Thanksgiving - Then and Now
/[This article was originally published as a Featured Reader commentary in Long Island’s “Newsday” newspaper - which Matt used to deliver on his bike as a kid! In it he describes Thanksgiving day dinners at his house on Long Island, and how things are … a bit different, now that we live in Italy.]
I grew up in Huntington Station in the ‘70s and ‘80s, in a typical mixed-ethnic, middle-income neighborhood, just a few blocks from the 110 and the train depot. The families up and down the block were a close-knit community. Though we each did our own Thanksgiving dinners, the kids and some of the dads on our block would play touch football in the street for a couple hours beforehand. It was a motley operation, but to us it was the Jets vs the Cowboys.
My family’s Thanksgiving dinner was pretty standard - roast turkey, stuffing, canned green bean & mushroom soup casserole, pumpkin pie. We also made a sort of "poker-night" cheese ball covered in chopped nuts – we ate it with Ritz crackers.
We moved to Italy from the US in 2019, at age 51 and 47, to start a new life. Thanksgiving is not a holiday in Italy; getting together with family to enjoy traditional food is just called “Thursday”. We love our Italian life, but sometimes, like Thanksgiving, we create for ourselves a version of the holiday, and we modify the classic foods to account for Italian ingredients.
Turkey is common here, but whole birds are not sold in stores – you must order them from a butcher weeks in advance. Instead we make a turkey involtini – pounded-out turkey breast rolled up with prosciutto and spinach, slow cooked in red wine. For the casserole, instead of the canned beans and mushroom soup, we use fresh green beans and local seasonal mushrooms baked with parmigiano and real cream, topped with homemade seasoned croutons instead of canned crispy fried onions.
Canned pumpkin can’t be found here either – but pumpkins of several varieties are sold, for food, not decoration. In fact, at a veg vendor, you can buy one big slice! We cook it down with some sugar, nutmeg, and cinnamon, and combine it with whipped mascarpone and cream, and biscotti instead of a crust, making a sort of pumpkin tiramisu. (Our neighbors really don’t know what to make of this strange hybrid!)
And we still make a cheese ball, replacing US ingredients with Italian – port wine, real provolone, local hazelnuts from the valley below our house. Instead of the Ritz, we just go to a local bakery for some Italian bread – or as they call it here, bread.
Of course, we can't play street football – we wouldn't know where to get an American football if we wanted to, and the streets in our little hill town are nowhere near straight or flat or wide enough. (Also, I’m old.) Instead, we take the classic Italian passeggiata – a leisurely stroll into the town piazza or up to a nearby 13th-century church, greeting our neighbors as we walk, and watching kids kick a ball around – which is what the rest of the world calls football. I might even join them for a kick or two. So we still get that sense of community here in our new home.
This is how we celebrate Thanksgiving – it’s definitely not the “Long Island” holiday I grew up with, but I’m definitely thankful for these little touches that really take me back.
