A BETTER IDEA

     Although I had obviously been eating Thanksgiving dinner for many years, it was my first time to cook it. But a few weeks earlier, the Dowager Mrs. Los Angeles, beaming her trademark angelic smile, had sunnily informed Mr. Los Angeles and me that “since you two like to cook so much,” we would be preparing the feast for the entire family; and when the Dowager Mrs. Los Angeles spoke, one snapped to. So, for that one day, I prepared to set aside my usual effete, liberal-voting, farmers’ market-haunting, fragrantly garlic-friendly personal cooking style to reproduce the delights of a 1960s Los Angeles kitchen presided over by a former North Dakota farmgirl.

Photo by Megan Watson on Unsplash

       It was decided that Mr. Los Angeles should be in charge of the turkey and the gravy while I would cook the rest, to recipes the Dowager, taking no chances with her foreign-born daughter-in-law, had carefully written out for me. To be honest, the particulars of most of those dishes are less than crystal clear in my memory: the Dowager Mrs. Los Angeles has long departed for that great Lutheran pancake breakfast in the sky, and warmly as I loved her, I have not found myself greatly troubled since by the urge to reproduce her Thanksgiving repast in minute detail. I only remember my kitchen countertop that day, groaning under a lurid array of foodstuffs it would not usually occur to me to buy – cans of emerald green beans and beaming yellow creamed corn, bottles of pickled beets, packages of technicolor jell-o – jostling for space with foodstuffs I had not even known existed. Dried fried onions, anyone?

       Well, I was a team player, and am lucky enough to be extremely fond of my in-laws, so I de-frosted and can-opened and chopped and stirred and heated, and along the way our bachelor friend Mike arrived and wandered to the living room with a cup of coffee to check out the magazines, and all was peaceful on the crisp Thanksgiving morning.

       The one dish that I was confident that I could make without instructions was mashed potatoes. I have personally never understood the American preference for blandly smooth mashed potatoes instead of crisply roast to accompany their already blandly smooth Thanksgiving turkey (Mr. Los Angeles tells me it’s about soaking up the gravy, and if Mr. Los Angeles says it is so, then so it must be), but if mashing the potatoes were the preparation that was required, then it was one I could certainly supply.

       I’m quite proud of my mashed potatoes, in fact. I add a bundle of peels to the boiling water to deepen the flavor, heat the cooked and drained potatoes for a few minutes in the pan in order to dry them out, use only the finest quality of butter and milk, and never, ever over-mash. My personal little secret is a small dollop of mayonnaise at the end to add a subtle splash of richness – nobody can taste it but it wins compliments every time. 

       Which was where the trouble started. Because it turned out that the Dowager Mrs. Los Angeles’ personal little secret at the end of cooking her own mashed potatoes was a small dollop of evaporated milk. And it further transpired that this personal little Los Angeles family cooking secret was a hill on which the Dowager’s son – approaching my lovely clouds of buttery deliciousness with an opened milk can and a firm step of purpose – was willing to die.

      “Please take that away,” I told him. “I’m about to add mayonnaise.”

       “You don’t add mayonnaise to mashed potatoes,” he told me. “You add evaporated milk.”

       Now, I was prepared to de-frost pearl onions. I was prepared to heat canned green beans. I was even prepared to stir canned fruit cocktail into raspberry-flavored jell-o and add marshmallows on the top (yes, I know). But do not tell someone called Donnelly how to mash a potato.

       “You might add evaporated milk,” I agreed. “I, on the other hand, add mayonnaise. And since I am the one cooking these potatoes, mayonnaise is what I intend to add.”

       “But our family always uses evaporated milk,” said Mr. Los Angeles.

       The Dowager did indeed use evaporated milk, and perfectly tasty mashed potatoes it produced too. On the other hand, these were my mashed potatoes. My mashed potatoes, alone in a sea of alien foodstuff spread clear across my suddenly unfamiliar kitchen, foods that no one ate on any other day of the year and I frankly failed to understand why they would voluntarily do so on this: my one link, the gloomy realization dawned upon me, not only to my personal gastronomic taste, but to my forebears, to my ancestral nation and to its sorrowful history.

       “It wasn’t a famine, you know,” I said.

       “Oh, God,” said Mr. Los Angeles.

       “There was never a famine in Ireland,” I said.  “Not in 1847 or any other year.”

       Mr. Los Angeles swallowed a hefty swig of coffee.

       “There was one crop that failed,” I said. “But there was never a famine. Just look at the Irish climate, it’s not a place that would even have a famine. There was rich land, there was cattle and grain and fish and fruits and vegetables. There was masses of food around in 1847, whole mountains of it. The only thing – the only thing – there wasn’t that year, was …”

       “Potatoes,” said Mr. Los Angeles.

       “And just because there were no potatoes,” I said, “and potatoes were the only food – the only food in the whole of that lovely green fertile land – that was available to my ancestors – who were the ones who were the natives, by the way, not the people who had taken over and were living like lords there – my ancestors were left to …”

       “Starve,” said Mr. Los Angeles.

       “And the only way for them not to starve,” I said, “was to leave and climb onto those terrible, disease-ridden ships they called …”

       “Coffin ships,” supplied Mr. Los Angeles.

       “… to go and live somewhere else and spend the rest of their lives and their children’s lives and their children’s children’s lives as foreigners forever. Which is how my family ended up in England where English people told us we were Irish and Irish people told us we were English,  and now here I am living clear on the other side of the world from both places, cooking canned green beans and creamed onions and God knows what other things I haven’t the faintest idea how to cook, along with just the one dish – the one, sole, lone and only dish – that I do know how to cook. And now you tell me. You. Tell. Me. That you want to add evaporated milk to it. Evaporated. Milk.”

       It’s faintly possible that my voice might have risen just the smallest little bit during the last portion of this speech. But Mr. Los Angeles does not face down easily.

       “I like evaporated milk,” he said.

       “And I use mayonnaise,” I said.

       The clock struck the half hour. The Los Angeles family would be here at any moment, genial Protestants with Viking beards and names like BJ and Lars, who would deliver bone-crushing hugs before settling to exchange memories of family dogs and baseball outings to Dodgers Stadium back when Mr. Los Angeles had been a little boy with a blond crew cut. I liked the Los Angeles family, and they made it plain that they liked me; and the fact that not a single one of them was about to devote one fraction of a second of thought among the jokes and the family reminiscences to dissecting the subtlety of the back taste in the mashed potatoes that would be soaking up Mr. Los Angeles’ gravy along with the other treats of the table, obviously added only the greater urgency to  the matter. These were desperate times indeed, and I was not going down without a fight.

       Suddenly – both unexpectedly and most gloriously, like a flash of lightning illuminating the darkest hour of the night – I had an inspiration. I remembered that there was another person already in the house, a person who was neither a Donnelly nor a Los Angeles, who was of neither Irish descent nor Norwegian, a man of mild manner and calm mien, who harbored affection and good will towards us both, to whom we could both surely turn for an unbiased opinion.

       Here, I realized with delighted relief, sitting just a few feet away in our living room and chuckling happily over the cartoons in the New Yorker, was the answer to the problem. Never tell me, I thought, really most impressed with both myself and my stroke of genius, that I lacked skills in conflict resolution.

       “I have an idea!” I announced triumphantly. “How about we put it to the test? Let’s do a little bit your way and a little bit my way, give both samples to Mike and ask him to decide which one he likes better!”

       I nodded proudly, scooped a spoonful of potato and reached for the mayonnaise jar.

       From the living room came Mike’s mellifluous tone, friendly but firm.

       “I have a better idea,” was all it said. “Let’s not.”