Forget pie. Embrace the trifle

Inspired by a text from a nervous first-time Thanksgiving host — the sort typed in a mild panic just as November dawned — I’ve spent the past several weeks gathering other queries about hosting the annual feast for our inaugural holiday advice issue of “The Bite,” Salon’s weekly food newsletter.

They came in like little confessionals. There were the practical pleas (“What should I be serving beverage-wise?”), the aesthetic dilemmas (“Do I have to splurge on seasonal décor, or can I simply dim the lights and call it a day?”) and the ones clearly forged in the long, uneasy heat of family history — like the lament about a culinarily incompetent cousin who insists on helping in the kitchen, usually to catastrophic effect.

But one question kept resurfacing, from multiple corners of the inbox,