While practicing an American medley of tunes by a male composer named Clare for the Kauai Community College Orchestra winter concert — with Thanksgiving Day upcoming — it struck me that “Turkey in the Straw” wasn’t included.
Which took me to remembering the first pit-roasted turkey I ate as a teen back in Southern California, long before I arrived on Kauai to sample the delights of luau turkey here.
“Pop Finney” dug the pit for that first tender, delicious, pit-roasted turkey I tasted. He was my mom’s crusty landlord who had a wide heart and became, with his wife (“Ma Finney”), like a beloved uncle and aunty to me and my sister, fatherless as we were.
Pop’s given name was Ralph. Of Irish extraction, he ran from a cruel stepmom somewhere in Utah at 15, $7 in his pocket. He was tall, and somehow managed to join the Navy under age. He’d sailed the oceans, learned to build ships, and was self-educated. He and Ma (given name Fern) built their own home while living in the apartment we eventually rented.
Mom loved them both, too, and regularly referred to the kind pair as “the salt of the earth.” Pop and Ma Finney were her lifelong friends, and they also became family to my first three children.
Once he retired from his “retirement job” of irrigating walnut orchards, he took up rock-hounding and crafting jewelry, and somehow took up pit-roasting the Finneys’ and their neighbor’s turkeys at Thanksgiving time.
I was invited along to a big warehouse shop of that day to buy The Turkey (a huge one that fed our family of three, too) at the special of around 19 cents a pound.
As a naturalized American, the whole process of getting ready for Thanksgiving and preparing the bird and all the “fixings” was very interesting to me — and the outcome, “yummy.”
The harvest time festival to an ex-Britisher is a familiar thing, but the American slant to harvest and gratitude carries a cultural difference. One thing I’ve learned is that it’s good to be grateful for the life-giving bounty one has if, indeed, you are one of the lucky ones, as I have been.
The truism of “waste not, want not” is something I learned not only from my frugal mom, who’d lived through the Depression and World War II and learned how to stretch resources well, but Pop and Ma Finney. Ma raised chickens in a pen behind the apartment. They were egg-layers and Sunday dinners.
She cultivated sweet corn and boysenberries in the side yard, and “put these up” in jars for the off-seasons, along with peaches from their trees and summer produce destined for the canning kettle as well. Mom got in on the canning sessions, her specialties being plum and apple butter, and English bitter marmalade. The garage shelves shone with the products of her industry, jars gleaming like jewels.
As for Pop wasting/wanting not, he’s the one who taught me how to make his “Turkey Rudder Soup” out of “the part that goes over the fence last.”
After the feast, and the subsequent turkey sandwiches and chunked turkey packages that would freeze for future turkey tetrazzini, stew and pie, Pop would work his magic with all the saved bones and scrappy leftovers, and the turkey rump. This is how I learned it, and how we have enjoyed it as we remember those kind people within our prayers of gratitude at Thanksgiving time over all these years.
The turkey-day feast seemed to extend itself as my young ‘uns awaited the expected soup as a post script to the main dinner. On cold November evenings as they grew through teen years to adulthood, it’s a wonder the slurping couldn’t be heard beyond the family dinner table and, we hoped, by the attendant waste-not, want-not spirits of Pa and Ma.
Dear Readers, I wish you your own good memories surrounding this day of gratitude. Please write to me if you make and enjoy the soup recipe. And check out some annual fund-raising efforts through Kauai school clubs involving pit-roasting your turkey – not “turkey-in-the-straw,” but turkey in ti leaves and foil, and they are ono (good).
Also, mark your December calendars to bring family and friends to the KCC Winter Concerts — all free admission: Symphony Orchestra, Sunday, Dec. 9, 4 p.m., and Jazz Ensemble &Wind Symphony, Friday, Dec. 14, 7 p.m. Both are at the newly renovated KCC Performing Arts Center. And for a great Winter Preview Concert to leave you wanting more, all three ensembles will offer selections on Friday, Nov. 30, 7 p.m., on stage at Kukui Grove Center.
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Dawn Fraser Kawahara, author and poet, made her home on Kauai in the 1980s. She and her husband, a retired biology teacher, live with books, music and birds in Wailua homesteads. Shared passions are travel and nature. The writer’s books may be found in local outlets and on Amazon. For further information, email tropicbirdpress@gmail.com.
