Ringraziamento (Thanksgiving In Pienza)

Thanksgiving is a quintessential American holiday.  Here in Italy, most people have heard of it, but they don't what it's all about.

I walked into La Posta, my favorite bar in Pienza, this morning for an espresso just as the Italian version of the Today Show was running a story on preparations for the Macy's Thanksgiving Parade.


I was peppered with questions about why Thanksgiving was such a bid deal, since it was nothing more than a department story promotion for Christmas toy sales.

This, then, is the average Italian's understanding of American Thanksgiving.

This is our first Thanksgiving spent in Pienza, and we decided to invite friends over for a traditional American Thanksgiving dinner.


The local macelleria (butcher shop) does not normally sell whole turkeys.

But Marco was more than happy to special order us one.

The big question was, did we want a tom or a hen?

When the turkey arrived, the tag...the part in English...made it perfectly clear who was going to buy whole turkeys.

From perusing the local grocery store last Spring, we knew cranberries were not available in Pienza.  In fact, in Italian cranberries are called "mirtilli rosso," red blueberries.

So, we brought cranberries with us from Seattle.
(Nobody said this wouldn't take advance planning.)

The big question was whether our tiny oven was big enough to hold the 6.8 kg (15 lb) turkey we purchased.



Had the turkey been one kilogram bigger...there would have been no way.

The apple pie presented another challenge.  Pies are not part of Italian cuisine (The closest thing is a crostata), so a pie plate is impossible to find.

Carol made due with a rectangular baking dish.

Then there's the conversion...pounds to kilograms and degrees fahrenheit to celsius.

Does it matter, since the oven thermometer reads a different temperature than the dial on the oven's controls?

There was considerable risk things wouldn't turn out.

But it all did.

Our guests arrived, perhaps a bit anxious about having a meal with neither pasta nor cheese.

But they soon got into the swing of things....

...like inventing new ways to eat cranberry sauce.

Italians rarely pick up food, other than bread, in their hands to eat.  (For instance, they wrap a cornetto...a croissant...in a napkin before picking it up).

Anna started out trying to eat the drumstick with a knife and fork.  She had to be prodded into eating with her hands.

Eventually, she got into it and thoroughly enjoyed the turkey leg.

We needn't have worried about whether our friends would accept these strange American foods.

All had seconds.  Everybody belonged to the Clean Plate Club, thereby making them eligible for dolce (the apple pie).

So......

If you think uninitiated Italians find the concept of Thanksgiving alien, how did they ever come up with this?