By Michael Patrick O’Brien–
I hesitate to disrupt the warm feelings of the upcoming holiday feasts and festivals, but something must be said. Gravy is the Rodney Dangerfield of Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners. It gets no respect.
Here is the proof. Some of you culinary apostates out there (*cough*turkey fryers*cough*) do not even bother to make gravy or, worse yet, pour it from a store-bought bottle or can. The greatest of all holiday writers, Charles Dickens, dissed both the delectable sauce-from-a-pan and Jacob Marley’s ghost with one insulting comment: “There’s more of gravy than of grave about you, whatever you are!” And then there is the matter of that dreadful phrase “the rest is just gravy.”
Seriously? The rest is just gravy? I’d like to meet the person who first said the rest is just gravy. I’d like to give him or her a piece of my gravy-intoxicated holiday dinner mind.
Urban and idiom dictionaries describe the abominable phrase as a “malaphor” (a blend of a malapropism and metaphor), and indicate it refers to circumstances when someone gets more than he or she anticipated. In other words, the gravy is the “more than” part, the extra stuff, the something neither anticipated nor even desired.
I’m sorry, but that is simply sad and wrong. For decades, at Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners in the O’Brien household, the gravy has been not the extra thing, but THE thing.
Twice every twelve months, my Irish-Catholic mother, may she rest in peace, would roast a full turkey. It was a sight to behold. She’d start to thaw the big bird days in advance, while working on other pre-meal rituals like baking pumpkin pies, making toll house cookies, and pulling together the ingredients of the soon-to-be homemade bread-crumb-onion-celery stuffing.
On Thanksgiving or Christmas morning, she was up at dawn to prepare and stuff the featured fowl, lovingly load it into the cooking pan, mix the basting juices, boil the giblets, and start the six or seven hour oven roasting process. After a short break, with some (but never enough) help from my brother, sisters, and me, she would boil potatoes to later mash, bake some yams, steam some vegetables (often green beans but sometimes broccoli), and cook bread rolls.
Yet, in the large scheme of things, these activities really were just busy work, previews, mere preliminary bouts to the main event of the day…the making of the gravy.
After the turkey was cooked, removed, cooling, and awaiting carving on a serving tray, Mom would eye the pan (from which all basting juices had been carefully drained and set aside) and the room fell silent. She always remarked, “Hmmm…not many drippings this time.” Few other words would strike more fear into our hearts…no gravy this year?
After a few tense moments of study, Mom would sprinkle flour on whatever drippings existed, add back in some juice, heat the pan, and start to work her gravy-making magic. Repeating this process several times over (sometimes using the boiled potato water or other stock as needed), she stirred and transformed the pan of poultry goo into an abundant well of browned goodness.
When done, Mom would sample her creation with a wooden spoon and inevitably say, “Well, it did not turn out so well this year.” Eager to test that proposition, I would grab a roll, soak it in the pan, and then mumble a somewhat incoherent, full-mouth rebuttal, only to be reproached later by my older sister Karen for the capital offense of premeditated unauthorized sampling.
I dearly love my sister Karen, but she has one major character flaw…she always was, and perhaps always will be, my bitter gravy rival. She watched me like a hawk during the making of the gravy, convinced (correctly) that my fingers were poised for a quick tasting dip into the pan. She grew suspicious if the gravy boat lingered too long by my dinner plate. And she was the most vigilant leftover gravy cop I have ever known.
During the holidays, Karen eventually had to return to work after the big feast days. I usually was on a longer school break, and thus home alone with the leftover gravy. Karen would measure and mark the top level of gravy in the Tupperware bowl and call during the day to remind me of the family rule that leftovers were strictly off limits until dinner time. Of course, I acknowledged over the phone what I viewed as “guidelines,” and then devised ways to skim bits of gravy off the top of the storage dish without discernibly lowering the high-gravy mark.
Interestingly enough, this obsessive gravy consumption disorder (OGCD) apparently was passed on to the next generation of O’Briens. With Mom gone, Karen and I make the gravy now, me in Utah and she at her home near Fort Worth, Texas. It’s never as good in either state as Mom’s gravy, but it’s not bad either.
Before the big dinners, I often text my nieces, Karen’s three daughters, and urge them to hide the gravy from their mother and send some to me any way possible. In my own home, I watch suspiciously as my oldest daughter Erin (normally a kind and generous person) deliberately hoards the gravy boat she has conveniently set right by her plate. I bite my tongue as my adult son covers the entire surface area of his plate (his entire plate!) with what seems like about forty-seven ladles of my precious liquid gold.
My wife Vicki, free from this particular family genetic defect, watches the gravy wars with quiet toleration. Only my middle daughter Megan brings her father any gravy-related happiness at these holiday gatherings. A vegetarian, she focuses her energies on cranberry sauce, buttered mashed potatoes, and plain bread crumb stuffing. No gravy…what a wonderful child!
Thanksgiving is an important celebration of great love and sincere gratitude. Christmas, of course, is the season of joy and giving, the birthday of the Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, and Prince of Peace. These are very important things.
Someone might dare to say that the rest is just gravy. He or she has never been to our house for holiday dinners. And, I must note, it is quite possible that this person may not get an invitation this year either.
Happy Thanksgiving!
*Mike O’Brien is a writer and attorney living in Salt Lake City, Utah. His book Monastery Mornings, about growing up with the monks at the old Trappist monastery in Huntsville, Utah, will be published by Paraclete Press in August 2021.
