Butterball: A Love Story

Thanksgiving dinner surrounded by friends and loved ones is a sepia toned American tradition. As a result, the centerpiece of the meal, the turkey, has become an object of inexplicable reverence. American women, on average, think about Thanksgiving turkey three times a minute in the month of November. That's twice as often as they think about sex the entire year. Finding the right bird to grace one's table has become increasingly fraught with difficult choices. Calls to several local stores and a quick Google search made me realize that there are options for every budget and every taste. Throw in cash back savings, coupons and other incentives and choosing the right bird in a bad economy can have serious ramifications. And if you're goal is to shame your guests with a truly breathtaking meal and still have enough left over for cosmetic procedures, the selection process becomes truly onerous. For instance, there is the iconic frozen Butterball turkey, available at Stop & Shop while supplies last for 69 cents a pound. This bird includes a pop-up timer plus 300 bonus gas points at Shell. I figure I need a sixteen pound turkey to feed my crew. That's $11.04. But once I throw in the Shell gas points, it's more like Stop & Shop is paying me to get a Butterball. Triple points means I could save 60 cents per gallon. If I fill up three cars at once, that's easily forty gallons of gas. Include the five cents a gallon savings if I pay cash, and I'd be saving $26.00 on gas if I chose a Butterball. That eleven dollar frozen bird just earned me fifteen dollars. Fifteen dollars is more than most Americans earn per hour, so the Butterball easily wins the prize for the best bargain. Too bad it tastes like cardboard. I realize that if I want something tasty and flavorful, I'll have to shop around at the specialty stores. Westport used to have just one of these, and it was called Hay Day. If you wanted something super special and you wanted the smug satisfaction of knowing you'd paid too much, Hay Day was where you went. Now we have three such stores, all equally willing to do their share to help you, the preparer of Thanksgiving dinner, stimulate the economy. The "regular" turkey at one of these stores is from Plainville Farms in Cicero, New York. As a classical scholar, I'm drawn to this bird because it is from Cicero, the humble chick pea of the Empire State. According to the web site, Plainville Farms turkeys are "antibiotic free and fed an all-natural vegetarian diet". I wonder about those other turkeys who eat bacon and eggs for breakfast. The literature also says the animals are "raised in an animal friendly environment." I also wonder what's so friendly when the animal ends up dead and on your dinner plate. Regular dead birds raised in an animal friendly environment cost $2.99 per pound. Not quite the Butterball giveaway with a $15.00 rebate, but probably tastier than cardboard. But I'm not satisfied that a turkey labeled "regular" is special enough to be the centerpiece of my Thanksgiving table. So I consider the next step up, a Kosher turkey from Empire. At $3.99 per pound, a kosher bird will cost me $16.00 more than his Gentile cousin. Still you have to appreciate the thought and labor that go into the preparation. I go to the Empire web site to explore their products. On the home page there is a picture of a white-bearded man in a hard hat. He wears a uniform with the word "Rabbi" embroidered over the left breast and he looks like Wolf Blitzer. This is the man who oversees everything and certifies that the birds are kosher. The nice part for the fowl is they get to soak in a wam bath filled with Dead Sea salts after their ordeal is over. It's like a Day of Beauty and a visit to the Mikva all rolled into one. But I don't really want Wolf Blitzer anywhere near my Thanksgiving table, and some of my guests are on sodium restricted diets, so the salt bath, nice as it might be for the turkey, probably won't do for my Thanksgiving table. Having eliminated the down market option of a Butterball, the only place left to go is up, which means organic. To me organic means it's made out of carbon. But nowadays organic means something different. Organic means breathtakingly expensive for no good reason. One of my local markets gets their organic turkeys from Eberly Farms. Eberly organic turkeys are raised on Amish farms in Pennsylvania, where they're fed "organic grains, given pure water, and allowed to move about and forage." They sound delicious. They also sound suspiciously like the Tom turkey who lives in my neighborhood, and who doesn't cost $4.99 per pound. My neighborhood Tom is undoubtedly a free range bird, having access to the entire street and cul de sac, where he can be seen at all hours ranging freely and foraging on acorns and Kentucky bluegrass. Also my local Tom is surrounded by a harem of females. I know he's a contented bird because he doesn't have to hit the bar every night trying to pick up chicks. But I'd need a permit to shoot him, which costs $70.00. A sixteen pound organic bird would set me back $79.84. But I also need a gun. The one I want is a Beretta Ultralight Deluxe, which costs a whopping $2,298.00. It's a nice piece, and there would be something deeply satisfying in an all American "I'm better than my neighbor" kind of way about shooting my own Thanksgiving dinner. But $2,298 is also what I'd pay for three syringes of Juvederm cosmetic facial filler, and all the stress of buying a turkey is wreaking havoc on my marionette lines as it is. Viewed through this prism, shooting my own turkey from my front door seems like overkill. But I am willing to spend a few dollars more for convenience and the veneer that what I'm serving is something you won't likely find someplace else. The Organic and Kosher birds do not stand up to the rigors of my costs-benefits analysis, and the Butterball and regular birds are what ordinary people serve. So I forage, or rather forge, ahead. Another Google search for turkey and a random slip of the finger yields amazing results. Instead of T-U-R-K, I type T-U-R-D, and get Turducken, a southern specialty product defined as a tender boneless chicken wrapped in a tender boneless duck, wrapped in a tender boneless turkey. I figure it might be worth a try, but there is something holding me back from ordering my Turducken. I'm disturbed by how close the word Turducken is linguistically to the word "turd". Worse than lowbrow, Turducken also suggests the possibility of post prandial exposure to E. Coli. Surely there must be something elegant, tasty, and visually arresting that is NOT Turducken. And that's when it hits me, the perfect Thanksgiving centerpiece, Foisgraten. Though currently outlawed in California, Foisgraten has nevertheless been warmly received in high end culinary circles, resulting in a product that is both expensive and nearly impossible to find. I have a friend in the business, however, a chef who breaks down sixty chickens a day in a Michelin starred Manhattan restaurant. Perhaps we can cut a deal. Foisgraten, as the name suggests, is the fattened liver of the sustainably raised Heritage Buff Goose, shrouded in triple cream brie from the Pyrenees, buried in puff pastry, wrapped in an enigma, with a heart of tender boneless chicken. I call my friend the chef to ask if he can prepare Foisgraten. He says yes. And he will sell me the components at cost. But I'll have to drive into Manhattan to pick it up, which takes me back to square one. I have a garage full of cars with gauges pointing to empty. And somewhere buried deep in the freezers at Stop & Shop is a Butterball offering to pay me to take him home for dinner.