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When our group of foreign teachers found out that I used to work at a restaurant, I was nominated for the role of turkey chef for our Thanksgiving celebration. It was important to Stephen, the academic coordinator, (aka god at our language school) that our Thanksgiving be as authentic as possible. He insisted that we bake a turkey. The problem with turkeys is that no one in Korea knows what a turkey is, and even if they did, they would never want to eat one. Stephen, true to form, was able to locate and purchase one of the three frozen turkeys in all of Korea. He bought it from the black market in Seoul, a 3-hour drive from Taejeon. This Butterball weighed 14.7 lbs and cost around $55.00. Stephen had to pick it up a month in advance. In fact, he bought the turkey on his 6-hour round trip odyssey to pick Celeste and me up from the airport the day we landed in K-town. As delirious as I was after our 12-hour flight, I was still very attentive on the way home as Stephen related to me the story of acquiring the turkey. Apparently he drove to the airport, parked the car, and then made his way on to the subway, cooler in hand. He wound his way through Seoul on the subway maze until he came to the "foreign" quarter, called Itaewan. After a little bit of looking, he found the black market he had researched, a 10x10 room of uniquely American foods, undoubtedly smuggled from a US army base in Seoul. He bought the turkey and realized that he didn't have any ice to keep it cool. So, he left the turkey at the store and walked around until he found a Baskin Robins, which by the way, abound here in Korea. Stephen didn't speak Korean, and despite his charades, he was unsuccessful at convincing the woman behind the counter to sell him any ice. She did, however, allow him to buy some ice cream. Desperate to find a way to keep the turkey cold, he agreed to buy a half gallon of Pralines and Cream. Much to Stephen's surprise and pleasure, the woman began to fill his cooler with ice to preserve his ice cream. He urgently beckoned her to keep filling and filing the cooler until he had enough to keep the turkey cold. Now, with ice and ice cream in the cooler, he made his way back to the market, packed the turkey, then lugging the cooler, made his way back onto the subway system and then back to the airport, just in time to pick us up. This entire process took hours and hours. Needless to say, this turkey was precious. Not only was it the most expensive Butterball on the planet, but in terms of effort and time, its accumulated value was such that we thought about not eating it and instead sending it to the Smithsonian institute in Washington DC. So, when the mantle of turkey chef landed on my shoulders, I felt a little nervous (to say the least) about cooking it. In the weeks and days that preceded Thanksgiving, I had repeated National Lampoons-esque nightmares. In my dream, I saw the entire Kalma group sit down to share the long awaited Thanksgiving dinner, a new and novel experience for the many Koreans present and an emotional life preserver for the American teachers who were missing home and family on Thanksgiving. I dreamed that when the moment for carving the turkey had finally arrived, I pierced the skin of the bird with the carving knife and instead of a delicious steaming turkey aroma, out spewed a hot dry vapor as the entire bird shriveled like a giant, deflated football. Those polite enough to eat it were breaking teeth trying to chew their tougher-than-kevlar morsel of pulverized poultry while others were soaking it in their water goblets for five or ten minutes before attempting to chew. A few weeks before Thanksgiving, many of the Kalma teachers made a trip to Seoul. One of the stops on our list was the black market to get any other items that we might need for our Thanksgiving dinner. Everybody was quite content to buy Stovetop at 6 bucks a box so as to get "real" stuffing for Thanksgiving. I assured them that we didn't need to spend black market prices for things that could be made just just as easily by scratch. Again, they deferred the task of stuffing to me because nobody knew that you could make stuffing from scratch; they thought "scratch" meant from "the Stovetop." It wasn't until later that it dawned on me that I hadn't cooked neither stuffing nor turkey for more than five years. I wondered if I could pull it off. Worried that I might screw it up, I consulted the master: Mom. I felt like Gandalf deferring to the old and wise master of his order of culinary wizards. Mom emailed me ample recipes and instructions for cooking a turkey, stuffing, pies, rolls, cranberries, and cookies. Fearing more work than I had bargained for, I didn't tell the group of my recipes for things like rolls and cranberries. That and it was the end of the month and Celeste and I had the equivalent of $3 left to eat with for the rest of the week. So, we decided to incorporate the pot luck idea for Thanksgiving, the rest of the group each bringing a dish. It wouldn't be an "authentic" Thanksgiving like Stephen had imagined, but dad gummit, there would be TURKEY. Two days before Thanksgiving, I decided to start worrying about getting "my bird" (as I had affectionately begun calling it) out of the freezer in the teacher's lounge at our school. "My bird" filled the entire freezer section of the small refrigerator. The freezer had greedily frozen the bird inside, so we were forced to unplug the refrigerator to thaw it out enough to birth the bird. I began to thaw my bird on Monday, a good thing because it was barely ready to go into the oven by Wednesday morning. Using Mom's recipe, I made a stuffing the night before, with enough butter to get you well on your way to your first angioplasty. I calculated that my bird had to cook for at least five hours, so I gave myself six just in case. At 5:30 am Thanksgiving morning, I prepared my bird, stuffed it with the stuffing I'd prepared the day before and headed up to Mr. Kang's (the school director's) apartment, to use his oven. The gravy proved to be a bit more of a challenge. Besides the turkey drippings, I needed chicken boullion, another commodity that doesn't exist here in South Korea, or if it does, it is in small and secret amounts. Instead, I improvised using substances that are in abundance in K-town: Ramen flavoring packets and soy bean paste. Together they did nicely as a base for my gravy and didn't make it taste too Korean. My bird cooked, but it took six hours instead of five. All the staff, Korean and Foreign, began to pile into Mr. Kang's apartment, bringing all different dishes, some Korean, others American. We had two different types of mashed potatoes, my gravy, pumpkin, apple crisp, and carmel pecan pies (oh, and some crusty, bizarre-tasting cookies Celeste had tried to whoop up--without an oven--she used a toaster... hmmm). We had stuffing. We had carrots with oyster sauce, provided by Se and Jane, a British couple. Sylvia broke out her special homemade kimchi (fermented cabbage served cold in red pepper sauce--Korea's signature dish). We had some fishy number--red sauce with bits of unrecognizable fish in it (actually very tasty), rice cakes rolled in sesame seeds, plain rice, sesame candies, a drink made from rice, milk and fruit, a baguette, and of course. . . my bird. With apron around my neck and saber in hand, I carved the bird. It was warm, cooked all the way through, moist, and delicious. No one got sick, which I've come to learn is rare after a meal in Korea (especially a meal like this one, with a turkey whose history is questionable). I felt the meal was a success, although few of the Koreans tried the turkey--I could tell that it just seemed . . . wrong to them. True to form, this Thanksgiving produced many leftovers and people were actually bolting to their apartments to get containers to stash away some of my bird and stuffing for future meals. For a cook, one of the greatest compliments is eaten leftovers. Indubitably an unforgettable Thanksgiving. Since no one else in K-town gives a hoot about Thanksgiving, we still had to teach our classes in the afternoon and evening. Regardless, the day still felt like Thanksgiving all day long. I told most of my students the story about Thanksgiving and had some of them make Indian or pilgrims' hats to wear. They were livid with excitement, although nobody wanted to be a pansy pilgrim. The Chef's Thanksgiving Tale, scottro [2002-03-07]
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