Leftover Thanksgiving turkey makes the best, coziest soups

By Melissa Clark, The New York Times

For Gail Jennings and her family, the Thanksgiving menu is never written in ink. One year, the turkey may appear on the table in her Durham, North Carolina, home burnished and whole, a Norman Rockwell painting come to life. The next, it may be roasted in parts, the drumsticks, wings and thighs swathed with onions and tomatoes. She might serve the traditional cornbread dressing, sweet potato casserole and macaroni and cheese, or maybe she’ll go with their veganized cousins, all depending on the particular diets her grandchildren are following that year.

“My grandkids go through phases,” Jennings said. “I just have to keep up with them.”

The day after Thanksgiving, however, is another matter. Every year without fail, Jennings gathers the leftover turkey to make a breathtakingly fiery gumbo.

When it comes to upcycling the remnants of Thanksgiving into leftovers soup, she is not alone. All over the country — sometimes even before the table is cleared and the dishes are put away — big pots are filled with turkey carcasses, scraps of skin, bits of meat, even the dregs of the gravy — and set to simmer on stovetops, in pressure cookers and in slow cookers. For legions of cooks, Thanksgiving isn’t complete without that final cauldron of leftovers soup, enough to last through the holiday weekend and into the next week.

Of all the possible ways to use Thanksgiving leftovers — Dagwood sandwiches, turkey enchiladas, turkey potpies — soup may well be both the most widespread and the most variable. It’s definitely among the coziest.

As for what exactly goes into these fragrant pots, the possibilities are thrillingly disparate. Just as Thanksgiving varies widely from state to state and year to year, so does the next day’s soup.

Jennings makes hers from chunks of leftover turkey meat, the drippings and vegetables at the bottom of the roasting pan, chicken wings, shrimp, collard greens and a turkey bone or two to make the broth taste even richer.

To season it, she combines curry powder with King’s Pepper, a chile-and-herb blend of her own creation that’s based on a West African recipe. Then she ladles the steaming soup over mounds of fluffy white rice. It’s a staple on their table from Thanksgiving through Kwanzaa.

“You know regular gumbo?” Jennings asked. “This is gumbo’s daddy. It’s even better.”

A few hundred miles due north in Arlington, Massachusetts, the leftover soup bubbling away in Cristiana N. de Carvalho’s pot is about as different from Jennings’s as can be considering that the main ingredient is still turkey. Instead of intensely peppery, it’s mellow and herbal, with a clear, velvety broth thickened with nubby pearled barley.

Having grown up in Brazil, de Carvalho didn’t celebrate Thanksgiving until she came to the United States in her 20s. When she saw the traditional roast turkeys on every American table, she was reminded of the birds her mother used to roast for Christmas in Rio de Janeiro.

“My mom always knew to marinate the turkey with herbs, and olive oil and salt,” de Carvalho said. The huge bird would take up almost the whole fridge for a few days, during which her mother would regularly flip it in its marinade before finally roasting it on Christmas Eve.

“When I came here and heard about brining,” de Carvalho said, “it made me think of my mother’s big turkey marinating in the fridge.”

De Carvalho’s mother, a Julia Child disciple and excellent cook, taught her daughter to make her own stocks from scratch out of carcasses, bones, fish heads, shrimp shells, and vegetables. But de Carvalho says store-bought broth works perfectly well in this soup.

“With soup, anyone can just chop up a few vegetables and add them to the pot with leftovers,” she said. “You don’t even need broth. Soup should be easy.”

This point is not lost on Liyan Chen of Montclair, New Jersey. She skips the stock entirely for her Thanksgiving leftover congee and uses water as the base, letting the fatty skin and the dark meat from the roasted bird flavor the soft, starchy rice.

The big difference in her home is that, instead of turkey, the bird at the center of her Thanksgiving table is a crisp-skinned roast duck.

“I’m not a big fan of turkey,” she explained.