Fruitcake and Other Feast Failures

    Ah, Thanksgiving - the holiday built around gratitude, family, and if we are being honest, food. I could add football to the list, but most games on Thanksgiving are so dull they just hasten the inevitable post-meal nap. 

    It’s definitely an American holiday that’s based on abundance.  Every November, families gather around dining room tables that groan under the weight of golden turkeys, dressing, spiral ham, buttery mashed potatoes, and assorted homemade casseroles.

    But lurking among these beloved dishes, hiding beside your mom’s mac and cheese and grandma’s field peas, are a couple of culinary outliers, foods that inspire grimaces not gratitude. Of course, I’m talking about  fruitcake and green bean casserole. If a Pilgrim wife had brought a fruitcake and a green bean casserole to the first Thanksgiving feast, the Indians might’ve killed them all on the spot.

    Although they may be served with the best intentions, these dishes usually end up as punchlines in family jokes, uneaten leftovers, or in the case of fruitcake, boat anchors. I get indigestion just looking at them.

    Let’s start with fruitcake, the undisputed  heavyweight champion of holiday hatred. Though it’s technically a Christmas dessert, fruitcake makes it’s debut around Thanksgiving, as if trying to extend its reign of terror. At its core, fruitcake is a dense loaf packed with nuts, spices, and candied fruits that look suspiciously like they’ve been marinating since the Carter administration. I wouldn’t be surprised if the expiration date on this year’s inventory was 2057.   Some recipes call for soaking it in rum or brandy, perhaps to make it edible, or more than likely, to dull the senses of whoever decides to eat it. 

    For centuries, fruitcake has been gifted, regifted, and eventually used as a door stop in family homes. There’s a famous joke that suggests there’s actually only one fruitcake in existence that keeps getting passed around year after year. Despite its long history, it remains the dessert that nobody wants but everyone feels obligated to have on the table, like an some kind of gross display you might see in a museum of medical history.  For goodness sake, make a pecan pie instead. 

     Then there’s the green bean casserole, which I find the most disgusting of all the Thanksgiving side dishes. It was created in 1955 by a Campbell’s Soup test kitchen as a way to sell more cream of mushroom soup, and boy, did that ever work.  Campbell’s says 60% of their annual canned mushroom soup is sold during the holiday season. This is the time of year when millions of Americans dutifully mix canned green beans (yuck), cream of mushroom soup, and crispy fried onions into a concoction that maxes out on the gross scale. The problem isn’t just the taste; it’s the texture. The green beans are limp, and when you mix them with the cream of mushroom soup, you get something that looks and tastes like algae-infused quicksand. The onions are the only reason anyone dares to even takes a bite of this stuff. I suppose it has some kind of nostalgic charm because everyone says, “It wouldn’t be Thanksgiving without it.” These are the same people who  push it around their plates while hoping someone else finishes it, which they don’t. My dogs even turn and run when I put it in their dish. And keep in mind, dogs have no problem licking their own posterior. 

    So why do these two dishes still exist? Partly because tradition and guilt are powerful forces.  Aunt Eileen would never forgive you if you didn’t try some of  her “famous” green bean casserole. And perhaps Thanksgiving is, in part, about honoring the foods that have appeared on family tables for generations, even if those foods are barely touched. In a strange way, the very fact that people don’t like these dishes has made them a part of  the holiday’s personality. They give everyone something to laugh about, to politely decline, and a reason to be thankful that it’s only served around the holidays.

    In the end, Thanksgiving wouldn’t be the same without these gastronomical misfits. For every perfectly prepared golden turkey, there must be a gummy slice of fruitcake. For every bowl of homemade mashed potatoes, there must be a dish of green bean casserole. They may not delight the palate, but they remind us that the holiday isn’t just about the food, it’s about family, laughter, and the stories that come from enduring the occasional culinary catastrophe.

    After all, if everything tasted good, what would we talk about for the other rest of the year? 

    And unfortunately for all of us, it’s only a few weeks until Christmas dinner when we’ll have to face both of them again. Yuck.