According to the Bible, God created the world in six days. Six is considered a lucky number in China. Get Your Kicks on Route 66.

Ben and Jerry said the ’90’s were the ’60s standing on their head. Seriously?! Six is a really important number. We should get to know more about six because it is a “decider” digit.

Every day we have to make decisions. Should I wear this or that? Go out? Stay in? Go to this restaurant or that one? Do I want the steak [cooked] rare or medium rare? Pepper? Blue cheese or vinaigrette? Smooth or chunky?  Small, medium or large? With or without? Regular or decaf? Law school, medical school or culinary school?

In order to survive, we have to narrow our choices. Otherwise, we’ll go crazy. If we decide to write a cookbook based on the Chicken Dishes of the World, we will drown. It would be far easier to compile the Chicken Dishes of Chicago.

Sheena S. Iyengar, the S.T. Lee Professor of Business at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Business, is among the world’s experts on the subject of decision making. She delves into the relationship between how we choose and who we are.

The Art of Choosing by Sheena Iyenga

I mention the distinguished professor because her most famous (at least to me) study, concerned the number ‘six’. The version I discovered concerns heuristics.

It was on Google that I tested a strawberry jam theory that goes like this. A customer wants a pot of strawberry jam so she “Googles” it.  Up pops about 5,260,000 strawberry jam references in less than 60 seconds: where to buy it, how to make it, etc.–all based on Google’s unique heuristics.

Delving deeper:

• One site offers 12 different kinds of strawberry jam. The customer is immediately exhausted. Twelve choices is six too many so she clicks to another site.
• Here only three kinds of strawberry jam are offered. Hmm. The customer decides this company is way too small. (If I give them my credit card number, they’ll probably steal my identity — and I’ll never receive the jam.)
• Click. And Eureka! Here are six kinds of strawberry jam. I think I’ll place my order this company. I submit my order. Done, and done.

This seemingly totally irrelevant stuff is actually valuable information.

If a fast food restaurant offers more than six choices, the line slows and everyone quickly gets grumpy. If a bakery offers six kinds of cup cakes, the buyer will buy at least one, maybe all six. Offer six bagels, and we’ll buy ‘em all even if we had planned to buy only one.

Many chefs figured out that it is shrewd to offer six choices on the menu, particularly on holiday menus. For Easter, there must be: lamb, ham, a fish, a vegetarian dish and two other selections. Keeping the number of choices to six means there is briefer interrogation of the server and  the tables keep turning, and the reservations are honored on time.

(Except, on Thanksgiving, the menu should be turkey, turkey, turkey, more turkey, no turkey and only one other choice.)

Prix-fixe menus with six choices work well particularly when guests are less interested in intricate preparations and more concerned about how much time they have before returning to work or getting to the theater on time.

Linda Duke, the CEO of Duke Marketing, says promotional sentences should be only six words long (or actually, short). Any more, and readers lose interest. She urges restaurateurs to try describing their restaurant this way:

“Ask yourself what makes your restaurant different? Define what you do best? Now try expressing your entire philosophy with six words. Great food. Great service. Finger-licking good — (though not too great if you have sanitized hands).”

Will you ‘deep six‘ this commentary, ‘take the road less traveled’ or when it ‘comes to a fork in the road, take it’?

You decide.

When the last trumpet sounds, I’ll have to confess I wasn’t a proper mother.

I brushed aside my little children’s pleas of “Mommy, Mommy, can I do that!?” In our family there are no photogenic, heart string moments when the tiny tots climbed onto the kitchen counter to stir the pot.  No magical memories of baking and decorating cookies for us. I was far too intent on testing recipes and writing cookbooks to teach my own children how to cook.

But unlike other years, this year…this year my daughter Hilary and I did the whole Thanksgiving dinner together.  We shopped together, cooked together, shared the dinner with our friends together — and Hilary washed the dishes entirely by herself.  (She offered and I gratefully accepted when I tottered off to bed.)

In a way, the day was entirely her’s. She supplied the recipes. I can’t begin to tell you how many cookbooks we have in our house: a few thousand, I’d guess. But this year, our Thanksgiving menu came entirely from Williams-Sonoma, a charming, little 2000 recipe booklet, a giveaway Hilary had picked up in one of the stores when she lived in San Francisco.

The message on the first page, written by Chuck Williams, the founder of Williams-Sonoma, says, “This year we are honoring Thanksgiving as it is done in New England where our forefathers held their first celebration in the early 17th century.  Our menu comes from three old traditional inns and a small hotel from the region.” (As we live in the Hudson Valley, this sentiment fitted right in with our plans.) Thus the Thanksgiving Menu:

Cream of Butternut Squash & Apple Soup

Roast Turkey

Yukon Gold Mashed Potatoes

Creamy Giblet Gravy

Maple-Glazed Acorn Squash

Pear, Chestnut and Sage Dressing

Brussels Sprouts with Crispy Bacon & Walnuts

Popovers

Cranberry Chutney

Creamy Pumpkin Pie with Poached Cranberries

It was a feast indeed! I resisted (almost) every urge to change the recipes, well…except for the drop of Madeira that I sneaked into the giblet gravy, the sip of triple sec that found its way into the cranberry chutney and the little splash of fine bourbon that added a spirited touch to the pumpkin pie.  Some little touches that added a whisper of enchantment to each dish.

I’ve now had a moment to reflect on Thanksgiving, 2008. While we faithfully followed the traditional recipes I realize how much stays the same.  With each feast day in the calendar, we symbolically hold hands from one generation to the next. But this year there were a few changes. Gathered together, we all were a little depressed about the goings-on in the stock market.

Yesterday you could buy 25 shares of General Motors or 12.5 shares of Citibank for the same price as an organically-raised, free-range bird, free of hormones, additives and preservatives.

The good news: today our turkey stock will make a lovely, nourishing soup. Tomorrow is another day. Hilary and I are already planning the menu for New Year’s Eve.