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Roast Turkey (Other fowl having been well)
Turkey or other fowl having been well drawn, washed anci dried with a towel, rubbed with salt and pepper, stuffed and sewn up, the legs and wings carefully skewered in place, put it in the oven, with the giblets, and about a quart of water in the pan. Bake until done, basting often, being careful not to burn it. The browning is done at the last. It will require three hours to roast a large turkey or a goose, and not much less for a brace of large ducks. XV. Baked Ham.
THE ham is first boiled. Very few persons know how to boil a ham. Wrap the ham in clean straw, or fill in around it in the pot with clean oat-straw. Add a clove or two of garlic (not a whole garlic), cloves, mace, allspice, thyme and pepper to the water in the pot. Add also a quart of cider and boil until done. If the water in which the ham is boiled is one-half old sound cider so much the better. Let it stand in the liquor until cool. If it is to be served without baking, skin and garnish with whole cloves stuck in the fat, and such other garnishing as may suit the taste. But a ham is better if baked after boiling.
Two recipes run together here: a roast bird with a water-filled pan, and a ham boiled in cider and straw before baking. Both work, but the instructions assume a cook who already knows what "done" looks like.
- Doneness is the hingeNeither recipe gives a temperature or a test. Use an instant-read thermometer: 165F in the thickest part of the turkey thigh and in the centre of the stuffing, and roughly 150-160F in the ham after boiling. The three-hour figure is a rough guide only; the actual time depends on the weight of the bird, which the recipe never gives.
- No oven temperature is givenFor a stuffed bird of this size, 325-350F throughout is the sensible reading. "The browning is done at the last" suggests the bird is kept from colouring early -- covering or loose tenting, uncovered for the final 30-40 minutes, achieves this, though the recipe does not say so.
- A quart of water in the panThat much liquid steams the underside of the bird rather than roasting it. In a modern oven use a cup or so, mainly to keep the drippings and giblets from scorching, and top it up as it cooks.
- "Well drawn" and gibletsDrawn means eviscerated. The giblets go in the pan to flavour the drippings for gravy; discard the liver if you dislike the bitterness it lends, or cook it separately.
- A brace of ducksA brace is two. Two large ducks will not need three hours at 325F -- start checking the breast at about 90 minutes, since duck breast is best well short of the doneness a turkey thigh needs.
- Stuffing the birdModern practice is to cook the dressing in a separate dish. If you stuff, do it immediately before roasting, pack it loosely, and hold the bird to the 165F stuffing reading -- which usually means overcooked breast meat. This is the main reason the two were separated.
- Straw in the potClean oat straw is generally explained as insulating the ham from the bottom of the pot and keeping the skin from scorching or sticking over a long boil. Untreated food-grade straw is hard to source now; a rack, a folded cloth, or simply enough water to keep the ham suspended does the same job.
- "Old sound cider"This means aged hard cider that has not turned to vinegar, not sweet supermarket apple juice. A dry hard cider is the right substitute. "A clove or two of garlic (not a whole garlic)" means individual cloves, not the whole head.
- Baking after boilingSkin the cooled ham, score the fat, stud with cloves, and give it 20-30 minutes at 375-400F to set a glaze. A whole ham of this kind serves a very large table; expect roughly 1/3 lb of boneless meat per person.
The roast bird here belongs to the era of the coal or wood range, where a cook could not set a dial and read a number, and where a quart of water in the dripping pan was cheap insurance against a fierce hearth-side blast. The ham is the more revealing of the two. Boiling a ham in straw is an old country practice, generally explained as a way of keeping the meat off the hot metal and protecting the skin during hours of simmering, and it presumes a farmhouse with oat straw in the barn rather than a city kitchen. The cider points the same way: home-cured hams were salty and needed a long, aromatic bath, and hard cider was an ordinary drink in much of rural America, so using it as cooking liquid cost nothing. The author's aside that "very few persons know how to boil a ham" is the standard voice of household compendia like this one, which sold themselves on correcting the household habits of readers who had learned to cook by watching.