A Thanksgiving menu comes together in four moves: count the guests and get the turkey weight right, pick four to six sides rather than ten, sort every dish by where it cooks so the oven is not oversubscribed, and move everything you possibly can to earlier in the week. Do that and Thursday is a bird, a gravy, and some reheating.
The menu is not where Thanksgiving goes wrong. The oven is. Almost every stressful Thanksgiving is a good menu that needed three different oven temperatures at four o'clock.
Portions first, because they decide the shopping and the pan sizes.
Turkey: 1 to 1.5 pounds per guest, bone in. Toward the top of that if you want leftovers, which most people do. For boneless meat, about 8 ounces a head.
Per person, for the usual supporting cast:
| Dish | Per person |
|---|---|
| Stuffing | about ¾ cup |
| Mashed potato | about 1 cup |
| Gravy | ⅓ to ½ cup |
| Cranberry sauce | ⅓ to ½ cup |
| Vegetables | ½ cup, or 4 to 6 oz |
| Sweet potato | 5 to 6 oz, or half a large one |
| Rolls | 1 to 2 |
| Pie | a 9-inch pie serves 6 to 8 |
For nibbles before dinner, three or four bite-sized things per person, or two if they are substantial like crostini. About 2 ounces of cheese a head.
Round up on the gravy. Nobody has ever complained about too much gravy.
The instinct is to add. Everyone has a dish they want represented, and the list reaches eleven before anyone has thought about the oven.
Four to six is plenty, counting the potatoes and the stuffing. The test for each candidate: would someone at this table notice if it were missing? The things that pass are the ones the day is actually made of. The things that fail get one spoonful each and come back out of the fridge on Sunday untouched.
If people want to contribute, that is what the contributions are for. Give someone the green beans and the pie rather than adding them to your own list — our potluck guide covers assigning categories so you do not end up with three desserts and no salad.
This is the step that saves the day, and it takes five minutes with the menu written out.
Put every dish in one of three columns:
Then look at the oven column. One turkey at 325°F occupies the oven for most of the afternoon, and the sides want 350 to 375. They cannot all be in there together, which is why the standard plan is to bake the sides during the turkey's rest.
If the oven column is longer than what fits in that 30 to 40 minute window, something needs to move to the stovetop, be served at room temperature, or come off the menu. Deciding that now is much pleasanter than deciding it at 3:40 on the day.
Most of a Thanksgiving menu does not have to be cooked on Thanksgiving.
One to three days ahead: pies, cranberry sauce, stock for the gravy, rolls, dips, pie dough.
The day before: assemble the casseroles and keep them refrigerated unbaked. Chop every onion, celery stick and carrot the menu needs. Make the mashed potatoes, or at least peel and cut them and hold them in cold water.
Thursday: the turkey, the gravy, anything crisp, and reheating.
A menu built this way means the day itself has one thing cooking that needs watching. Our Thanksgiving cooking timeline has the hour-by-hour once the menu is set.
A named plan for the day itself, separate from the week's dinners.
In Tradish you can make a named meal plan just for the event, drop each recipe onto the day it gets made rather than the day it gets eaten, and keep it apart from your ordinary weeknight planning.
Tradish is launching on iOS and Android soon. Plan the whole menu, then build one grocery list from it, combined across recipes and sorted by aisle. Join the waitlist for early access and our best launch price.
Six recipes that each "only" need a stick of butter add up to a pound and a half. The failure mode is discovering that on Wednesday night.
Build one list from every recipe at the same time, so shared ingredients combine into a single line. Tradish does this from the plan: tap Build grocery list, pick the meals, and it sums quantities across recipes, drops the duplicates, and sorts the result by aisle. Add the things no recipe mentions by hand — foil, bags for leftovers, ice.
Our Thanksgiving grocery list guide has the full version, including what to buy when.
If you are cooking for four or six rather than fourteen, the whole thing scales down more gracefully than people expect.
Cook a turkey breast or a few thighs rather than a whole bird. They roast faster, carve easier, and you still get leftovers. Keep to three or four sides. Make one dessert. You lose nothing that matters about the day and you get most of the afternoon back.
What does not scale down is the gravy. Make the full amount regardless.
About 1 to 1.5 pounds per guest, bone in. Go toward the higher end if you want leftovers, which most people do, and toward the lower end if you are also serving a ham or a second main.
Four to six is plenty for most tables, including the potatoes and the stuffing. More than that and the oven becomes the problem rather than the cooking, and half of it gets a spoonful each.
Roughly three quarters of a cup of stuffing and about a cup of mashed potato each, with a third to half a cup of gravy and the same of cranberry sauce. A 9-inch pie serves six to eight.
Pies, cranberry sauce, stock, rolls and dips can all be made one to three days before. Casseroles can be assembled the day before and baked on the day, and mashed potatoes reheat well with a splash of milk and butter.
Cook a turkey breast or a couple of thighs rather than a whole bird, keep to three or four sides, and make one dessert instead of three. The hosting is the same; the shopping and the oven juggling get much easier.
Get the portions from the numbers, keep the sides to four to six, and check the whole thing against one oven before you commit to it. Then move everything that can be made earlier to earlier, and Thursday becomes a day you are present for.
Tradish is launching on iOS and Android soon. Join the waitlist to be first to know when we launch.
Related reading: