The power of giving and receiving love through food
By Rachel Hergett EBS COLUMNIST
I used to wonder about the people who said Thanksgiving was their favorite holiday. Halloween has costumes. Christmas has presents and singing. The Fourth of July has fireworks. All Thanksgiving has is a dumb turkey.
Maybe I’m wiser now. As the holiday approaches, I find myself leaning into its positive aspects. Despite its problematic origins, we are given this time to gather, to celebrate the gift of the people in our lives and share the best meal we can muster. For this, I am grateful. ‘Tis the season after all.
I find myself reminiscing in the name of Thanksgiving, thinking back with gratitude on the countless meals shared with those I love. Memories flood my brain as I write, and I grasp for them. I see friends and family gathered at Thanksgiving tables of all shapes and sizes. Then holiday memories give way to others, of myriad ways I was wrapped in what amounts to an edible hug.
In one such memory, I’m a college student sitting at my grandma Hergett’s kitchen table in Billings, watching while she pulls a baking sheet of her homemade cabbage rolls out of the oven—golden bread perfection stuffed with a filling of cabbage and hamburger. She knew they were a favorite, and made them because I was visiting. When it’s time to return home, I’m loaded down with Ziploc bags of extra cabbage rolls, garden vegetables and cans of green beans and peaches. This is love.
In another—or in what seems like the vast majority of my food memories—the table is my mother’s. She is making an extraordinarily giant pile of mashed potatoes because a potato-loving cousin will be joining us. It’s surely here I learned to celebrate people through food, to make the dishes you know will light them up. This is love.
In more recent memory, a friend who cooks at the Union Club offered to make me dinner while I was in Missoula for a concert this month. After scoping out the dishes coming from the kitchen and perusing the menu, I ordered the hand breaded chicken strips. When he brought them to my table, he had included no less than four sauces—homemade ranch, pesto vinaigrette, Thai chili and pineapple barbecue. He also only scoffed a little when I said those sauces were best on the chicken and asked for fry sauce. I’m a sauce girl, so I know that five sauces is love.
I’m also thinking of my stepfather, Frank, a conservationist and hunter, and some of his closest friends, who keep my freezer stocked with wild game and fish. This week, Frank gave me the backstrap from a white tail deer he shot at the beginning of hunting season. A quick search of the internet for why this matters sees comparisons of backstrap to filet mignon, though it comes from a different part of the animal. It is the lean and oh-so-tender muscle that runs along the outside of the spine. Giving it to me, even if he claims he prefers other cuts? Yeah, that’s love.
There are so many ways to give and receive love through food. It may come in the form of the college-era care packages filled with your mom’s chocolate chip cookies—the ones that somehow hit different even if the recipe is the one featured on the Tollhouse package. It’s a comforting jar of pot roast left on the doorstep of an overwhelmed friend, or the tray of lasagne given by the funeral home that buried my grandmother Keiko last year. Even in our tech-obsessed and somewhat disconnected world, we find new ways to do this. We DoorDash meals to friends, or send them a coffee gift card when they are on our minds. This too, is love.
Now, even if costumes are not the norm, I’m much more thankful for Thanksgiving. I’m blessed with people who have fed me in my life, and who have given me the opportunity to share that favor and show my love. I hope that you, too, have a warm place to land this holiday season, and a table that provides a loving meal and taste of home no matter where you are.
Rachel Hergett is a foodie and cook from Montana. She is arts editor emeritus at the Bozeman Daily Chronicle and has written for publications such as Food Network Magazine and Montana Quarterly. Rachel is also the host of the Magic Monday Show on KGLT-FM and teaches at Montana State University.
