Calvin Trillin's Campaign to Make Spaghetti Carbonara the National Dish for Thanksgiving—the real story of the first Thanksgiving
Every year I issue my annual Spaghetti Carbonara Day Appeal for Calvin Trillin's Campaign to Make Spaghetti Carbonara the National Dish for Thanksgiving. It is heavily based on Trillin's beliefs that:
a) "It does not take much
historical research to uncover the fact that nobody knows if the Pilgrims
really ate turkey at the first Thanksgiving dinner. The only thing we
know for sure about what the Pilgrims ate is that it couldn't have tasted very
good."
b) "Christopher Columbus,
the man who may have brought linguine with clam sauce to this continent, was
from Genoa, and obviously would have sooner acknowledged that the world was
shaped like an isosceles triangle than to have eaten the sort of things that
the English Puritans ate."
c) "I happen to love spaghetti
carbonara."
d) "…that turkey is basically
something college dormitories use to punish students for hanging around on
Sunday"; and,
e) "I even had a ready answer
to the occasional turkey fancier...who insists that spaghetti carbonara was
almost certainly not what our forebears ate at the first Thanksgiving
dinner. As it happens, one of the things I give thanks for every year is
that those people in the Plymouth Colony were not my forebears. Who wants
forebears who put people in the stocks for playing the harpsichord on the
Sabbath or having an innocent little game of pinch and giggle?"
Ergo, the campaign to make spaghetti
carbonara the national dish for Thanksgiving. (Please do
not miss Trillin's account of the REAL story of Thanksgiving, quoted in
the last paragraph!)
I actually do not make
spaghetti carbonara every Thanksgiving, although I always make some sort of pasta (and
sometimes even a pasta al tartufo bianco—it is the
season, after all...)—but I often do, and intend to this Thursday. I
just am sure NEVER to serve turkey.
Thus I am sending you my "Happy Spaghetti Carbonara Day" greetings—from my turkey-less, pasta-filled house to yours!
(I include below, for your reading
pleasure, Calvin Trillin's "Spaghetti Carbonara
Day" Appeal—including his not-to-be-missed account
of the REAL story of Thanksgiving, at the end.)
[The
following has been shamelessly excerpted from "Third Helpings," by Calvin
Trillin. (These passages are quoted from Trillin, C., The Tummy Trilogy, Farrar, Strauss and Giroux: New York, 1994, pp. 259-67.)]:
I have been campaigning
to have the national Thanksgiving dish changed from turkey to spaghetti
carbonara.
It does not take much historical research to uncover the fact that nobody knows
if the Pilgrims really ate turkey at the first Thanksgiving dinner. The
only thing we know for sure about what the Pilgrims ate is that it couldn't
have tasted very good. Even today, well brought-up English girls are
taught by their mothers to boil all veggies for at least a month and a half,
just in case one of the dinner guests turns up without
his teeth... (It is certainly unfair to say that the English lack both a cuisine and a sense of humor: their cooking
is a joke in itself.)
It would also not require much digging to discover that Christopher Columbus,
the man who may have brought linguine with clam sauce to this continent, was
from Genoa, and obviously would have sooner acknowledged that the world was
shaped like an isosceles triangle than to have eaten the sort of things that
the English Puritans ate. Righting an ancient wrong against Columbus, a
great man who certainly did not come all this way only to have a city in Ohio
named after him, would be a serious historical contribution. Also, I
happen to love spaghetti carbonara.
[In our family]...Thanksgiving has often been celebrated away from home.
It was at other people's Thanksgiving tables that I first began to articulate
my spaghetti carbonara campaign—although,
since we were usually served turkey, I naturally did not mention that the
campaign had been inspired partly by my belief that turkey is basically
something college dormitories use to punish students for hanging around on
Sunday... I reminded everyone how refreshing it would be to hear sports
announcers call some annual tussle the Spaghetti Carbonara Day Classic.
I even had a ready answer to the occasional turkey fancier at those meals who
insist that spaghetti carbonara was almost certainly not what our forebears ate
at the first Thanksgiving dinner. As it happens, one of the things I give
thanks for every year is that those people in the Plymouth Colony were not my
forebears. Who wants forebears who put people in the stocks for playing
the harpsichord on the Sabbath or having an innocent little game of pinch and
giggle?
Finally there came a year when nobody invited us to Thanksgiving dinner.
Alice's theory was that the word had got around town that I always made a pest
out of myself berating the hostess for serving turkey instead of spaghetti
carbonara...
However it came about, I was delighted at the opportunity we had been given to
practice what I had been preaching—to
sit down to a Thanksgiving dinner of spaghetti carbonara.
Naturally, the entire family went over to Rafetto's
pasta store on Houston Street to see the spaghetti cut. I got the cheese
at Joe's dairy, on Sullivan, a place that would have made Columbus feel right
at home—there are plenty of
Genoese on Sullivan; no Pilgrims—and
then headed for the pork store on Carmine Street for the bacon and ham. Alice
made the spaghetti carbonara. It was perfection. I love spaghetti
carbonara. Then I began to tell the children the story of the first Thanksgiving:
In England, along time ago, there were people called
Pilgrims who were very strict about making everyone observe the Sabbath and
cooked food without any flavor and that sort of thing, and they decided to go
to America, where they could enjoy Freedom to Nag. The other people in
England said, "Glad to see the back of them." In America, the
Pilgrims tried farming, but they couldn't get much done because they were
always putting their best farmers in the stocks for crimes like Suspicion of
Cheerfulness. The Indians took pity on the Pilgrims and helped them with
their farming, even though the Indians thought that the Pilgrims were about as
much fun as teenage circumcision. The Pilgrims were so grateful that at
the end of their first year in America they invited the Indians over for a
Thanksgiving meal. The Indians, having had some experience with Pilgrim
cuisine during the year, took the precaution of taking along one dish of their
own. They brought a dish that their ancestors had learned from none other
than Christopher Columbus, who was known to the Indians as "the big
Italian fellow." The dish was spaghetti carbonara—made with pancetta bacon and fontina
and the best imported prosciutto. The Pilgrims hated it. They said
it was "heretically tasty" and "the work of the devil" and
"the sort of thing foreigners eat." The Indians were so
disgusted that on the way back to their village after dinner one of them made a
remark about the Pilgrims that was repeated down through the years and unfortunately
caused confusion among historians about the first Thanksgiving meal. He
said,
"What a bunch of turkeys!"
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