Day 258 - The First Thanksgiving

Image of cooked turkey by Mink, via Flickr.com

Ambassador Pendleton was able to arrange for two turkeys to be delivered to Moldova from Romania, another example of Bucharest's new found ability to provide support instead of receiving support. Since none of us had kitchens, we arranged to use the kitchen on the ground floor of the VIP building to cook and the hall next to the kitchen to share the meal with the local employees. While we would have liked to introduce Thanksgiving as the family holiday it is in the U.S., we didn't want to try to extend those two turkeys too far so we invited just the employees.

On the Wednesday evening, the ambassador, David and Susan, Becky, Alex and I, and a couple of staffers who were in country on temporary duty gathered in the kitchen to prepare for the next day. We peeled potatoes and apples. The potatoes we left in water to be cooked and mashed the next day. The apples went into apple pies which we baked that night along with pumpkin pies. We tore up bread and mixed it with herbs and spices, onions and celery root, for stuffing. And we pulled out all the cans of corn, green beans and sweet potatoes that we wanted to serve as side dishes.

The next morning, the ambassador brought the two turkeys down to the kitchen and turned the dials to turn on the oven to get them started. Nothing happened. The two ovens that had worked so well the night before when we baked our pies did nothing in the morning. They were not gas stoves so it wasn't that we had run out of gas. They were electric stoves, hard-wired into the wall. She looked for fuses that might have blown and could find nothing. She finally went to the manager of the Codru Hotel to ask if he could figure out the problem. He came and looked around and also couldn't find anything wrong. His explanation was that the two stoves must need a rest after all the cooking the night before.

He did offer a solution: he brought the ambassador and the two stuffed turkeys to the hotel kitchen which served the hotel's restaurant and he had them put the turkeys into two of their ovens which the ambassador then sat in front of to make sure no one took the turkeys away.

Image or ricing potatoes by camknows, via Flickr.com

She managed to get word to us, so we took turns sitting by the ovens with the turkeys in them. In the meantime, the crew from the night before, minus David and Susan who had been invited to someone else's home for dinner, got the rest of the meal ready. The burners on the stove worked, so we were able to cook the potatoes, make gravy, heat up the vegetables, as we also made salads for the meal and took the jellied cranberry sauce from the cans. Once the potatoes were done, the ambassador suggested that the best way for us to get them mashed without lumps was to start by ricing them. She knew that she had a ricer among the shipment of kitchen supplies that were sent for her official residence. She sent Becky upstairs to look through the boxes in her living room. About ten minutes later Becky came down and said there wasn't one in the boxes. The ambassador went up to her apartment and came down with the ricer. Becky looked at it and said, "Oh, I saw that in your apartment. But that's an applesauce maker, not a ricer." The ambassador responded with a kindly, "Oh, Becky." The rest of us stared at one another in stunned silence.

The local staff began arriving around 1 p.m. and joined us at the table in the reception hall at the front of the building. We brought all the food to the table and served American style by passing things around the table. The local staff enjoyed the meal, but they admitted that they had never had food anything like it before. Poultry was rare in Moldova - at least on the menu since everyone seemed to have a hen on their balcony for eggs - and when we did see chicken on the menu in restaurants, it was the exception to the rule that the most expensive item on the menu must be best. Chicken was always the most expensive item on the menu, but the chickens were so small that the main course seemed more like an appetizer. Sometimes they were also tough. Turkeys, especially the raised to be placed onto a Thanksgiving table sized turkeys we had that day, were something entirely new.

Image of sweet corn by trimmer741, via Flickr.com

We hadn't done anything special with the vegetables, but even they seemed to be something new to the local staff. Stefan, one of the employees, finally asked us how we got the corn so sweet. Corn in Moldova was something fed to cattle or ground up as cornmeal, not something served to people. We explained that we didn't do anything to the corn. We just took it out of the can and heated it up, but it was sweet corn, not field corn.

To make sure there was something familiar for everyone, we had Moldovan wine.