Magazine covers focused on turkey

Thanksgiving must be a perplexing time for food modelers. My empathy here is for the paid professionals who set up food displays for the covers of cooking magazines. When November rolls around, there’s just one food item eligible for the cover of magazines like Gourmet and Bon Appetit, and that, of course, is a roasted turkey.

Even though the holiday season is a time of colorful, eye-catching desserts and other dishes, the poor food modelers at these magazines are limited to working with your basic brown turkey, the icon of the Thanksgiving meal. There it is, right there on the cover of virtually every one of their Thanksgiving covers for time immemorial.

The exception to the rule is Cooking Light, which this year features a pecan pie on its Thanksgiving cover. But I wasn’t able to find, in my collection of back issues of Gourmet and Bon Appetit, a single turkey-less November cover.

Moreover, the roasted turkey covers tend to be monotonous. This year, both magazines offer us roasted turkey in profile. The frame of the Gourmet cover cuts off about one-third of the breast end of the turkey, vaguely reminiscent of a Degas ballerina moving off the canvas. But the basic setup is more likely to be a brown turkey surrounded by various fruits and other items, giving the cover the appearance of a still-life.

This is what the food modelers are reduced to. Forced year after year to use the turkey as cover subject, they manipulate the camera angles, lighting and backdrop to make the photo seem newly engaging. Aerial photos, photos shot down the length of the turkey — everything has been tried. Last year, Gourmet photographed the turkey from slightly below a pedestal platter, which made the bird appear to hover.

Despite these machinations, it’s still a turkey, and I suspect that readers like it that way. With the exception of the Jewish feasts, Thanksgiving dinner is the most tradition-bound holiday meal in American culture. While readers look at the photos inside the magazines and read the innovative recipes for side dishes and desserts, my guess is that the majority of cooks will make Thanksgiving dinner the same way they always have.

I don’t envision a new trend emerging from Gourmet’s recipe for pomegranate gravy, or too many cooks forsaking Grandma’s stuffing to try out the recipe for Swiss chard “purses” filled with sausage.

We expect the menu to be the same year after year, and we take comfort in the link to a shared past. After all, what is a traditional meal but a communion with our ancestors?

That said, I’ll pass along one tip from the November Bon Appetit that might be worth trying and will have a low impact on the standard menu. The cover bird is billed as a thyme-roasted turkey. Three tablespoons of chopped fresh thyme are spread under the skin and across the breast before roasting.

During basting, the herb will permeate the bird and the pan drippings. In addition, the herb will be visible after the skin becomes translucent during cooking — or at least that’s what happened to the turkey on the cover.

Notes to readers: Last week’s sweet potato recipe mistakenly called for fried apricot. As someone astutely pointed out, the correct ingredient is dried apricot.

Also, if anyone has ever brined a turkey, I’d be interested to talk to you about it. Please e-mail me.