Thanksgiving Redefined: How Vegetarian Sides Can Take Center Stage
By Jonathan Kauffman, guest contributor
What makes the Thanksgiving dinner, well, Thanksgiving?
Is it really the roast turkey? Or even the turkey and the stuffing? The turkey, the stuffing, the mashed potatoes, and the quivering, ridged cylinder of cranberry sauce?
Perhaps this is not a question you have asked yourself, unless you count the hours you’ve lurked in front of the oven door, curse-praying that the 20-pound bird inside makes it to the table between rare and overdone. The question becomes less rhetorical, and more a test of your hospitality, when the Thanksgiving party includes people who don’t eat meat.
There are ready solutions in the freezer section for accommodating vegetarians and vegans, of course (see below). But I want to run a different scenario by you: Last year, our group of friends, family, and family’s friends assembled around the Thanksgiving table for the third year in a row. And for the third year, enough of us were vegetarian that we didn’t bother serving turkey — or any other meat. There was a crusty, stuffing-like panade of bread, winter squash, caramelized onions, and gruyere. There was an opulently creamy potato gratin. A deeply savory bowl of braised kale and beans. Sweet potatoes. Brussels sprouts. Salad. Which one of them was the turkey substitute? They all gave off main course energy.
What if the point of the Thanksgiving meal isn’t the turkey? What if it is really the vegetarian Thanksgiving sides?
Some main opinions about side dishes
I surveyed a few Pacific Northwest authors of vegetarian cookbooks about whether, when hosting vegans and vegetarians, you really need to designate one dish as the turkey substitute. Opinions differed.
“I myself am married to a vegetarian, and I feel strongly about serving something other than the sides that his diet will allow,” wrote back Ivy Manning of Portland, author of Weeknight Vegetarian. “He shouldn’t have to eat whatever isn’t eliminated because of animal products. He should get something special, too. For years I’ve made him either “Beet Wellington” or delicata squash stuffed with mushroom, lentil and wild rice. They anchor the plate, supply a bit of protein, and make him feel like he’s not getting a consolation prize.”
“The sides have my heart when it comes to Thanksgiving,” wrote Portland’s Liz Crain, co-author of Fermenter: DIY Fermentation for Vegan Fare, who always contributes her family’s Garlic Cheese Grits Casserole to the table. “I just want to have as many different bits and bobs of dishes and flavors on my plate. Most of those are different veggies and grains. And a generous serving of my boyfriend, Jimbo’s, holiday mushroom gravy. Always.”
Hsiao-Ching Chou, author of Vegetarian Chinese Soul Food and the forthcoming Feasts of Good Fortune, had a more speculative answer: “If I were to do a veg Thanksgiving, it’d be family style with a ton of veg dishes,” she emailed. “From a Chinese cook’s perspective, composing a meal means considering how flavors, textures, seasonality (which includes traditional Chinese medicine properties), and symbolism meet in a single dish, and then how that dish then harmonizes with other dishes. If you have something crunchy and spicy, you also want something tender and more nuanced. If it’s a cool season, you want warming foods and vice versa. There’s so much orchestration in a meal, there’s hardly any time to worry about turkey.”
Hsiao-Ching’s answer rings pretty close to the position I, an omnivorous cook with a vegetarian husband, have arrived at after 14 years of turkey-free Thanksgivings — though to be fair, some of those years included prime rib.
Not just turkey vs. tofu
Meat eaters, particularly meat eaters in countries dominated by European food traditions, tend to fixate on the idea that everything on the table orbits around a main course of meat. The other 80% of dishes, no matter how ornate, no matter how delicious, are merely “sides.”
We used to bake our own tofu roast, basted with herbs and soy, to occupy that central spot. More and more, though, we haven’t bothered to replace the turkey, symbolically or culinarily. The entire Thanksgiving meal, cranberry sauce and all, is varied and delicious enough.
If you think of the Thanksgiving table as a cluster of autumnal favorites, it doesn’t take all that much to upgrade a few sides into something that feels special to vegans and omnivores alike. Stuffing — even if it’s featuring mushrooms and an umami-blast porcini broth instead of crammed into the cavity of a roasted — is a once-a-year feast dish for many of us. Sweet potatoes are deeply comforting, whether candied, roasted, or smothered in cream. Green bean casserole, with fresh beans, is something altogether finer than the canned-and-boxed version. In the early 2010s, entire restaurants devoted to mac and cheese flourished, and no one called their $20 versions “sides.” There is so much still in season in November: Winter squash. Brussels sprouts. Mashed potatoes.
If, in the middle of this bountiful fall dinner, this celebration of the spirit of gratitude, this excuse to gather around a table for a long and potentially excessive meal, it feels right to place a roast turkey and a cruet of gravy — well, then, it’s nice to serve a little meat for the meat eaters, too.
Besides, everyone knows, deep in their hearts, that turkey isn’t the point of the Thanksgiving meal. The reason so many of us rush through the savory dishes, whether meaty or meatless, is to get to the real Thanksgiving centerpiece: the pies.
A short, incomplete history of the frozen vegetarian Thanksgiving main
Although recipes for turkey-like vegetarian substitutes quietly circulated before the mid-1990s, 1997 was the year they entered the mainstream.
That year, a Bay Area chef named Miyoko Schinner (the same Miyoko of vegan cheese fame) began selling a seitan-based “UnTurkey” under the brand Now and Zen Foods. The recipe was one she had perfected at her San Francisco restaurant of the same name. That same year, a Hood River, Ore., tempeh maker named Seth Tibbott began selling a stuffed seitan-tofu roast he’d been tinkering with for a couple years. Its name: Tofurky.
These frozen holiday substitutes satisfied so many emotional and practical needs. For vegetarians, they represented inclusion at the Thanksgiving table, an embrace of the holiday’s traditions if not its main dish. But Tofurky and UnTurkey also appealed to omnivorous hosts who found themselves preparing a holiday meal for a vegan kid, cousin, or new girlfriend. Even if you had no idea what vegans ate, you could pop a Tofurky in the oven and that your guests would have enough to eat, what with all those sides.
For cooks with more advanced vegetarian skills, these roasts have always been a little more controversial. “I only bought the Tofurkey roast once, and the smell right out of the package was all I needed to know: No thank you,” wrote Ivy Manning. “My husband would rather eat vegetables than fake meat.”
“I do kind of love Oregon-born-and-bred Tofurky, as well as a Field Roast Celebration Loaf. I only have either during the holidays, so they feel nostalgic,” wrote Liz Crain.
Now and Zen closed up shop in the mid-2000s, but Tofurky now sells more than $40 million a year in meat substitutes. Its signature roast has a number of competitors, including Seattle’s own Field Roast Celebration Roast (released in 2003) and roasts from Gardein and Quorn.
There are vague signs that turkey substitutes are declining in popularity, and not because of the rise of second-generation fake meats like Impossible and Beyond Meat, none of which make holiday meals. SPINS, a wellness-focused data and intelligence provider, reports that sales of “plant-based loaves and roasts” in natural-foods stores is dropping. In those channels, Q4 sales from 2023 — which covers the holidays — were 23% lower than Q4 sales in 2021.
Perhaps palates are expanding, or more of us are shying away from large blocks of processed plant-based meats. More evidence, perhaps, that the meat or “meat” at the Thanksgiving table is no longer the main event.
Jonathan Kauffman is a James Beard Award-winning writer based in Portland. He is the author of Hippie Food, a history of the 1970s natural-food movement. He currently writes A Place Is a Gift, a free newsletter about his quest to eat his North Portland neighborhood.
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Try PCC recipes for these vegetarian Thanksgiving sides: