Wakey wakey

You know you're in Newfoundland when, while in the process of rummaging through a fridge in search of breakfast items, you come across a cooked turkey neck.

"A cooked turkey neck?" Yes. I can see how some would raise a sardonic eyebrow or purse their lips in distaste. You see, where I come from, we cook and eat turkey fairly often. It's kind of a staple. This could be due to the fact that a large turkey feeds many hungry people, which is great when a normal Sunday dinner with the family is comprised of no less than 15 participants. It could also be argued that the turkey serves as a convenient vehicle for all the tasty stuff that goes along with it - pease pudding, greens (turnip, mustard, dandelion and various other permutations), salt beef, boiled vegetables (potatoes, cabbage, carrots, turnip, parsnip, etc.) Or, it could be just because turkey is frigging delicious, full stop.

I won't go into a lengthy dissertation of how one actually eats a turkey neck - it's an ugly, ungainly process. There are vertebrae. There's also a spinal cord in there, which will vary in length/thickness/revoltingness according to the size of the bird from whence it came. You basically just haul the cooked neck out of the roasting pan (the neck always cooks faster than the rest of the turkey), scoop a ladlefull of dressing out of the exposed arse of the bird, throw the two into a bowl and eat it in one of two ways: standing over the stove like some sort of starving convict a la "Great Expectations", or, sitting down at the table in a darkened, fragrant kitchen and sharing the pickings with somone you love who also loves the neck. It has been my experience that neck folks are usually excellent people. My mother and her sister are neck people, as was my late grandmother O'Neill. Lovely ladies to a one.

Why do we love the neck so much? I have a couple of theories. One stems from the fact that we are not a wasteful folk. We share an inherent frugality that stems from a heritage built on large families from outport communities who lived off what the sea and land provided on a seasonal basis. Not much went to waste back in the day - there were no supermarkets in these tiny, isolated outports. Refrigeration was a bit on the sketchy side as well. So, if you turned up your nose at a nice bit of meat from whatever animal was on the menu, odds are you'd go hungry. Eating the neck just made sense.

A far less noble/romantic hypothesis can be attributed to man's basic survival instincts. The human race has been housebound for quite some time now, but if you strip away the iPods and trendy shoes, we're basically just a bunch of animals milling around waiting for the meat. What does a lion do when faced with the plump carcass of a freshly-killed ruminant? The lion feeds. It doesn't push aside what isn't boneless or skinless or grain-fed for its enjoyment. No, the lion gorges on the ambrosial organ meats, the rich, dark viscera. Bones are crunched and salty marrow is slurped and savoured. Tender stalks of necks are mouthed and mascerated by bigger animals with bigger teeth. That is, I think, a big part of what the turkey neck means to me. It's primal. The turkey neck is my right as the animal at the top of the food chain.

Animal though I am, I cannot overlook the social aspect of the neck. I mentioned previously that my mother is a neck person, as was her mother. The neck constitutes "a moment" amongst women in my family, shared amidst the ordered pandemonium of clanging pots and rising steam of dinner preparation. I was raised in warm houses filled with the laughter of grandparents and parents, brothers and sisters, aunts and uncles, untold cousins and their significant others. We grew up around the communal table. We laughed and sang, told stories and danced to music scraped from fiddles and squeezed from accordians. It was a never-ending cycle of food preparation and consumption as a family unit.

I learned so much from being with my mother and my grandmother in the kitchen at our various houses. I learned more than how to prepare the food that we would share - I learned about life, about being a woman. I learned what it would mean to be a matriarch presiding with love, pride and and aching sort of joy over a boisterous, brilliant family. The joy that I took from sharing tender, salty bits of meat with these women in a kitchen filled with the smell of their love of family is indescribable. I still have that with my mother. It is precious and beautiful and delicious.