New Haven Independent

New Haven’s best place to answer the pressing question was, of course, the 15th annual Latino pre-Thanksgiving Day lunch at Casa Otonal, the senior independent living complex on Sylvan Avenue in the Hill.

Here, the nonagenarian sisters, Sarah Claybourne (on the left in photo) and Marjorie Higgs, joined some 120 others in the Casa circle, residents as well as participants in the many Casa adult day care programs, for an annual Thanksgiving lunch of turkey, stuffing, salad, sweet potato, rice, and pumpkin pie.

If you have already singled out from the aforementioned list the rice as the primo ingredient as opposed to some form of the potato, then you are well on your way to answering the day’s culinary question. But you are not there yet.

Sarah Claybourne for 22 years organized the operating room schedules at Yale- New Haven Hospital before her retirement to Casa. She barely notices the rice as a unique Casa ingredient anymore. She has been coming to these lunches for the past 15 years.

The musica typica, or traditional folk music, that accompanies the lunch is definitely not the atmosphere you would encounter at a Thanksgiving lunch at the Rotary Club. Unless the club were perhaps in San Juan.

As always, giving special flavor to the lunch was Casa’s musical group Los Otonales. It was playing this year, however, with a certain dolor because lead singer Gregorio Arbello, who had also worked at Casa for 27 years as a van driver, died recently in a motorcycle accident.

Still at least one bolero was catchy enough for Casa resident Maria Hernandez to rise with a slow drama from her seat and cut a rug in the spirit of her home country, the Dominican Republic.

As we continue in our search for the authentic Latino Thanksgiving experience there’s no way we can get away from addressing the birds, which this year were contributed to Casa by Christian Community Action and the Connecticut Food Bank.

For this, we pressed Casa’s chief cook, Ramona Santos, to reveal her secrets. A veteran of six Casa Thanksgivings, provided a one-word answer: Adobo. The all-purpose seasoning contains onion, garlic, cilantro, oregano, and generous helpings of turmeric.

Santos said that she and her crew had begun work some 36 hours before, with the turkeys spending much of that time under the effects of the seasoning, making the blend and duration of seasonings’ spell an important part of the Latino Thanksgiving experience, at least for the turkey.

The rest of the devoted kitchen crew, consisting of (right to left) of Manuel Sanchez, Migdalia Vega, Vicky Perez, and Juan Marquez agreed.

As did the eaters.

Jennifer Ramos and Julio Cirillo, who have been working at Casa for four years, brought out meal after meal. Los Otonales played on, music that according to Yolanda Lopez, director of Casa’s Casa Latina, youth programming, always puts Latino listeners in mind of their parrandas. That’s loosely translated as caroling.

“The music is making people think of when they were younger and this is the beginning of the holiday season. You have a gathering and you begin singing these parrandas at home, and then you go down the street to another house, and you sing beneath a window and play on these simple percussion instruments, and people come out and join you, and the crowd gets bigger. I think these kinds of memories,” she suggested, “is what really makes this a Latino Thanksgiving.”

The last word goes to the hands-on director of Casa, Patricia McCann-Viseppo. In the kitchen, with a sense of drama worthy of Vanna White, she lifted up the tin foil from a tray of stuffing, revealing that it was covered by green banana leaves or banana paper. “We also put in ‘achiote,’ she said, “the same seed that makes rice yellow.”

And there we have it: Thanksgiving, Latino style.

About half of the pre-Thanksgiving Day diners will be on hand Thanksgiving Day itself to partake of more. The other half will be with their families, as Casa, with its 104 efficiency apartments, is an independent living complex. Sarah Claybourne’s daughter will be joining her in apartment at Casa, where Claybourne will be doing the cooking. With or without rice? That could not be determined by press time.