For Elizabeth Heiskell, Thanksgiving is about tradition — even when tradition gets a little messy.
She is, by her own description, a rule breaker. But when it comes to Thanksgiving, Elizabeth Heiskell believes in rules.
The Oxford cook, author, caterer and television personality is a firm believer that Thanksgiving should look — and taste — much like it always has. The turkey should be traditional. The dressing should be made a certain way. The menu should carry the flavors and memories of generations past.
Of course, life has a way of messing with even the best-laid Thanksgiving plans.
These days, Heiskell’s holiday table has expanded to include mashed potatoes, Boursin potatoes, squash casserole, macaroni and cheese and green bean casserole — dishes she admits would probably horrify her grandmother and great-grandmother.
But that’s family, too.
Heiskell sat down with Malcom White and Carol Puckett to chat about Thanksgiving on Mississippi Public Broadcasting and talked about Thanksgiving traditions, the Egg Bowl, her famous pillowcase turkey, chasing down television executives with homemade food and her unlikely transformation into a TikTok sensation.
You describe yourself as a rule breaker. But Thanksgiving is different?
I’m very much a rule breaker. Carol, you know this about me from our days working together at Viking. But when it comes to Thanksgiving, I am all about the rules.
I think it should be traditional. I think it should be the same every year. I don’t think there’s any reason to deviate.
And Thanksgiving in Mississippi has another little complication when the Egg Bowl falls around the holiday.
Oh, absolutely.
The thing that’s so difficult about the Egg Bowl is that you’re going to have family members who are on both sides of this fence. It’s not like you’re playing Georgia or Alabama. These people are sitting at your Thanksgiving dinner.
That happens all across Mississippi.
My daughter went to Mississippi State. My dad grew up a passionate Mississippi State fan and still is. I went to State. And here we are sitting in the middle of Oxford, Mississippi, with the most die-hard Rebels you’ve ever seen in your life.
So you have to play nice on Thanksgiving.
No trash talking. None of that.
But then Friday morning you wake up and, buddy, it’s game on.
And you learned early that it’s probably best not to discuss the rivalry too much.
Oh, absolutely.
The first time Luke ever met my dad, we went down to Starkville for the Mississippi State-Ole Miss game. Luke proceeded to drink, I swear to God, a whole bottle of bourbon. Things went downhill real fast.
Ole Miss lost.
I’m telling you, Luke acted out like nothing I had ever seen before. Then he passed out on the way home because we were going to take him to the camp.
He kept waking up and saying, “Don’t make sure you drop me at the duck camp.”
Daddy looked back at him and said, “Son, you’re going to be lucky if I even slow the car down before I kick you out.”
It was horrible.
So we don’t really talk a lot about the Egg Bowl.
What is the Egg Bowl like from the perspective of someone who caters in Oxford and around the Grove?
It’s the best day and the worst day. That’s the only way you can describe it.
Somebody is going to be happy and somebody is going to be mad.
We don’t usually cater for the Egg Bowl because it’s the day before Thanksgiving, and I want my people to be able to cook Thanksgiving. I don’t want us having to cook on Thanksgiving after we’ve just done the Grove.
But everybody else is in it. Taylor Grocery will be frying catfish. Everybody is working.
I’ve just decided I can’t do it.
You’ve certainly done your share of work in the Grove, though.
Oh, my gosh.
Oklahoma almost killed me.
People don’t understand the Grove unless they’ve actually been there and catered it or set up their own tent. They’re going to close that Grove three hours ahead of game time, which means you’re going to need to be in the Grove five hours ahead of time so you can get set up and get out.
For Oklahoma, they closed it four hours before game time because there were so many people.
It was an 11 a.m. kickoff. They closed the Grove at 7 a.m.
We were in the Grove at 4 a.m., in the pitch-black dark, trying to set up tents.
It was something.
But if there is one Thanksgiving tradition that has become synonymous with you, it’s the pillowcase turkey.
That damn turkey has taken me everywhere.
It’s my grandmother’s recipe.
In 1950, there wasn’t a Williams Sonoma in Greenville, Mississippi. You couldn’t get on Amazon and order cheesecloth. So she took a pillowcase.
And I don’t mean one she had slept on the night before. Obviously, it was a clean pillowcase.
It had to be white and 100% cotton.
She would wrap the turkey in the pillowcase and flip him upside down so all of the juices would run toward the breast.
My grandfather loved a dark gravy. He didn’t want a creamy poultry gravy. So she would pour red wine over it, put bay leaves in the bottom of the pan and add a little cognac.
You put the turkey in a V-rack in a roasting pan. And if you don’t have a V-rack, you need to go get one.
I feel so sorry for people I see in line at Kroger with that big tinfoil roasting pan. I don’t understand how they get the turkey out. I’m sure the whole thing collapses.
Just get a V-rack.
What makes the pillowcase work?
It’s almost like one more layer of protection to really hold in all those juices. It almost steams the turkey.
And it is truly epic.
You baste it with butter and wine while it cooks. Then, right before it comes out, it’s a team effort.
You have to get the turkey out. You have to lift it. You have to flip it. You have to get the pillowcase off — all in one fell swoop.
It is an ordeal.
