Happy Thanksgiving.

I was musing this morning while prepping our dinner, and it was such a good muse that I thought -- must write this down. I was chopping cabbage for our cabbage salad -- it's a dish from Jim's family -- some call it "Aunt Rita's Cabbage Salad" referring to Jim's Mom; some say "Gram's Cabbage Salad" as in his Grandmother, but I always think of it as "Pap's." 

The Hovey family cabbage salad is extremely simple -- chopped cabbage, finely shredded carrot (for color), mayonnaise (Hellmann's), pepper and maybe some paprika sprinkled on top. The absolute most important detail in this recipe is the word "chopped." Not box-grated, not sliced, not pulsed in a food processor. It must be hand-chopped as small as possible with a very sharp knife on a cutting board. 

In the 70's we used to eat many Thanksgiving dinners at Gram and Pap Hovey's. We lived around the corner from them and I would pop over early in the morning for coffee [a treat in itself for coffee-lovers -- Pap would make the coffee the night before in one of those old metal percolator pots and just heat it up in the morning--STRONG and so good]. Anyway, Pap would be at the kitchen table hand-chopping the cabbage, methodically and slowly. Gram would sidle over to the table once in a while and push around some pieces on the board and smile and say "oh yes, that looks good." It's a tough job and takes about an hour to chop a good-sized head of cabbage, but I am totally convinced that it's the chop-chop-chop that makes it Pap's Cabbage Salad. 

Oh, I could go on for days about French Canadian cooking -- Gram's pork, potato and sage stuffing, tourtiere, boiled dinner, potato soup (no cream or milk), apple dumplin' (whipped cream always). Yum, tres nostalgique right now. Also faim. --cds