Rooney: Giving Thanks For Butter

The producers of Sunday Morning have asked me to talk about food today because food is so important to Thanksgiving.

The emphasis is more on what we have for dinner this Thursday than it is on any other holiday. Once you've given thanks on Thanksgiving, there isn't much else to do but watch football and eat.

We think of our bodies as being the same as ourselves but they have different interests sometimes. For instance, I have always been puzzled by the fact that the appetite is not controlled by what our body needs to sustain itself. You'd think it would be but it's not.

If we get thirsty, we take a drink. Thirst goes away and we don't want any more water. On the other hand, if we get hungry and start eating, we just keep on eating if it tastes good whether we're still hungry or not. It seems wrong... some kind of basic flaw in our creation, there.

I cook quite a bit and consume a lot of food I'd probably be better off not taking in.
Just for example, to pick one at random, butter. Butter is near the top of my list of good foods. I don't care whether it's Thanksgiving, Labor Day or just dinner after work, there are very few things we cook that aren't made better by the addition of butter.

Just to keep this in the holiday spirit I'll give you some examples of using butter for Thanksgiving dinner. After the turkey has been in the oven for an hour or so and the skin is sort of dry, pull it out and go over the whole bird with a stick of butter in your hand. It helps keep the drumsticks and breast from getting too brown and it improves the taste. Do it several times while it's cooking.

When you make the dressing use good bread. We make the worst bread in the world in America. Our commercial bread is mush. Find good bread somewhere - there's usually a bakery in town -then cut it into cubes and dry it out in the oven. Melt a quarter pound or more of butter and mix it into the cubes. Put in six or eight eggs and whatever seasonings you want.

I always make more stuffing than I can stuff into the cavity and I put it in the oven in a big pan - with more butter.

For most of the year in this Country, we don't eat food that's as clearly American as Thanksgiving dinner is. The food of other countries is more definitely theirs than ours is ours. What we eat isn't as distinctively American as Chinese food is Chinese, Italian food is Italian, Indian food is Indian or French food is French.

Thanksgiving dinner is the exception. It's a very American meal. There isn't another meal like it anywhere in the world. And it's the same on millions of tables on Thanksgiving Day in our Country: Turkey, stuffing, gravy, cranberry sauce, mashed potatoes, squash, creamed onions and then mince and pumpkin pie.

I don't want to sound like an ugly American but it seems proper that Thanksgiving is so exclusively ours. We should keep it to ourselves but let's face it. We've got more to be thankful for than the people of most countries have.