Black Olive Fingers

chestnuts and Pepperidge Farm stuffing

Me and a turkey filled with chestnut stuffing at Mom’s in mid-city. Proudly wearing my bespoke apron from J. Morgan Puett.

I’ve always loved Thanksgiving. Maybe because it was my mom’s favorite holiday and one we celebrated with abandon each year. It was always me, my mom, my Aunt Ruth and Uncle Al, cousins Vicki and Bobbi. They lived in a Schindler house overlooking Silver Lake, so when we had the meal there it was extra special. The light! The sea foam blue-green of the walls bouncing off the Russell Wright plates and serving dishes.

The day before the meal, came the prep. We always had chestnut stuffing (yes, stuffed into the bird - oh the horrors!) so the roasting and peeling of chestnuts was the continuous background to all other activity of the day. My mom was from Philadelphia and my uncle from Patterson, New Jersey, places where cold weather announced itself with the scent of chestnuts cooked on outdoor braziers and sold to chilled pedestrians in newspaper cones. It was a fundamental sign of fall for them. Ergo chestnut stuffing. For a few weeks before prep day mom haunted various grocery stores looking for the imported Italian chestnuts that would irregularly appear before Thanksgiving. Some years the moldy ones outnumbered the perfect specimens. We had to build in a quantity that including the amount we ate during the arduous process of roasting and peeling them.

I don’t know if you’ve ever prepared chestnuts, but it is a slog. To avoid the drama of exploding chestnuts they have to be stabbed with a knife to let the steam emerge. Each year there would be great discussion aka fights about which method we should use. Should we pierce them on the flat or rounded side? High or low oven? And then there was the year no one ever referred to again when someone thought we should boil them. What a mess! There was threat of injury as the slippery devils might easily slide away so that the poised paring knife could impale a finger. My Uncle Al was an artist, a painter, who also loved creating constructions and collages of all kinds. After too many years of chestnut slippage he built a contraption that could hold a single nut. The women of the family thought it was too laborious to use and so continued to pierce the chestnuts free form. This stabbing was a grown-up activity akin to opening an oyster so I was relegated to coaxing the meat out of the shell once they were roasted, also a tedious job. Sometime the furry skin between the shell and the nut would easily slip off, other times it stuck with ferocious tenacity which meant having to pare it off without wasting chestnut meat. There was much supervision and commentary.

As for the bread part of the stuffing it had to be Pepperidge Farm. Back then there was only one kind. My mom’s brand loyalty in this case traversed decades. When I started doing Thanksgiving at Angeli and made bread stuffing from scratch using Diamond Bakery’s lovely huge loaves of challah (I can’t believe they’re closed) she scowled. For years she scowled. Finally I started making one bag’s worth of Pepperidge Farm. The scowling stopped.

At the cousins the meal always started off with a tray of celery sticks, carrots and black olives which I would immediately stick on my fingers then prance about the living room. I hope you have occasion to prance this year.