I have cooked in foreign countries before, but trying to create the feel of a Canadian Thanksgiving outside of North America was a new challenge.  I’m labeling this as a Travel Tip, because I definitely recommend trying something similar.  It is a fantastic way to “dig deeper” as you explore a new city.

The basic image of Thanksgiving for me is a spread of turkey, cranberry sauce, stuffing, mashed potatoes, fiddleheads*, and pumpkin pie, surrounded by family on a quiet day with no shopping, no school, no parades, no football, but with card games and board games and walks in the crisp fall air.  We would usually call our direct relatives for a quick check-in.  This was well before video conferencing, and some years were even before the speaker phone feature.  Perhaps some of you remember developing the choreography of when to pass the phone and when to recite messages, while keeping an ear for the oven timer.  I loosely recall family friends joining us once, with the ulterior motive of having two of us play a clarinet duet as entertainment – not sure what they expected but everyone seemed to be thankful when (or that?) we finished.

Thanksgiving this year was Monday, October 14, 2019, and in our second week in our new city, here was the plan: 

Step one: make it a potluck dinner.  The burden of a whole meal is just unnecessary, and having various guests bringing food adds to the sense of gathering and community.  And on a practical note, we didn’t have a very large oven available.  

Step two: decide which one or two foods you really want and will therefore do yourself, and release any expectations of the rest. The gathering will wind up being richer for the diversity of dishes that arrive, especially local ones! 

Step three:  keep inviting people to join, with the encouragement that just bringing themselves is bringing something valuable.  And honestly, haven’t you noticed that you wind up with way too much food if everyone brings something?

So which foods didn’t I do?

• Fiddleheads.  I haven’t seen them outside of eastern Canada, so I wasn’t even going to look in Croatia.

• Pumpkin pie.  We put some effort into this before striking it.  Here is a picture of the one orange gourd we found while scouting the city’s outdoor markets. We have called it a pumpkin, and maybe it is.  The more classic gourd shown is an acorn squash so he would have a friend.  There was no canned pumpkin in any grocery stores – we even asked and received quizzical expressions.  I now know that pumpkin is native to North America, and apparently is not being widely exported – perhaps too perishable or some unpublished trade war that happened before my time.  [Aside: There isn’t a Starbucks here, but if there was, would it promote pumpkin spice lattes?  I doubt it.]

• Cranberry sauce. Well, a wiki search suggests that 98% of the world production of cranberries comes from Canada, USA, and Chile.  Basically, nowhere near Croatia.  Vendors excitedly pointed to their dried cranberries when I asked about brusnica, and we incredibly found cranberry juice, but that was the end of the cranberry road.

• Stuffing.  Or dressing.  Whichever term you prefer.  I don’t have an amazing family recipe with apples, or craisins, or a secret blend of spices, or a special kind of bread.  I didn’t hold my breath looking for a box labeled “Stove Top Stuffing” on the shelf.

• Potatoes. I figured this was an accessible bar that someone else might jump.  (And the resulting jump indeed cleared the bar by a very large margin.)

So what were my two foods?

• Turkey. Was. A. Must.  Intel from the local guides was that if I wanted a full turkey (pureca), then I would need to order it directly from a supplier, otherwise I would find it ‘dissected’ in various grocery stores and markets.  This prompted a store visit to see just how a turkey might be dissected.  But which store?  Why a Purex store of course!  It turns out, perhaps even back home, you can buy just legs, or just hips, or just breasts, or just necks.  Or I guess you could buy, cook, and plate them all to recreate the full offering….but you wouldn’t have a wishbone.  Ahhh the wishbone.  I remember my mother declaring where she was placing the wishbone to dry – on the ledge above the stove knobs, on the bread box, in the bread box (once the cat caught on.)  I also remember once when the wishbone was inadvertently broken during the carving of the turkey and a deep hush immediately filled the room.  Given, per above, I wasn’t motivated to stuff the bird, if the only reason I was considering a full bird was the wishbone, then maybe a dissected turkey breast was the universe giving me an Easy Button.  I hit the button.  

When it came time to buy it we weren’t near the first Purex store where we did the original research.  Two sets of eyes and four map apps and we could not find the Purex in the Green Market in Old Town Split.  (I convinced myself it had closed, moved, or changed names but we actually stumbled on it two days later!)  So we set off to a third Purex store on the other side of Old Town, creating yet another opportunity to discover new alleys and passageways.  Rest assured, that a three pound turkey breast was purchased, roasted with Dalmatian seasoning, sliced, and served!

• Pie.  I had released the thought of pumpkin pie, but I still held onto the overall idea of pie.  Next best seasonal pie?  Apple.  My favourite recipe calls for Granny Smith apples, which I had already happily seen as a normal offering in every store.  Prepared pie crust however…..hmmm.  Pie crust in a tin foil pie plate is not a thing here.  Pie crust you can unroll and lay into a pie plate is not a thing.  Even empty pie plates aren’t a common thing here.  I was about to experiment with using a springform pan when a silicone pie plate was secured through local crowdsourcing.  I did though experiment with the closest thing we could find to pie crust, which was more like filo dough.  And I took an educated guess at which tea cup seemed about the size of a measuring cup.  The result looked awesome, and anything with apples, butter, and brown sugar cooked together will taste amazing right?  The result was sort of an apple baklava?  No leftovers.

• Bonus item – Gravy.  I MADE GRAVY!?!  This was a last minute decision, and did require my roommate to run to the corner store for chicken stock.  Trying to imagine what my mother used to do, remembering something about risk of lumps, and convincing my fork it was a whisk, a sauce came to life and filled a gravy boat.  That’s right – I couldn’t find a pie plate, or canned gravy, or gravy packets, but the apartment came with a boat – perhaps for salad dressing?  Beginner’s luck or holiday magic – it was DELICIOUS.

Throughout the planning and preparing I had a lot of fun figuring out cross-cultural adaptations.  It gave us purpose to get out and explore new parts of the city and engage with locals.  The real gift, as I’m sure you all know, was just having special people gathered together in a spirit of gratitude.  The four Canadians in our group were surrounded by our Remote Year tramily (traveling family) for a genuine celebration.  

Fairly early into the dinner, I turned off the ‘Canadian Thanksgiving 2019’ Spotify playlist, happily realizing that it was being drowned out by laughter.

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* What are fiddleheads?  They are baby ferns that are curled up and look like the end of a violin.  As with other forest edibles, it is best to leave the picking to the professionals.  Harvest season is short as they will quickly become actual ferns!  So given they are clearly a spring harvest, how are they a part of my October tableau?  A few generations of my father’s family have lived in the province of New Brunswick which has a lot of woodland streams with the ostrich fern.  Fiddleheads gradually elevated from being a spring vegetable, to a family favourite, to a holiday staple.  In that part of the world you can find them in the frozen food section of the grocery store, next to the spinach.