Turkeys all the way down
tales (and tails) from the weird side of blueberry season
This week’s edition of the Local Technique Opinion comes to you from Brooklyn, where it’s already been a long, strange year even though we’re only in August. My day job as a food stylist makes me a card-carrying member of the media, and the media’s job is to mediate, to take the common experience of being a soft, vulnerable life form on a planet hurtling towards the heat death of the universe and sell you back a mental framework for coping with that. We distill the raw material of existence into stories that make it make sense. In the words of my local newspaper, we seek the truth and help people understand the world. This week in NYC, that truth is turkuterie.
New York is a city of apprenticeship to life, and you learn how to survive here from the people who have done it before you. One of the best pieces of advice I’ve received was from a brilliant bookseller named Maggie Topkis I once moonlighted for when I was a cook. She owned a mystery-and-crime bookstore two doors down from my restaurant in the West Village. She was an old acquaintance of Anthony Bourdain and she’d thrown launch parties at her store for him, back when he was treading water as an aspiring writer of food-and-mafia-themed thrillers (this was all before his mom, Gladys, a no-nonsense NYT editor, intervened at The New Yorker and launched his career on his behalf). Tony, rather than inviting anyone even remotely connected to publishing or PR to these events, instead thanked Maggie by inviting East Village winos to come across town and drink all her wine for free.
So that’s not the advice. We’ll get to the advice in a second. First, let me rewind for context. On the editorial calendar here and now, we’re in the middle of a period known as Holiday, in a universe where Thanksgiving wraps up in August. You know the season is underway when you log on to Instagram and see your normal friends posting fun photos from the beach and your food stylist friends posting “DOES ANYONE HAVE A LEAD ON PUMPKINS 🙏” to their stories at half past midnight. Best of luck to any mere mortal who’s trying to source a jack o’lantern the size of a volleyball in late July, when the real ones are still babies on the vine…yet this is our Sisyphean task. If demand were high enough, I’m sure the divine algorithm of global commerce would decree a new season, one that could profit just from the absurdity of photo shoots. In the meantime, I can tell you that the upstairs bathroom of the Tribeca Whole Foods is relatively private, a great place for sobbing.
Still, we persist. I can’t share any images of my personal spin on turkuterie yet (not until it goes live in November, at least), but I’m not violating any NDAs by telling you that even without the exact details you can get the basic idea of the biomorphic avian snack board I was hired to create by googling the word. The concept is alive on the internet already.
And what a concept it is: a tom turkey, agitated into a state of full plumage by a baroque assortment of crackers, cheese, fruit, nuts and charcuterie. Feathers all the way up. A bird that looks like it means business, and by business I mean business. According to the official website of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, “Turkeys may attempt to dominate or attack people that they view as subordinates, and this behavior is observed most often during breeding season, a time when males puff out their feathers, fan their tails, and strut while gobbling and making other vocalizations.” This is exactly the vibe a turkuterie board aspires to: tail thrumming, ready to take this conversation outside.
Boards, as a genre, are notoriously difficult to style. This is because there’s so much social status riding on them. One unwritten goal of making a cheese or charcuterie board is to flex how much high-value food you have tucked away in your own tailfeathers. (“This behavior is common when turkeys are establishing social dominance or status within the flock,” notes Massachusetts.) The hard work lies not in arranging the snacks aesthetically — plenty of influencers are very talented at that — it’s in penetrating the hedges of the client brain to map the landscape within, in figuring out what type of flex their audience will respond to, what counts as compelling to their flock, what makes their garden grow. One client’s clothbound cheddar is another’s Hot Cheeto. The guesswork while shopping is agony.
The other part of styling boards, the part I love, is the pure hospitality of it, the part where you get to practice your bizarre craft, where you indulge your own way of making food nice because making nice food to share is the secret to life. Which makes the constraints of turkuterie a relief. First, because the end product has to look like a dang turkey, which automatically weeds out anyone in the audience who takes themselves too seriously. (If “turkuterie platter” doesn’t make you chuckle a bit, seek immediate help.) Second, because creating a board is like entering the wilderness (see client psychology, above) and it’s a lot easier to carve a path through the forest of infinite options when the end zone is clear, when you know what a touchdown looks like. Infinity divided by infinity = impossible. Infinity divided by turkey = scoreable.
