“I can’t remember a Thanksgiving where the Dells didn’t make the turkey,” explains Amanda Dell, the Jewish Food Society’s program director. Her family has made the same turkey recipe in her grandmother’s Bronx apartment, in her parents apartment in Manhattan and later in their New Jersey home, a family vacation house in the Poconos, and in Amanda’s apartment in Stuy Town in Manhattan’s East Village.
One year, her parents Jane and Larry roasted the turkey and pushed it downtown to a relative’s apartment in a shopping cart. Jane can’t remember precisely why. “Maybe their oven wasn’t working,” she says. “That was rough.” But the bird made it.
The Dell family recipe forgoes the pesky requirement of basting a turkey repeatedly over hours of roasting. Instead, the bird is dressed and placed into a label-less paper bag that’s coated inside and out with oil. Then, the bag is pierced with small holes at the top to let out the steam and tied shut at the end of the bird with an oil-soaked piece of string. The result is “fabulous, crispy on the outside and very moist on the inside,” says Jane, and the bird releases just enough juices into the pan to make gravy.
No one is certain where the recipe came from — a magazine or a friend seems likely, say the Dells. But, it became part of the holiday tradition in the 1950s, when Jane’s mother Bertha, who was known as Bertie, started to make it in her Bronx apartment. “Once she started doing it, it was a revelation,” Jane says.
“My mother liked to keep the family together,” she adds. Her parents emigrated from Poland with Bertie’s mother Ida arriving at Castle Garden, the point of entry for immigrants arriving in New York before the opening of Ellis Island in 1892. The family assimilated, moving away from religious practices, “but they kept some of the traditions,” Jane says, and lived in a Jewish, Italian, and Irish neighborhood near Fordham Road. “My mother [she liked] the Jewish style of cooking.” There was schmaltz on hand in the kitchen, superb potato latkes, and chopped liver.
Bertie loved to cook, when her daughters were little, she would take Jane and her sister on a bus to Arthur Avenue in the Bronx to grocery shop and host family dinners. As the girls got older, Bertie took a job as a secretary for the Secret Service department of the IRS. Still, “My mother really made an effort, especially for Thanksgiving,” Jane adds. But, despite her love of cooking, Bertie “didn’t really share her [culinary] secrets all that much.”
Somehow, the technique of roasting a turkey in a bag was passed down — as was the custom of changing up nearly every other dish on the table. Al, Bertie’s brother, who is now 97-years-old, explains: “The stuffing was always different every year. There was sausage stuffing, cornbread stuffing, and I think there was wild rice involved in one stuffing with apricots.” Other sides over the years included Bertie’s chopped liver, which made an appearance on the family Thanksgiving table from time to time, says Jane.
In recent years, Amanda has taken on the role of Thanksgiving host, as she lives closest to Al, who is always included in the holiday festivities. “I really…wanted to host, so that I could take some of that [work] off of my parents,” she says. “I felt happy…that I could step up as an adult daughter that could host…I felt very proud to do that.”
She’s given the family holiday menu a more modern and seasonal spin, adding greenmarket salads inspired by London-based Israeli chef and cookbook author Yotam Ottolenghi, roasted delicata squash, and courtesy of her cousin, cranberry cornbread, to the menu. This year, there may be chopped liver as well. And, of course, at the center of everything, will sit Bertie’s turkey.
