MR PORTER’s US Editor explains why on this most foodie, and fraught, of holidays, “he’ll be fine”.

As I imagine is the case with every family, mine has a sort of cherished saying that serves in part as a sort of mantra and motto. Ours began with my grandmother, and is still very much in use at present – updated, however, for modern usage. When it is freezing in the house, and someone offers a blanket, when you are hungry, but would rather sulk than accept a meal, when you are hurt, but would rather mope in silence than receive succour, a Wallace will say, with the woe of the world upon him, “Don’t worry about me. I’ll be fine”.

In my grandmother’s hands, the phrasing was self-pity itself, a ladder she used to climb up onto the cross. As it has come down to me, through her equally dramatic son, that mopey martyrdom is now sort of a family signature. Except that, today, when my dad and I (and even my mom, mockingly) say I’ll be fine, it is wrapped in a mille-feuille of irony. And, even, a zip of fun.

This sentiment is the soul of our holiday gatherings, the spirit with which my father and I will cook and serve and eat Thanksgiving dinners, say. But dinner is a big thing for us. Food was the language my father and I found in common, the mutual interest through which we’ve been able to bond over the years, a shared passion that unites us in a singular cause. Or maybe three causes: eating, drinking, and being merry.

I remember what a big deal it was, for example, when my dad and I were reconnecting, about 15 years ago, and he told me about how he and his father had connected over food. Over oysters. When my dad was a teenager, his family had moved from Missouri to the Rockies, and his father, an architect, who was sometimes distant and unpredictable, would sometimes surprise my pops with a trip to The Oxford Hotel in downtown Denver, Colorado, for two dozen oysters – still a vivid, Proustian treat for my dad (“The Oxford also has one of the greatest Art Deco bars in the world,” he says now, “not that I had any idea about that then, but that’s where my dad introduced me to raw oysters”). Another time, my dad explained, he had been rewarded with sweet treats for good behaviour, and diagnosed his enduring sweet tooth as a desire to feel like “a good little boy”. This, from a Midwestern, Depression-era baby was revelatory.

Growing up in Independence, Missouri – in a house sometimes called the summer White House when he was sharing it with his uncle, President Harry S Truman – my dad says he spent a lot of his time in the kitchen, with the family’s housekeeper, Ms Vietta Garr, near enough the oven to stay warm in the winter, and hovering around the icebox throughout the summer. Or so I have gathered. Usually I have to cobble together a picture of his youth – the wax-paper-wrapped ham sandwiches, fried chickens from the backyard whose necks he’d snapped himself – from scraps of stories, offered in passing, stories heard second-hand, or inferred from his own writing. One memory, though, came through vividly, in frequent retelling, of an early Thanksgiving in the house in Independence. Bambi (1942) had just come out, so he must have been eight years old. Imagine his horror, then, when he made the connection between the delicious deer meat they were having – a departure from the traditional game birds, which had to be chewed gingerly so as to avoid the occasional lead shot buried in its flesh – and baby Bambi. For all of that, though, Pops seems to have gotten over any residual trauma, as we regularly had venison on the menu for dinner when I was a kid and my dad always loved it – or at least loved telling the story, which maybe amounts to the same thing. “It was Aunt Bee,” he told me recently, of Ms Bess Truman, later the first lady. “She said, ‘Well maybe this deer was Bambi’s enemy.’ And that made it all OK.”

Stories like these of course are the stars of family holidays, the oyster stuffing. But the story behind Thanksgiving itself is... not a great one, so for years I just boycotted it. Sat it out in sushi bars or Chinese restaurants – or even, in one case, on safari in Kenya. The marketing around the day, as well, is too ridiculous to make anyone feel particularly festive. But, the food! The food at my pops’ table during the holidays is good enough to crack my cynicism.

And so I came back, came home for the holidays, to whinge and whine, and for our own, personal, family traditions, traditions like, instead of a turkey entree (because who likes turkey anyway?), going with a variety of game birds: a central pheasant, say, surrounded by little duckies, always duckies, and then these surrounded by quail, lollipopped and fried, spatchcocked and broiled under a brick, or else roasted whole and laid on a pile of shredded, fried tortilla strips, arranged in the shape of little bird’s nests (yes, you got that right).

These memories are fun for me now, leavened over time. My memories of my grandmother, for example, have red-shifted toward the sweet with my own shifting perspective. Sitting in her little room, playing cards and eating saltines with jam as she always did, in her cardigan as she always was, she would tell me stories of family members she’d had shrunken and frozen in carbonite, Han Solo-style, onto little coins that hung from her charm bracelet. As we drifted through games of gin, or she distracted herself with solitaire, she’d leaf through the charms, reading off the names of the relatives like lines in a rosary prayer – each one followed by some maudlin refrain of disappointment, and a shrugging off of any comfort offered. “Oh, it’s all right,” she would say, “I’ll be fine.”

What seems funny to me now is not my grandmother’s seeming self-pity, but the Wallace family hyperbole; not whatever feeling is implied by our sulking, but the actual self-parodying character it demonstrates. This, I now know, is the recipe I’ve inherited, my heirloom humour, such as it is. Finding it to be a little more pleasing – and even, at times, a laugh-out-loud subject at our dinners – is just my personal spin on Grandma’s signature dish.

This year, as my dad was putting the final touches on his menu for the big day (pumpkin soup; Cornish hens basted in pomegranate juice and served with pineapple salsa; scalloped oysters; wild rice; green bean amandine; and a cranberry tart with gelato, also cranberry) I asked him what he’d be moaning about – I mean, thankful for. “I guess I’m thankful to live in California,” he said. “And for you, though I never see you and you never call, but that’s fine. I’ll be fine.”

And like that, another perfect holiday is in the books.

Here, my pops’ recipe for scalloped oysters:

3 cups smashed saltines (crackers) ½ cup butter (1 250g pack, melted) salt and pepper, to taste 2 jars (8oz/230ml) oysters 1 cup milk or cream 1 tsp Worcestershire Sauce

Combine cracker crumbs, butter, salt and pepper; sprinkle a third into a greased baking or soufflé dish. Arrange half of the oysters over crumbs (if they are really large as most jarred oysters are, cut them in half). Top with another third of the crumb mixture and the remaining oysters. Top with remaining crackers.

Combine milk/cream plus oyster juice from jars and Worcestershire sauce; pour over oysters. Dot top with a few pats of butter. Bake, uncovered, at 180ºC/350°F for 30-40 minutes or until top is golden brown.