The real joy of festivals comes with their leftovers
Matthew Perry’s recent death will seem particularly sad during the next weekend’s Thanksgiving. The one festival which 'Friends', the TV show in which he played Chandler, really celebrated was this purely American occasion for good cooking (Monica), bad cooking (Rachel), guilt-tripping about cooking (Phoebe), annoying friends with bad jokes (Chandler), eating (Joey) and enjoying leftovers (Ross).
A whole episode (‘The One With Ross’s Sandwich’) was named after a special sandwich made with leftover Thanksgiving turkey.
The secret was the ‘moistmaker’, a slice of bread soaked in leftover gravy and added to the filling. It’s an example of how
eating food left over from festivities can be better than eating at the actual event.
During the event, you must eat in certain ways, endure others and perform various rituals. But afterwards, you can do whatever you like.
Anthropologist Peter Berger describes how the Gadaba tribe of the Odisha highlands celebrate basis porbo, the ‘festival of leftovers’, the day after a major summer ritual:
“Since every household sacrificed animals on the festival day, and meat is abundantly at hand, it is now cooked and eaten.”
Many festivals effectively follow this practice, with so much food cooked, purchased and gifted that it helps make meals for the next few days.
November begins with a glut of candy for American kids who went trick-or-treating on Halloween. In The Everlasting Meals Cookbook: Leftovers A-Z, Tamar Adler suggests making a cake with reduced sugar and crushed candy mixed in.
The traditional British Christmas meal is reborn on Boxing Day, December 26, in equally traditional dishes like Brussels sprouts salad and curried turkey.
