My Irish husband Tony and I have recently moved to Birmingham, UK and I am writing a weekly blog explaining Europe to my fellow Americans. As a present for the upcoming Thanksgiving holiday season, this is an entry about the Thanksgiving dinner I cooked in Ireland a few years ago, here to explain our best holiday to you. You can find my blogs about Britain at www.gypsyteacher.blogspot.com.

'AMERICAN WOMAN CRUSHED BY TURKEY'

That headline flashed through my mind as I crossed the 'dual carriageway' (four-lane road), walking back to Tony's North Dublin home, carrying the Thanksgiving turkey the Superquinn meat department guy had ordered for me.

Of course, Ireland doesn't celebrate Thanksgiving. But when I planned my fall trip to visit Tony, the Irishman I had met in a pub that summer, I was determined to cook a Thanksgiving dinner for my new Irish friends. I had never made a Thanksgiving dinner for my old American friends, but I figured the Irish wouldn't realise if I screwed it up. I brought pumpkin pie filling and canned cranberry jelly with me, assuming that the rest of the ingredients would be available somewhere.

Turkeys are indigenous to North America, not North Dublin. So the Irish only eat them at Christmas and they're not readily available year round. The day I arrived from America I ordered ours at the Superquinn. I said we were expecting seven or eight for dinner, and the Meat Guy recommended a twelve-pound bird that I could pick up Friday.

I had given up the idea of having our dinner on the day which is the real Thanksgiving in the States. In Ireland, that would be a regular workday. So we picked Saturday, and the bird would arrive a day early.

When I went to pick it up, the Meat Guy hesitated. 'There's a mistake in the order,' he said. My heart stopped. 'Instead of a 12-pound bird, they sent a 20-pound bird. But I'll let you have it for the same price.'

So we did indeed have a turkey we could afford. Turkey there is a lot more than 79 cents a pound. He handed me this humungous bird, but there was one problem: I had no car. By the time I walked to the bus stop with a huge turkey, waited for the bus with a huge turkey, got on the bus with a huge turkey, got off the bus with a huge turkey and walked from the bus stop to the house with a huge turkey, I decided I'd have been better off just walking home with the darn thing. Thank God I didn't get crushed by it, which would have resulted in the headline I'd envisioned earlier.

When I got the monster into the house and set it on the only available surface in the postage-stamp-size kitchen, it was the largest thing in the room. Then I looked at the oven. The little, tiny oven. I hoisted the bird into a pan, moved the oven's middle rack to the lowest rung and carefully slid the bird inside. The top of its breast just kissed the roof of the oven. It fit!

Tony's mother had cooked meals for ten in that tiny kitchen every day for almost 20 years. If she could do it, I could do it.

Next, I plucked the feathers off the turkey. The Irish like to know where their food comes from, so their potatoes have the dirt on them and their poultry have a few feathers. The second most important ingredient was my mom's stuffing, the main thing my brother and I remembered from our holiday dinners. When I first lived on my own, I had called her for the recipe, written it down somewhere and lost the sheet of paper, but I never forgot how to make it.

So on Friday night I took two loaves of white bread and, as Mom had taught me, spread the slices out on the table so that by morning they would be partially stale, with just the right crunch for stuffing. When we got up Saturday it was apparent that I hadn't allowed for one thing: Irish weather. Bread sitting out in that humidity doesn't crunch — it becomes a sponge. You could wring the moisture out of each slice. Tony and I blotted them with paper towels to get them dry, then ripped them into bite-size pieces.

Tony had to go into work that day, so I had the whole house to myself to get ready. I set to work chopping up lots of celery and onion for the stuffing and I sautéed it in a pound of butter. Real butter. Mom used only Land o' Lakes, but I had to substitute Kerrygold. No problem — the Irish have the best dairy products in the world.

After pouring the butter-celery-onion mixture over the bread pieces in a couple of big bowls, I mixed it with my bare hands. I beat two eggs with a little water and divided that over the stuffing in the bowls. Next came the poultry seasoning. My mother would have my brother and I taste the stuffing as she was working on it, and we would always say, 'More poultry seasoning.' Guess what: the Irish have never heard of 'poultry seasoning'. And, when you think about it, what is it?

I called my sister-in-law in Pittsburgh and had her read me the ingredients from her poultry seasoning jar. I mixed thyme and sage and created a close approximation, but decided not to use as much of it as usual.

Next, pumpkin pie. In our house, pumpkin pie was brought by Dad straight from the bakery. It never occurred to us that you could actually create such a treat from scratch. I followed the directions on the can of filling that I had brought, but it called for evaporated milk. I didn't have evaporated milk. I had condensed milk. Oh, what's the difference, I thought as I mixed it up and poured it into a pre-made pie shell. Thank God the Irish had those.

Potatoes. Aha! Common ground. However, in Tony's motherless, wifeless house there was no potato peeler. Taking a sharp knife, a big bag of potatoes with the dirt still on and a bucket of water, I moved my operation into the living room. Tony's house had no central heating, so I sat wrapped in two sweaters, peeling the dirty potatoes with a paring knife. I definitely heard a cosmic laugh from my great-grandmother, whom I had neither known nor met. She was saying, 'You tick. Why do you think we left?!'

When Tony came home, we pushed two tables together in the dining room and borrowed chairs from Mrs Cavanaugh down the street. She thought that celebrating this American tradition was a lovely idea, so we invited her to join us: that's an American tradition too. With that turkey, there would be more than enough to go around.

Tony's teenage kids arrived, wondering what all the fuss was about. When our American friend Pam and her Irish husband and babies showed up, she was thrilled to see canned cranberry jelly. We slid it into a bowl with all the ridges from the can still indented in it. The Irish couldn't understand why anyone would eat cranberries out of a can when you can get them fresh and make them into a 'loovely' sauce.

The dinner was Norman-Rockwell perfect — except for the pie. Evaporated milk and condensed milk are not the same thing. I showed the flat, bright orange filling in the pie shell to Pam and she said, 'I'll never tell'. So we covered it with real whipped cream and told the Irish it was an American delicacy, just for Thanksgiving.

We said grace under the picture of Sacred Heart, had a complete dinner with all the fixings, ate too much and nodded off on the couch in front of the TV.

The Irish heartily approved of all the food and traditions. The American Thanksgiving dinner is very much like what they eat all the time: carved meats, mashed potatoes and overcooked vegetables — and the flat pumpkin pie tasted so sweet, they just loved it. So the story of my Irish Thanksgiving is that there were no real disasters. Only those remedied by American ingenuity.

KDixonDonnelly

10.11.05 Front Page

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