Starters and cranberries

Hello, and apologies for this edition coming to you a day later than you may have expected — Halloween interrupted the usual publishing process, we’ll be back to the regular Wednesday schedule next week. Also, as you are receiving the Premium Edition of Thanksgiving FYI, you are also invited to the official Slack where we discuss all manner of Thanksgiving adjacent topics. If you haven’t received an invitation, please email me at jim@thanksgiving.fyi and I’ll do everything I can to resolve that.

I have a simple goal with today’s newsletter: to convince you there is a place for snacks, starters, hors d'oeuvre, and the humble salad at Thanksgiving. I would have thought this would be a simple enough task, but there is a strong contingent of holiday opinion-havers that none of these belong at your table.

David Chang, he of the Momofuku empire and with his characteristic if not exactly charming bluster, said he doesn’t believe in appetizers at Thanksgiving. Sam Sifton, in his excellent treatise Thanksgiving: How to Cook It Well was a bit more graceful but equally firm.

You should make no salad. And you should cook no appetizers, whether you call them side dishes or not. I have tested this rage, so that you do not need to: nothing is more annoying at Thanksgiving than spending an entire day cooking for people only to see them crush their hunger an hour before dinner by inhaling a pound of cheese, olives, or deviled eggs. Nothing is grimmer than seeing someone forgo a second plate of dressing and thigh meat and yams and Brussels sprouts in the name of a thatch of arugula dressed with nuts and cheese, slicked down with olive oil.