Cooking, cleaning and serving on Thanksgiving is only half the battle. Did we say battle ? Holiday entertaining isn’t a war, but it is a charm offensive. Off the table ? Any talk of the divisive presidential election, still fresh enough to be a tempest in a gravy boat. Grousing about the economy and all the shopping you won’t be doing on Black Friday ? Also uncharming: Uncle Fred’s been laid off, and Aunt Linda slapped that “Price Reduced” banner over the for-sale sign in her front yard back on Labor Day. In these complicated times, anything from contemporary society is out. Even this weekend’s other pastime — hunting — is a hotbed. Hunting talk leads to gun talk, an open door to gun-control talk, which is just a short drive over the river and through the woods back to election talk. Skip it. “The good
guest leaves his problems at the door,” Betty Crocker advised in Betty Crocker’s Guide to Easy Entertaining in 1959.
As an author, Crocker is less authentic a persona than, say, Santa Claus, but more genuine than the Web logger who cooked up Sarah Palin’s confusion over Africa the continent vs. Africa the country. She knows her stuff. (Betty, that is. )
“Barring some accident that requires first aid,” Crocker continues, “such as a pin to secure a crucial button, the good guest demands the least possible attention from host and hostess immediately after arrival, and waits until things have simmered down before telling that long story or asking that detailed question.”
Back in 1959 dinner guests had a shorter wait until things simmered down, as it were. Castro had only just come to power in Cuba. Alaska, the state that would give us Palin, and Hawaii, the state that would give us Obama, were newly admitted to the union. Some Like It Hot was the wedge-issue movie of the year; some people found it hilarious, some people feared it tipped downward toward a slippery slope to mainstream acceptance of alternative lifestyles and women tuba players.
THE JOY OF SKIING Betty — Crocker, not Betty Draper, whose every 1960 s dinner party on AMC’s picture-perfect Mad Men presents a Cuban missile casserole of dread, anxiety and back-burnered repression — was too canny a hostess to identify a problem without offering a solution.
In a chapter on buffet dinners, a popular option for feeding a Thanksgiving throng, Betty prescribes goosing guests toward neutral topics of mutual interest.
“Guests usually are allowed to find their own places in the living room after helping themselves,” Betty writes, “though the thoughtful hostess is alert to direct a stranger to a congenial group by saying something such as, ‘ Sylvia, sit here by Pete. He’s just back from Colorado and can answer your questions about skiing at Aspen. ’”
Ah, to be a guest at a dinner where skiing at Aspen was the common frame of reference ! The Guide to Easy Entertaining does sound like a planner from a simpler time.
But no time seems simple in the living of it. Perhaps Crocker, ever the homey happymaker, was just projecting a brighter inner life to replace what was reality for the most famous Sylvia of the day — Plath. The poet would stick her head in an oven four short years later. (But mercifully not on Thanksgiving. )
If there had been an audio feed from the family gathering depicted in Freedom From Want, Norman Rockwell’s iconic Thanksgiving painting published in 1943, the matriarch might have been kvetching about Roosevelt as she bowed to present her perfectly tanned turkey.
But the art of modern entertaining is as complicated as its latter-day Bettys. Martha Stewart, modern society’s most prominent hostessing model, has been imprisoned for obtructing an investigation of insider trading. The advice of Amy Sedaris, humorist and author of I Like You: Hospitality Under the Influence, 2006 ’s most entertaining entertaining book, arrived sprinkled with irony, a flavor that has even seeped into dinner.
Sedaris suggests that when entertaining the elderly, perhaps one should toss a balloon back and forth with them after dinner to forestall unplanned napping. On the subject of hostess gifts, “don’t you dare show up with bamboo !” she admonished. “You might as well show up with a turtle.”
Conversely, the question-andanswer portion of Amelia Leavitt Hill’s The Complete Book of Table Setting and Flower Arrangement, published in 1949, only sounds like a joke. Asked by a reader confounded by the mores of how to combine a crust of bread and a cup of au jus, “Is dunking permissible ?” Hill is permissive, to a degree. “Only in the bosom of your family !” she gasps.
