“This is how the Americans do it,” my grandmother would say as she laid the marshmallow-covered sweet potatoes on the table.
Sittau, which means “grandma” in Arabic, was the first of her six brothers and sisters to be born in the U.S. rather than Syria, the family’s first “real” American. Yet, Americans were still “other” to her, an elusive tribe she aspired to join, whose ways were to be carefully studied and appropriated.
The meal was changed and adapted. As it spread south, it picked up cornbread and sweet potatoes. As it went west, it took on seasonal ingredients such as artichokes, and regional flavors such as masa and chilies.
Enter the Thanksgiving feast. Because she only cooked “American” once a year, it wasn’t much to look forward to. Those potatoes were mushy and cloying. The turkey was like carpet fiber. And the only one who really enjoyed it was my other grandmother, who was of Irish descent and therefore used to eating overcooked poultry. But the meal was Sittau’s declaration that she belonged, and an instruction to her children on how to become unimpeachable patriots.
And Sittau wasn’t alone. Starting in the late 19th century, Thanksgiving was seen as a way to “Americanize” new immigrants. Schoolchildren of all backgrounds were kitted out in pilgrim hats, and sent home with glorified tales of the Pilgrim Fathers’ heroism and instructions to preach the gospel of turkey and cranberry dressing, says food historian Sandra Oliver, co-author of Giving Thanks, a history of the holiday. “It was a way of teaching people how to be American,” she said.
And then the most American thing of all happened: The meal was changed and adapted. As it spread south, it picked up cornbread and sweet potatoes. As it went west, it took on seasonal ingredients such as artichokes, and regional flavors such as masa and chilies. And when it reached tables like Sittau’s, its staples took their place alongside the things we already knew as celebration foods — the neatly cut carrot-and-celery crudites (boring!) sidling up to kibbeh nayeh (Middle Eastern lamb tartare), the pumpkin pie sitting primly next to diamond-shaped pieces of baklava.
Sittau used her Thanksgiving turkey and sweet potatoes to claim her place as an American. Decades later, my brothers and I do the opposite: The turkey we take for granted, but the kibbeh and grape leaves, the string cheese and baklava — these are items we wheel out only a couple of times a year. And only when we’re together. They are our way of remembering how our journey to America began, and of giving thanks to the family that brought us here.
