They're all wearing the same outfit.
Pick up Gourmet, Good Housekeeping, Bon Appetit or
even Family Circle and you'll see the turkey of the month reclining
on a platter bedecked in greenery and kumquats. In other magazines,
the accessories may vary slightly, but the effect is the same. The
free-range fashion police have spoken, and they're talking orange
and green.
It's bad enough that the turkeys themselves bear as
much resemblance to what most Americans will confront on Thanksgiving
as Kate Moss does to the average Safeway shopper. No big bird stuck
in an oven for four hours ever emerges as shapely and perfect as
Bon Appetit's does, with its breast under a veil of suspiciously
bright green minced thyme. (I did the herb rub one Thanksgiving.
My turkey looked like an ashtray.) But with fantasy food, you expect a little more creative flair. Flip through four or five magazines this month and you're likely to feel as if the holiday is really "Groundhog Day": Didn't I just see a turkey in kumquats and leaves?
Gourmet, the Vogue of the food world, carries the
look off most successfully, partly because its bird is roasted to
a George Hamilton turn but mostly because it's presented feet first
rather than breast forward. Even a classic suit can pass for couture
if the model is doing a handstand on the cover.
Good Housekeeping, the Gap of the food world, actually
follows the same pattern as Gourmet, but the leaves and fruit are
arranged in clumps rather than laid out like a blanket. Family Circle
also uses the same leaves and fruit, but its turkey makes it literally
seem like a pale imitation of the Gourmet cover; the poor thing
looks as if it had been interrupted in a tanning booth.
Taste of Home is the most surprising knockoff. The
magazine, published far from big-city stylists, is to Gourmet what
Wal-Mart is to Armani. But its buttery bird is surrounded with those
same fashion-forward kumquats and green herbs, along with lady apples
and sliced star fruit (possibly to pull your eye away from the stuffing
that protrudes from the turkey like a tumor).
Sunset's turkey has greenery around it but with trend-bucking
pomegranates. For Select magazine, though, which it publishes for
supermarket chains, the big bird was surrounded by squash slices
and, of course, kumquats and greenery.
A few magazines tried to think out of the hatbox,
like Saveur, which has a long-standing aversion to anything cutting-edge.
Its turkey is part of a feature on Clementine Paddleford, and the
garnishes are vintage: era-appropriate curly parsley and cherry
tomatoes. Food & Wine went for the minimalist look, with a few
flashes of green around its soft-focus bird, while Martha Stewart
Living presented a fashion victim, with way too many leaves and
berries and pods. Both turkeys have a forlorn aspect, though; they
make you feel as if Thanksgiving must be a sad season for the rich.
Probably the scariest bird is the one on the cover
of Fine Cooking, the one with just a half-hearted scattering of
sage leaves around its contorted body. The legs are not tied together
tidily but tucked under the fanny strip instead, and the skin is
oddly taut. It looks as if something really bad happened in a yoga
class.
Given that every food magazine except Vegetarian Times
feels compelled to feature a stylized turkey in its pages this month,
it's probably not surprising that there is so much overlap in the
accessories department. Most food stylists are apparently too busy
dressing next year's turkey to talk, but Paul Grimes, who deserves
credit or blame for Family Circle's centerpiece, had a simple explanation:
They went for the seasonal and the dramatic. Also, he said, "kumquats
come with those beautiful leaves. You just pull them out of the
little box and jam them around the bird."
Grimes refused to say what the well-stuffed turkey
will be wearing next Thanksgiving. But he insisted that all the
froufrou is always meant to inspire readers to try the same look
at home. And that seems rather silly considering no safety-conscious
cook would ever set out a turkey with the stuffing still in it breeding
bacteria, let alone with leaves lying in the path of the carving
knife. Besides, any reader knows the best accessory for a turkey
is not greenery but gravy. It may not be pretty, but it covers a
multitude of sins. |