SIMPLE CHARMS To their credit, the entertaining guidebooks of earlier eras carry an easy grace. They don’t seem heavily labored over, but more as if their authors had jotted their thoughts on the back of an envelope and later transferred the scribbles to the printed page. The absence of self-consciousness is reflected in repeated phrases, where a more mannered writer (mannered here not being a Martha Stewart-esque good thing ) might attempt oddity of expression to gild her lilies.
Hill, for example, seemed to love the word “gay,” just as she loved to point out which aspects of table decorating were so old that they had become new again, like trident-shaped silver candelabra — or, on Thanksgiving, a pumpkin centerpiece.
“The pumpkin in the center of the Thanksgiving table is far from new but novelty is added when enough of it is scooped out to hold a few fruits, while others are attached to it by wires and allowed to stream down over the tablecloth, perhaps onto a bed of gay red leaves,” she writes.
Old manuals are anachronistic in ways besides their deaf ear to strife. “Scaling down requirements for our dinner, let’s see what can be done in the maidless household,” Hill proposes cheerfully. Yes, let’s ! Her menu for “Family Luncheon Without a Maid” consists of tomato cocktail, lamb croquettes, green peas and mint, boiled new potatoes with parsley, popovers, tea, persimmon salad and wine jelly.
Let’s Set the Table, Elizabeth Lounsbery’s 1938 guide (with introduction by Emily Post ), opens with the promise of sympathy for all those dinner hostesses out there in Palin’s real America.
“Women living in large cities, where entertaining is constantly provided in theaters, concerts and lectures, and where restaurants offer a tempting relief from housekeeping, cannot realize, perhaps, just how much pleasure the woman in a smaller community, without these facilities, derives from having her friends about her in her home for luncheon, dinner or supper, especially if she can plan it in some novel way,” Lounsbery offers — with almost as many commas as a Palin sentence.
But then she goes and oversalts the dish with the suggestion of a good, old-fashioned “Poverty Luncheon” — you know, a “Raggedy Ann affair,” she explains, perfect for giving your friends before they head back to boarding school.
For table decor, Lounsbery advocates planting tomato cans with geraniums “that look neglected and lack of sun and water — in other words, poverty-stricken !” Use tin pieplates for dishes and set out salt and pepper in their original grocery store boxes — “the cruder the better.”
“Then, to complete the setting, the hostess and her guests must wear their oldest worn-out clothes,” she says. “Nothing can be too shabby. Old shoes, a faded blouse, and a torn golf skirt will be ideal for this masquerade, in which, I am sure, everyone can take part, for who does not have just these things at the end of summer ?” If you don’t, ask your maid.
PUMPKIN HEAD Bizarrely, it is Tiffany Table Settings from 1960 that offers the most accessible table-decorating advice. “Thanksgiving Dinner for Six and One-Half,” a chapter credited to a contributor identified as Mrs. Moss Hart (with the half a guest being a baby ), suggests creating a centerpiece by sticking dozens of shafts of wheat into a pumpkin and candying it by gouging whole walnuts into the outer shell. The result resembles an abstraction of acupuncture gone awry, or what might happen if the half-guest had been assigned table decor.
“Four dishes containing gumdrops, peanut brittle, nuts and raisins are placed on the table to add gaiety and color accent,” writes Hart, who seems to have anticipated Snoopy and Woodstock’s dinner menu of popcorn, toast and jelly beans from A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving, first broadcast in 1973.
Or maybe Hart wanted guests to wonder aloud what they were supposed to do with gumdrops and peanut brittle instead of restoking the Kennedy-Nixon coals.
With friends like these, you might as well go ahead and make enemies. Frame your Thanksgiving table, and the discussion, however you want. Chew on gumdrops and socialism. But only in the bosom of your family. They have to come back next year no matter what. Coming next week:
What are you thankful for ? Our list includes household gadgets that, despite being taken for granted, make our lives easier.
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