination, Thanksgiving encouraged families of scrubbed-faced pale-haired Christians across the country to sit around their hand-sawn and sanded wood tables under a big similarly homemade cross and say…
Torta di zucca, an Italian winter squash and olive oil cake. Photograph by Gayle L. Squires Admitting this in the days leading up to Thanksgiving might put me squarely in the crosshairs of the long-defunct House Committee on Un-American Activities, but I’m a risk-taker, so here goes: I don’t like pie. I particularly don’t like…
Just in time for the last week of December, Beth Kissileff has a query about the Yiddish word khoge, which denotes a non-Jewish holiday. Does it, she asks, refer only to a religious holiday like Christmas, or does it also include “civic holidays” like Thanksgiving and New Year’s? Since civic holidays did not exist in…
Now that doughnuts filled with pumpkin crème and potato latkes festooned with cranberry sauce have been safely consumed, and all those recently purchased menurkeys, where “the candles meet the turkey,” are stowed away until the next time they are destined to put in an appearance, it is high time, I think, to take a moment…
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