You’re cooking turkey all wrong

If you live in America and eat grocery store turkey every year for Thanksgiving, you have no idea what real turkey is like. I didn’t either, until I spent Thanksgiving overseas and got blindsided by how weird we are. 

A little over ten years ago, I was living in southern Russia. I studied at a linguistics university there, and somehow my colleague Bryan and I got recruited to teach a biweekly English class at a small branch of our university. The branch campus was located over an hour away, just over the border into one of the republics that make up the North Caucasus. 

The director of the branch was a short, bald man with a booming voice who never seemed to stop talking. He and his two sons, all fluent in English, seemed like local celebrities. The younger son would come pick us up early in the morning in a beat-up little car to make the 70-minute drive over winding mountain roads to his village. He seemed to relish the chance to speed on the highways, and he knew right where to slow down in advance for the potholes. He explained to us the importance of keeping the car windows unfogged, because fogged-up windows were a tip-off to the police that the driver could be drunk and we would be more likely to get pulled over at checkpoints. 

When we arrived at the university, we would have a few minutes to use the restroom (I always needed that after the crazy drive!) and get our bearings while the students gathered into their lecture hall. There were probably 50 students there, all sitting two by two at tiny desks. The room was cold, and they would often keep their jackets on. It seemed like everyone wore black. Once they explained to me that black is the favorite color of the peoples of the Caucasus. They weren’t sure why, but it looked sharp, and made sense–  the name of the people group we were working with, Karachay, actually means Black River. 

The booming director asked us to read lectures to the students. There was one decrepit “American Studies” textbook in the university, and we were told to read it aloud, v-e-r-y slowly, while the students copied it down on paper. This was a standard Soviet teaching method. It was puzzling to me, but I didn’t know enough to give push-back. Those years were before I took my CELTA training and learned more effective ways to teach English, so I went along with it. 

After we read a lecture about American holidays, the director and his sons decided it would be a good cultural experience for the students to celebrate Thanksgiving with us. They asked what we usually eat, and we said the sides can vary, but the main non-negotiable is turkey. 

So on the Friday right after Thanksgiving when we showed up for class, they had set up the campus cafeteria with fancy colored paper napkins all folded in tiny triangles, fruit juice, and little bowls of salad (which can be any combination of vegetables, but they are always boiled and covered in creamy sauce, like our potato salad) on long tables for all the students.

We sat down in anticipation and Bryan led the room in a prayer over the meal in Jesus’s name (so those dear Muslim students could get the full cultural experience). Then the cafeteria workers brought out… big skewers of turkey kebab! 

I had to stifle my laughter. It had never occurred to me that there could be other ways of cooking a turkey than what I had always seen at home. And apparently it never occurred to them that there could be other ways of cooking meat than to skewer and grill it. 

I have to say, though: that might have been the most delicious Thanksgiving meal I’ve ever had. Sure, the meat was rubbery and flavorless (because, friends, healthy turkeys are shaped more like Roadrunner than Butterball), the sides were all wrong, and there was no stuffing–  but dozens of people from a remote mountain village had shown me touching hospitality by preparing a meal according to my traditions, not theirs. They welcomed me as I was. 

I hope that this Thanksgiving, we can move beyond our little issues and choose to welcome people as they are, in Jesus’s name. 

(If you haven’t read it yet, also check out “What happened when someone actually wanted to wash my feet.”)

Photo credit for turkey kebab: Bayati_96