Esquire Surveys Chefs On Their Thanksgiving Preferences

Esquire:

Unlike other holidays, Thanksgiving is really about the food. There are no gifts. No costumes. Just sitting around a table to eat. (Okay, maybe a little football.) More than that, the food is steeped in tradition -- hundreds of years of it, in fact -- but whose? The thing about Thanksgiving is: Not everyone does it the same. We're not even always sure what counts as tradition and what doesn't (who the hell came up with those marshmallows, anyway?), or which traditions are okay to mess with, which ones should be left alone (no turkey, really?). So -- in what amounts to one of this blog's largest undertakings -- we asked some people who care quite a lot about food (thirty-one, to be exact, chefs like David Myers and David Burke, and especially chefs from our 2010 list of the Best New Restaurants in America) what they think of Thanksgiving: what they love about it, what they hate about it, the personal practices they've turned into annual traditions. What we found might surprise you, well, a lot.

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Comments

[DavidMG]

09:15 AM on 11/15/2010

Try a vegetarian Thanksgiving with recipies from 'American Wholefoods Cuisine' at http://www.healthyhighways.com/wholefood.shtml

[Bacon Is Meat Candy]

11:04 AM on 11/10/2010

The best thing about Thanksgiving turkey is the leftover turkey. Love turkey sandwiches.

[DavidMG]

09:21 AM on 11/15/2010

The best thing is the side dishes.

[missjulz]

04:56 PM on 11/09/2010

I'm kind of tired of turkey myself. Maybe I'll do a stuffed pork loin or the prime rib suggestion.

[SusanElizabeth1949]

10:31 PM on 11/09/2010

I'm having a nice brown venison stew with baking powder dumplings for Thanksgiving. There will be only the two of us this year and a turkey would be wasteful as heck.

[Progress08]

10:55 AM on 11/10/2010

I'm a ham for Thanksgiving person. I think because I buy alot of smoked turkey for making sandwiches that I prefer to have something else for Thanksgiving.