In the East Coast family she belongs to, Karen said you have to strain out all the small pieces of skin and meat so that what remains are the cooked turkey juice and just the slightest rich glint of fat. Salt, cornstarch, and water, these are stirred in so the golden liquid thickens imperceptibly but remains clear. A pool of Karen’s turkey gravy rises ever so slightly, held by surface tension, above the hollow made for it in your mashed potatoes. The butter drifts up through it like a yellow cloud through the sky.
My gravy, on the other hand, contains all the small chunks too ragged to be skewered on the end of a fork. Each little morsel on the tongue is a savory messenger from its source: gizzard, liver, neck. My textured gravy has plenty of the fat shining on top of it with a pancake-batter consistency of milk and flour poured in during cooking to make it thick. My gravy is likely to take twenty seconds, once it escapes the confines of your mashed potatoes, to reach the green salad next door.
Karen does not approve of my chunky opaque gravy, and I am suspicious of her elegant translucent gravy.
After an hourlong ride in a Cessna 206 to Anvik on the Yukon, during which slightly spilled portions of both gravies combine to blow grandmotherly smells up our noses and lull us to sleep under the aircraft’s drone, Karen’s beautiful gravy commiserates with my beautiful gravy at a college graduate’s celebration dinner, while guest after guest spoons whole-kernel corn over mashed potatoes.