A Lucy Stone Thanksgiving
Lucy Stone has cooked the same Thanksgiving dinner for years. In fact, it’s the same dinner she remembers her mother and grandmother cooking when she was a little girl. Lucy has inherited her mother’s china, and her grandmother’s crystal and linen, and uses them to set the table. She takes great pleasure in taking them out for the holidays—she even enjoys ironing the linen tablecloth and napkins!
The menu is simple: New England home cooking based on recipes from The Fannie Farmer Cookbook. Lucy has the eleventh edition, which was published in 1965, and doesn’t think much of the newer versions.
For a centerpiece, Lucy arranges colorful fall leaves on her best white damask tablecloth and piles fresh fruit and vegetables on top. The arrangement varies from year to year, depending upon what’s available, but she likes to use apples, pears, and Concord or Fox grapes, punctuated with tiny pumpkins and squash. She doesn’t use tropical fruits such as oranges and bananas, believing that only native-grown New England produce is appropriate for Thanksgiving. A scattering of mixed nuts in their shells completes the arrangement, which the family nibbles on after the meal. When the children were younger, Bill used to make little boats out of the walnut shells, continuing a tradition from his own childhood.
Five kernels of dried corn are placed at each place setting. That was the daily ration allowed to each of the Pilgrims during their first difficult winter in Plymouth Colony, and it is a reminder of the hardship they endured so they could enjoy the freedom we take for granted today.
Appetizer
Lucy tends to agree with her mother, who always maintained appetizers were too much trouble and only spoiled people’s appetites, anyway. Sometimes, though, she does serve shrimp or oysters before dinner.
Shrimp are served chilled, on ice, with cocktail sauce and lemon slices.
Oysters are served raw, on the half shell, also with cocktail sauce.
Soup
What? And make more dishes to wash?
Main Course
Roast turkey with bread stuffing (Sensitive about her weight, Lucy now mixes chicken broth, instead of water and butter, with either Pepperidge Farm or Arnold stuffing.)
Giblet gravy
Mashed potatoes
Sweet potatoes or yams (the canned kind, heated in the oven while she makes the gravy)
Creamed onions (white onions from a jar in white sauce)
Petite peas (frozen, not canned)
Condiments (These are served in crystal dishes Lucy inherited from her grandmother.)
Cranberry sauce (whole berry)
Celery with pimento-stuffed olives
Sweet pickle mix (the kind with cauliflower and tiny onions)
Dessert
Mince pie (Lucy always uses a jar of Grandmother’s brand mincemeat.)
Apple pie (Macintosh or Cortland apples)
Pumpkin pie (A good way to use up pumpkins left over from Halloween)
Coffee, fruit, and nuts
TURKEY TROT MURDER
For all the Turkey Trotters,
Especially
Greg, Ben and Abby, Matt and Sam,
Andy and Mandy,
Em and Ari, Leon and Debi
PROLOGUE
It was all over the morning TV news—the season’s first killing frost. It came later than usual, probably due to global warming. That was the theory, anyway. But come it did, finally, coating each blade of grass with sparkly white rime, sealing automobile windows with a thick layer of frost, reducing late green tomatoes to black mush, and changing chrysanthemum plants, whose color had faded weeks before, into shriveled black stumps.
Alison Franklin didn’t notice these changes, but she did sense the sharp nip in the air as she stepped out onto the flagstone patio of her father’s house in Maine. She zipped up her fleece jacket and jogged down the long drive to begin her morning run. She usually went one of two ways. One route took her along scenic Shore Road with its ocean views and the other wound through the woods on old logging roads and circled around Blueberry Pond. A cold northeast breeze was blowing off the water so Alison chose the more sheltered woodland path.
She was rounding the loop that led to Blueberry Pond when she heard the cries. It was nothing more than a yelp at first, a cry that could be the call of a crow or perhaps the yip of a fox. The calls came louder and grew clearer as she drew nearer to the pond.
Realizing someone was calling for help she quickened her pace and soon spotted a familiar figure standing on the shore of the frozen pond. She’d been spotted so it was too late to turn around. Nothing for it except to make the best of the situation.
“Alison! Thank God you’re here!”
“What’s the matter?” she asked somewhat reluctantly.
“It’s Scruffy! He ran out onto the pond and I think he’s fallen through.”
Alison studied the pond, which had a coat of new ice. “Are you sure? There are no tracks in the ice and I don’t hear him crying.”
“Of course I’m sure! Why would you doubt me? Listen, listen! Can’t you hear him? Oh, the poor thing. He’s growing weaker . . .”
Once again Alison turned to the pond, casting her eyes along the irregular shore which was littered with large boulders, glacial erratics, most now covered with a thin layer of soil that supported bushy balsam pines and gnarled blueberry bushes, all hanging on for dear life. This growth made it impossible for her to get a clear view of the entire shore or to see exactly where Scruffy had gone through. She concentrated on listening for the poodle, hoping his cries might direct her, but all she heard was the sighing of the wind in the trees and the groaning protest of bare branches thrown against each other.
“Stop dithering! Poor Scruffy. He can’t hang on much longer!”
There was no way out, decided Alison with a sigh of resignation. The undergrowth along the shore was too dense for her to make her way around the pond without a machete, which she didn’t happen to bring along on her morning run. The only way she could find Scruffy was by going out onto the freshly frozen
