Home › Poultry › Jellied Turkey
Jellied Turkey
With a sharp knife cut the skin down the center of the back and raise the flesh carefully on either side until the legs and wings are reached, when extra care is necessary to remove the bones without cutting the skin. Care is again required when detaching the breast bone from the skin. When this is done the whole body may be easily taken out entire. Restore the turkey as nearly as possible to its original form by filling the legs, wingsbody with force-meat. Sew up, truss and put on to roast. Make lile stock of the bones and giblets, to be used in the jelly.
This is a boned, stuffed and roasted turkey served cold under its own jelly. The text as printed is abbreviated — it stops once the bird is in the oven and never explains how the stock becomes the jelly — so the notes below fill the structural gaps rather than restating the method.
- The hinge: keep the skin wholeEverything depends on an unbroken skin, because it becomes the casing that holds the forcemeat in shape. Work with the tip of a boning knife angled against the bone rather than the skin, and go slowest at the wing joints and along the ridge of the breastbone, where the skin is thinnest and fused to the keel.
- Typographical gaps"lile stock" is little stock; "wingsbody" is wings and body. Both look like printing or transcription slips rather than archaic terms.
- Force-meatHere this means a bound, finely worked stuffing — often veal or pork with a breadcrumb panada, egg and seasoning, though bread-and-suet forcemeats were also common; the recipe does not say which. It has to be firm enough to slice cold, so push it into the leg and wing cavities in a solid mass with no air pockets.
- RoastingA boned bird cooks faster and more evenly than one on the frame. The recipe gives no oven heat or timing; cooking it today, go by an internal reading of 165F in the centre of the forcemeat, which is the slowest part to come up.
- The jellyThe stock from the carcass and giblets needs to be reduced until it sets firm when a spoonful is chilled on a saucer — turkey bones give less gelatine than veal, so you may need to reinforce it. Clarify with egg white and shell, strain through a cloth, and season more assertively than seems right, since cold blunts salt.
- Setting and chillingCool the roasted bird completely, then coat it in layers of nearly-set jelly, refrigerating between coats. A single thick pour slides off; three or four thin ones cling.
- YieldA 10-12 lb turkey boned and stuffed this way should serve roughly 15-20 as a cold buffet dish; the recipe gives no weight. Since the bird is reshaped rather than rolled, slice across the body so each piece shows meat and forcemeat.
Boning a bird whole and rebuilding it around forcemeat is the technique behind the French galantine, though a true galantine is poached rather than roasted as it is here. Cold jellied meats suited an era before reliable refrigeration but with cold larders and ice boxes: aspic sealed the surface from air, kept the meat moist for a day or two, and made the whole thing sliceable. That the compiler assumes the reader can make and clarify a setting stock without being told says a good deal about who these books were written for.