DATE: Thursday, November 27, 1997           TAG: 9711270702
SECTION: LOCAL                   PAGE: B1   EDITION: FINAL 

TYPE: Column 

SOURCE: Guy Friddell 

                                            LENGTH:   51 lines

A CORNUCOPIA FILLED WITH THE SIMPLE GIFT OF THANKS

It is not too soon to revive our drive to make the day after Thanksgiving a holiday, namely Recovery Day.

Thanksgiving is one of the least stressful of holidays. All it asks is that we eat and enjoy ourselves. There's no gift-giving, except the most precious gift, which is love.

It is a day to please those who love to eat, and those who love to cook and watch them eat.

At the close, when guests stretch and yawn and pat their midriffs, everybody is replete, full of bonhomie, good will to men and women - and dogs and cats under foot, begging.

It is a gastronomic spectacle that deserves yet another day in which to run it over in your mind as you drive home and ruminate on all you have enjoyed.

First, your relatives and friends and their blissful faces as they put away Nonie's potato salad, Sarah's cranberry sauce, Maude's turkey stuffing - that stuffing, abetted by chestnuts, is worth the trip over the river and through the woods.

People never look more soulful than when eating of God's bounty that includes Moira's sweet potato pudding roofed by toasted marshmallows which, as it is being served, you watch to see if the big spoon will catch a sizable piece of the candied, tanned, top.

And then there's the turkey, crisped outside, succulent within, and the rich gravy, and several winter vegetables, including rutabagas, and creamed potatoes, puffy as a shining cumulous cloud and nearly as soft, enhanced with a pat of country butter. And squares of inch-thick corn bread of a size of paving blocks for a patio.

And black-eyed peas, with a cruet of vinegar and one of several greens, collards, mayhap, tamed a mite by the first frost.

And it doesn't hurt to have country ham with red-eye gravy on the side with a platter of biscuits. I'll trade my ham for your gravy.

Pies - mince meat, sweet potato, pumpkin - adorn the sideboard along with monumental 10-layer cakes, the showiest coated with fresh-shredded, bristling coconut, a toque of a cake to crown a queen of occasions.

Every family has a cherished recipe. Preparing collards, Wanda McDougald of Elizabeth City puts three or four unshelled pecans into the pot with the boiling greens to abate their emphatic odor.

``My mother told me to do that, and I'm pretty sure she got it from her mother, and it seems to help,'' she said. For seasoning, she boils salted pig tails for 20 minutes and then adds the collards for another 20.

``It's good seasoning, even if you don't eat the pig tails,'' she said.

Let us have Friday to give thanks for Thanksgiving and all it brings, including pig-tailed collards.

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