Gjeldeti

Albanian Turkey—A Model for American Thanksgiving

(A guest post by Thomas, visiting from Alaska)

Between Christmas and New Years, Susanne and I took an overnight trip to Berat, Albania’s oldest community. Berat is an inhabited citadel with terraced slopes, and narrow, cobblestone streets bordered by fifteen-foot-high walls. To walk these ancient streets, white-washed and maze-like, is transforming. Two thousand four-hundred years of history boggles this Alaskan’s mind, whose hometown has yet to celebrate its one-hundredth birthday. At the top of a 700 foot climb lies the main entrance to the fortified portion of Berat, which once protected a thriving urban center and 42 churches within its walls, but now lies in partial ruin from repeated attacks, including a German bombing during WWII. But this blog is not about Berat, or Balkan history. Susanne can blog on that later. This post is about turkey. Specifically, the turkey we ate in a tiny family run café within Berat’s massive stone walls.

Turkey, it turns out, is a New Year’s tradition in Albania. Although we may have missed our own traditional turkey feast at Christmas, we indulged ten-fold and a few days late in Berat.
Albanian turkey is oven roasted and served on a generous bed of dressing made from homemade bread, turkey drippings and giblets. Side dishes such as mixed salad, roasted vegetables, and traditional byrek, a cheese filled pastry, fight for space on the table. At times it’s hard to find a spot to wedge a glass of wine between all the platters. The volume of food is so generous, the flavors so robust, that the absence of central heating inside the ancient stone house goes nearly unnoticed. (The owner did remove the five gallon jug of home-pressed olive oil from atop a kerosene heater and moved the heater next to our table.)

Doomed....

Despite a wide variety of tasty foods, the turkey tantalized most. It was rich and moist and tasted like turkey, not like a frozen, leathery Butter Ball raised in a warehouse, slaughtered months earlier, and injected with saline to enhance weight and juiciness. How fresh is Albanian, free-range turkey? Well, as rich forkfuls of dark meat melted on our palates, the owner walked through the café to rinse his bloody knife.

We’d heard turkey gobbles in the background, as common as braying donkeys in Greece or angry car horns in Tirana. Upon seeing the knife, however, we recalled hearing one foreshortened gobble, which normally occur in threes.

This time of year, turkey transactions occur on nearly every street corner. Albanians carry their live purchases home, upside down by the legs, the same way American shoppers sling Fred Meyer bags of groceries to their cars.

Toting home dinner

Cash & Carry

In Berat, dark feathers cover white-washed streets, a negative of a fresh winter dusting. Dark pools of blood dry on stone stoops, and an occasional turkey head awaits a lucky dog or cat. While in America, the sight and sound of a turkey slaughter would draw the health inspector and a gaggle of animal rights activists, in Albania, signs of freshly killed turkey convinced me to reach for a third helping. This was real food, healthy food, grown locally and harvested minutes before being consumed. We were eating turkey, Albanian style, the same way it’s been raised and harvested and prepared for 2,400 years.

So why can’t Americans, who love turkey and make it the centerpiece of major holidays, figure out how to put real turkey on their tables? That’s for another blog.