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Thanksgiving is a fascinating holiday. We run around combining canned things with boxed things with jarred things. For us at Serious Eats, the meal is arguably the tastiest of the year, but some familiar ingredients are undoubtedly strange. A good strange, a strange we love to hate, but strange nonetheless. It's this gastronomic sketchiness that unites us as American eaters each November.
Serious Eats' Erin Zimmer has defined why these are our top six...
1. Canned Cream of Mushroom Soup: A man in a suit must have said, "How can we sell more boxed onion strings?" And so the dependence on canned cream of mushroom soup was born. The familiar murky-colored sludge contains a mushroom fleck or two, but might consider a name change: Cream of Really Creamy soup. What's exactly in there? Dare we suggest a replacement in green bean casserole? Oh, how the onion strings would throw a fit! And let's be honest, dinner guests might too. (Well done, boxed onion string moguls. We are hooked.)
Alternative: Anthony Bourdain's mushroom soup
2. Gyrating Cranberry Sauce: The wiggly, jiggly "sauce" should really be classified as a goo. Spaghetti sauce is a sauce; barbecue sauce is a sauce. Cranberry goo is fun to poke and an ideal invite to a dance party, but not a sauce. Like a memory foam pillow, it always returns to the same posture.
Alternative: Cranberry sauce with champagne and currants
3. Giblets: Aren't the giblets sealed in a body cavity bag for a reason? While foie gras, offal, and other animal innards have been glamorized, poor giblets (soft "g" sound, pronounced jib-lets) have remained socially ostracized and feared. Chop them into mini chunks for a Thanksgiving stuffing, though, and maybe nobody will notice!
Alternative: Cornbread dressing with pecans and bacon
4. Pearl Onions: Pearl onions are funny. Do they come from factories or trees? If the latter, how are they perfectly pearl-shaped each time? They rarely exist outside of casseroles and creepy white sauces, which can't be good.
Alternative: Other onions
5. Marshmallows: Campfires would be so pointless without the fluffy, cloud-like cubes, but they are not as harmless as they look. They contain bones. Okay, traces of bones. Gelatin, an ingredient in most commercially manufactured marshmallows, comes from animal hides or bones. So Aunt Esther's sweet potatoes might contain traces of skeletal systems.
Alternative: Sweet potatoes without marshmallows
6. Turkey: Yup, I said it. Historians can't even prove that pilgrims ate the darn bird. Do you eat it on your birthday, wedding day, or other celebratory times? Nope. As beloved writer Calvin Trillin once suggested, why not spaghetti carbonara? The homage to Christopher Columbus—and his big Italian eyes that discovered America—is just as iconic of the American frontier. Not to mention, less dry, less flavorless, and less lame. If you must have turkey, at least deep-fry it. Or, let's just quit the act and have fried chicken.
Alternative: Fried chicken
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