Infinite options and limitless resources masquerade as the precursors to art, but they’re actually its enemies. Endless power doesn’t give creativity, it just gives more power. True creativity needs resources, yes, but it also needs some obstacle to overcome; it needs a lock to pick. Legally I can’t go into details, but I can tell you this is all a metaphor for how I ended up pairing blueberries and Castelvetrano olives along a central arc of “feathers” on the turkuterie board last week.
It seemed like a good idea at the time. Then the tides of doubt that lap at the shore of the 3 AM mind started rising, the waves that wet you with worry over whether one little choice you made that day (among the million other choices, all fine) was the one that finally flipped a switch that unlocked a levee that will now wash your life out to sea. The combination of blueberries and olives took me there. Here comes the flood. Sometimes this feeling fades with daybreak. But as I felt my chest inflating like a PFD over morning coffee, I knew I had to face it.
Which brings us to Maggie’s terrific advice, an old sales adage she once shared: if you can’t fix it, feature it. I.e., if you’re a bookseller and you receive a pallet of books with a glaring typo on the cover thanks to a cheap publisher’s oversight, you make a sign that says “RARE FIRST EDITION WITH UNCORRECTED COVER — EXTREMELY LIMITED COPIES AVAILABLE. ATTENTION COLLECTORS!” and you build a whole window display around it. Or say you’re a seasoned food editor and you encounter an unexpected obstacle, maybe the cake you’re developing is stuck to its bundt pan like a limpet to a rock; you break out the tripod, film the fiasco, and pump the gas on social media. If you’re a food stylist who paired blueberries and olives on a turkuterie board that’s going out to an audience of 3 million potential haters and you fear that in the egoless thrall of art you made a choice that now feels a little disgusting, you double down on research and plot how to claim the pairing actually works.
Fortunately, it wasn’t hard. The combination of blueberries and olives only feels off until you realize what good friends blueberries and olive oil are. You really notice the affinity when you taste heirloom blueberries at the height of their season (i.e., now) and discover that they’re so much more than what we’re accustomed to from supermarkets. A very fresh blueberry from a very good blueberry grower tastes like it has allspice or cinnamon baked into its skin, not quite sweetness but some uncanny analog, a sensation that comes more from living warmth than the pop of simple sugars.
Hurray for that. Unless you’re a hummingbird, sweetness alone is a boring drug, and good blueberries have so much more to offer. Pickled in brine or served alongside fish and game, they’re one of many fruits that have been thriving beyond the sugar-bricked walls of the European pastry kitchen forever. Last week I wrote about having an eyeopening meal at Owamni, the Indigenous-first restaurant in Minneapolis, where tepary beans and wild blackberries find themselves side by side. Following a long run to Brighton Beach this weekend, I enjoyed recovery plov from my favorite Uzbek buffet, where the veil between sweet and savory flies thin, where lamb fat, garbanzo beans and Zante currants come together in ways that share hundreds (if not thousands) of years of history.
Now, as blueberry season peaks, the last thing I thought I’d be writing about is olives, but it’s a crazy luxury, a wonder even, to be able to experience two fruits that are native to different continents side by side and to discover that they actually have some strange commonalities. (Yes, olives: a fruit!) To have discovered this while doing preemptive damage control on a photo of a turkuterie board for the internet is absurd. But making a living as a food stylist, period, takes a certain degree of lightheartedness and optimism in the face of chronic absurdity (which is why it’s a profession well suited to ex-restaurant cooks, moms, and other veterans of military service). You have to be able to sit with the chaotic entropy of the world around you and spin a truth from it that someone is willing, literally, to swallow, a truth that sees the potential of good things rather than the inevitability of bad things. If you can’t fix it, feature it.
Illustration by Adrienne Anderson.