Don’t pass the sauerkraut just yet. We’ll get to that end of the table shortly. First, a scoop of flødekartofler. You know the dish as scalloped potatoes.
Growing up in Katy, Texas, a half-hour west of Houston, 19-year-old Danish-born Kamma Von Liloienskjold enjoyed the heavy cream, onion and potato dish with her family on the fourth Thursday in November.
“My Dad tried to deep fry a turkey a few times and it didn’t really turn out,” said Kamma of her seafaring father. “Now my Mom bakes a ham.”
There is no equivalent to Thanksgiving in Denmark, the closest being a non-religious holiday break in early November on the eve of St. Martin’s day – Mortensaften – celebrated with roast duck.
No duck or flødekartofler for Kamma this year as she will be observing Thanksgiving as a deckhand on board the Pride of Baltimore II. Docked on South Clinton Street for winter maintenance – refinishing the top masts, caulking the deck, taking the rig apart – it shoves off in spring for a round of 250th American Independence celebrations.
Tomorrow’s feast will be cooked below decks by Captain Jeffrey Crosby, a 38-year-old native of Duluth, Minnesota who grew up sailing on Lake Superior. “I’ve spent most of my life mucking around on boats,” said Crosby, whose turn at the cast-iron diesel stove gives ship’s cook Christina Melendez a well-deserved day off.
“I’m going to spatchcock a 20-pound turkey and brine it for three days in habanero, lemon grass and soy sauce,” said Crosby, who seems to have as many culinary as navigational tricks in his wheelhouse. The marinade, he said, will be used for a lively gravy.
The captain approaches putting together a meal the way he does building things. Earlier this month he was making a new gangway in the building that used to be Little Johnny’s diner, the greasy spoon where “the Greek” and his gang convened in season two of The Wire. Decades after Ziggy Sobotka inquired about the open-faced roast beef sandwich at 1912 South Clinton Street – and told, as usual, to shut up – it is the Pride’s workshop.
Crosby is particular about his mashed potatoes, partial to russets for their starchy texture. “I boil them, mash’em and put the peels in cream and butter to simmer for a good hour,” he said. “Add some potato flour in the butter and cream for a very distinct mashed potato taste.”
Hey Ishmael, care to swap out your hardtack for a sweet potato muffin?
Crosby peels and chops sweet potatoes and then layers them in a muffin tin with Gruyère cheese, and pancetta until the tin is filled for baking. Other sides include traditional bread and celery stuffing and a fresh green bean casserole with homemade cream of mushroom soup made the night before.
For dessert, right there with the pumpkin pie, he serves a holiday staple in many Greek families from Ponca Street to Perry Hall: Baklava.
The treat that Pride second mate Remy Perron remembers from his Andover, Mass. Thanksgivings is Aunt Shelly’s lime green Seafoam Salad, a mid-20th century gelatinous gem popularized at Woolworth’s lunch counters. In 1959, a complete turkey dinner at the Lexington and Howard street five-and-dime location cost 65 cents any day of the year.
The feast for eight crew members and four guests that Captain Crosby prepared – sans sauerkraut, a Chesapeake tradition with which he is unfamiliar – is quite different from the Thanksgiving meals he experienced as a kid in the Land of 10,000 Lakes.
“It was a pot luck family affair,” he said. “Everyone brought a dish and we piled as much food into us as we could. Then we’d take a nap and eat again. Just hanging out, playing board games and telling stories.”
The stories from family gatherings!
An enduring one from the Italian side of my own family (taking place before I was born) featured Uncle Nick Prato (or maybe it was his brother Uncle Tony, there’s no one left to ask) who became quite agitated one year over a turkey leg that passed him by. In Baltimore such disputes, aided by a handy carving knife, often escalated into the local crime blotter.
When she’s not feeding a dozen or so seadogs, the 26-year-old Melendez calls the hamlet of Grindstone, Penn. home, some 40 miles south of Pittsburgh. On board, the galley is her domain, pots and pans scrubbed by the deckhands.
“My parents raised me to cook for myself. I feel dynamic in the kitchen,” said Melendez, who began making meals with her mother around the second grade. One favorites was strawberry cake. With her father, who owned a red 1999 Camaro, young Christina built model muscle cars.
On the day of my visit, with a strong breeze blowing across one of the last industrial stretches of the southeast Baltimore waterfront, Melendez was prepping a cold-weather lunch classic of tomato bisque and grilled cheese.
It’s just one of the staples in her bag of tricks. When she is back in Grindstone, for a holiday or routine visit, the family wants to know, “What are you making for us tonight?”
The twists to fermented cabbage
Bring on the kraut!
Rob Kasper – the “Happy Eater” to several generations of Baltimoreans when he wrote for a once glorious newspaper whose name escapes me – remembers writing “endlessly about sauerkraut and Thanksgiving.”
Baltimore is a sauerkraut burg, Kasper learned, because of the strong influence of German immigration in the mid-to-late 19th century. In that time, more than a quarter-million Germans entered the country through Baltimore. Before World War I, when some 33,000 German immigrants lived here, City Council minutes were published in English and German.
Those who had left the Fatherland behind liked to roast a goose on special occasions and, as this was the New World, goose became turkey at Thanksgiving.
One of those families were ancestors of my cousin, the former Cindi Hemelt, now Gallagher. Cindi’s father George and my Pop were best buddies (and lifetime friends after George married Dad’s cousin Theresa) at different ends of Macon Street. Back then, Highlandtown was as German as it was Italian as it is now Latino.
To accommodate non-Baltimoreans at Thanksgiving, Cindi “takes a bit of the sour out of the kraut by rinsing it before sautéing it with apples and caramelized onions.”
Long before the Germans and other waves of European immigration made it here, families of African descent in all major American cities put their own spin (in the shape of a pig’s tail) on finely shredded, fermented cabbage.
“We’d get the pigtails from a store at Monroe and Mosher called Burkom’s that had a butcher shop in the back,” said Jackie Oldham, a Baltimore poet. Her maternal grandmother, Lillian Randall Barber, lived near the store on North Payson street and hosted Thanksgiving from about World War II through Jackie’s 1960s childhood. “She put a little sugar in the sauerkraut to take away some of the bitterness.”
“When Grandma couldn’t cook anymore,” Oldham said, “the holiday passed down to my mother,” Dorothy Barber Oldham (1932-2018) in Lauraville. Jackie’s father Oliver, known as Jack, did the turkey and her mom prepared the vegetables and sauerkraut, always seasoned with pork.
The meal then traveled to her mother’s sister’s house in Silver Spring until that aunt, Lillian Barber Scott, was no longer up to cooking.
Now, said Jackie, whose heirloom Good Housekeeping cookbook fell apart from its binding, “there’s no Barber/Oldham family Thanksgiving anymore.”
She is grateful for the good friends who have invited her to their tables ever since.
Rafael Alvarez, whose favorite Macy’s Parade balloon is Bullwinkle, has written an annual Thanksgiving essay for many years. He can be reached via orlo.leini@gmail.com.
