My Thanksgiving in New England

Laura · Joined: 16 May 2004 Posts: 446 Location: San Francisco

I'm back from New Hampshire. It started snowing the day before Thanksgiving, and by Saturday after Thanksgiving there was 6 inches of snow on the ground. It was really pretty -- I haven't seen a "white Thanksgiving" (let alone a "white Chistmas") in decades.

My parents took me to The Inn at Pleasant Lake, in New London, for an amazing dinner. It was a seated, prix fixe meal. Everyone gathered for cocktails in the inn's living room at around 4:30pm. After a while, the chef came out and talked to us about the menu. I wish I could remember his name, it's Brian something, I think MacKenzie, but I could be confusing that because I just watched five episodes of "Commander in Chief" back to back.

Anyway, Chef Brian is from New Orleans, but he made a traditional New England dinner using fresh local ingredients as much as possible. (That means there were a lot of root vegetables on the menu.) We started with a cream soup of roasted vegetables, mainly butternut squash but there were also tomatoes and zucchini in it. Then there was a salad of baby spinach leaves with a pomegranate vinagrette. The main dish was turkey breast wrapped around the stuffing, and finished with a confit of the dark meat and carmelized onions. There was a sweet potato/white potato puree on the side, and also a helping of roasted root vegetables (this time turnip, parsnip, and squash). Dessert was pumpkin creme brulee. It was divine.

If you ever find yourself in the Dartmouth/Lake Sunapee area of New Hampshire, think about staying at the Inn at Pleasant Lake. It's right in New London, and very pretty. Chef Brian is opening up a new restaurant too, right near where my parents live in the village of Eastman, which is part of the town of Grantham, which is basically the next town north along the interstate from New London.

Also nearby to this is the Shaker Village in Enfield. The Shakers were a very interesting religious sect that was at its height about 100 years ago. They practiced communal living, and people coming into the sect gave up all their posessions to the community after a 1-year "try out" period to make sure they wanted to go through with it. :-) They were famous for their wonderful woodworking and simple yet elegant design skills, and also for being the first group to run a successful mail-order garden seed business. At one point there were over 6,000 Shakers in the eastern US, with villages ranging from Maine to Florida. Now there are only six Shakers left, living in a village in Sabbathday Lake, Maine. The reason why the Shakers have pretty much died out is because they practiced celibacy. So, no new Shakers were ever being born -- everyone coming into the community was either someone from the outside (sometimes whole families) who chose to join, or orphans who the Shakers raised and educated.

The Village at Enfield has several buildings you can tour, plus gardens during the growing season. Local craftsmen who make high-quality Shaker reproductions sell their wares in the museum shop, and also give demonstrations in the warm months.

On the grounds of the village is also a very interesting Catholic Church that was built in the 1920's, after the Shakers from Enfield were long gone. It features some wonderful stained glass windows telling the story of the appearance of the Virgin Mary to two children in La Sallette, France, around the early 1900's.