Then you flip him, put him back in the pan, baste him with more butter and put him back in the oven so he can brown.
The recipe eventually caught the attention of Garden & Gun and Southern Living.
Garden & Gun did the article first, and then Southern Living picked it up.
Southern Living is neurotic about testing recipes. They tested 10,000 recipes that year, and my pillowcase turkey landed in the top 10.
Not the top 10 turkeys.
The top 10 recipes.
And then came the Today Show.
I had wanted to be on the Today Show for 15 years.
I was watching Martha Stewart doing the Thanksgiving turkey, and I told my friend Jitsi, “I’m going to be on that Today Show and I’m going to do my grandmother’s pillowcase turkey.”
I said everybody needed to know about this recipe.
That ended up being the first recipe I ever did on the Today Show.
I did a whole turkey in two minutes and 13 seconds.
I flipped it, unrobed it, got it back in the oven — all on live television.
You can go back and watch it if you want. It was pretty funny.
You also have a reputation for being persistent.
Oh, absolutely.
I will chase somebody down.
When Garden & Gun came to Greenwood back when we were working together, I kept telling the editor, Sid Evans, that I needed to tell him about my pillowcase turkey.
I literally chased that poor man through Greenwood.
I could not have had my face any closer to his face.
I know he thought, “How is this lunatic working here? Why did they let her out of the kitchen?”
But it worked.
They did the article about my grandmother’s pillowcase turkey. Now we’re dear friends, and he’s the reason I did my first cookbook, Come On Over.
And then you did it again with NBC executive Andy Lack.
I saw that man on the street in New York after I’d been on the Today Show for a couple of months.
I literally ran at him and bear-hugged him like we were long-lost best friends.
Can you imagine what that man thought of me?
I think he was trying to shake me off.
But it worked.
Food has always been your calling card.
Absolutely.
I sent Andy Lack chicken salad, pimento cheese, Bloody Mary mix and cheese straws.
That’s how I got on the Today Show.
And now you’ve discovered a completely new audience on TikTok.
It’s like I’ve discovered another planet.
I had a TikTok account, but I wasn’t doing anything serious with it. Then sorority rush season came around, and I started watching all these Instagram and TikTok videos the sororities were making.
I found the cutest girl, KK Hagel, and hired her to take over my social media.
Buddy, she is killing it.
When we started, I had 950 followers.
Within two weeks, we had 51,000.
Then we had a viral video of my chicken salad that got 2.3 million views.
It’s three ingredients — chicken, Cavender’s and Hellmann’s mayonnaise.
Well, four if you count celery.
It’s really more about the method of how you cook the chicken.
Bethenny Frankel was commenting on it. We were going back and forth.
Then they immediately flew me to the Today Show to do the TikTok chicken salad.
It’s nuts.
You are also very particular about Thanksgiving dressing.
I have rules.
My cornbread dressing is an old family recipe. I use cornbread and crushed saltines. About three-fourths cornbread to one-fourth saltines.
I use chicken broth and sage. I sauté my sage and poultry seasoning with onions and celery because it activates everything and makes it smell really good.
Then I add cream of chicken and mushroom soup, a couple of eggs and some seasoned salt.
But you have to watch the sodium because chicken broth has a ton of it, and so does that cream soup.
And I like my cornbread chunky.
I don’t like it all mushed up.
And absolutely no oysters?
Absolutely not.
If somebody told me I needed to put an oyster in my dressing to impress somebody, it would not happen.
Crab meat?
No.
I’m sorry. Absolutely not.
Cornbread dressing is not Crabmeat Maison. You can call it what you want to.
“I think it’s one of the tackiest things anybody has ever created.” — Elizabeth Heiskell on green-bean casserole
What about green bean casserole?
I’m going to tell you right now, I think it’s one of the tackiest things anybody has ever created.
My grandmother and great-grandmother would no more have had green bean casserole on the Thanksgiving table than the man in the moon.
The menu was the same every year.
Nothing changed.
So what was on that original family Thanksgiving table?
It was always turkey with that pillowcase turkey gravy.
We did rice. We did not do potatoes.
We had asparagus with hollandaise, cornbread dressing and a grapefruit salad with avocado and a beautiful French vinaigrette over lettuce.
Then the best sweet potatoes you’ve ever had, with marshmallows.
Cranberries, obviously.
And my grandmother would make a Charlotte Russe for dessert.
That was it.
And it didn’t change.
But now you’ve got children.
And they’ve changed everything.
It’s all gone to hell in a handbasket.
I’m going to be totally honest.
Now we’ve got turkey, gravy, cranberry sauce, cornbread dressing and sweet potatoes.
Then they want mashed potatoes. They want Boursin potatoes. They want squash casserole. They want macaroni and cheese. They want rice because my daughter doesn’t like potatoes.
And, of course, asparagus.
I’m still going to do that just to have at least something that’s not in a Pyrex dish.
My grandmother and great-grandmother are rolling over in their graves with what’s going on at this house.
But that’s family.
And that’s Thanksgiving.
Traditions change. Families grow. Menus expand. Somebody inevitably wants macaroni and cheese.
And somewhere in the middle of it all, there is still that turkey — wrapped in a clean white pillowcase, just like Elizabeth’s grandmother made it.
