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Roast Turkey, with Chestnuts
Prepare the turkey in the usual way for roasting; for dressing take some bread cut in dice; season with salt, pepper, sage and sweet marjoram one dozen chestnuts which have been previously boiled and chopped. Mix all well together and stuff the bird. Roast and baste in the usual manner.
A terse late-Victorian formula that assumes you already know how to roast a bird. The quantities are left to the cook, so the useful work here is filling in the numbers.
- Scale the dressingA dozen chestnuts and an unspecified amount of diced bread is dressing for a small bird at best. For a 12-14 lb turkey, figure on 8-10 cups of dry bread cubes and closer to a pound of peeled chestnuts, with 4-6 tablespoons of butter and an egg or some stock to bind, or the mixture will be dust.
- "Prepare in the usual way"For a cook of this period that meant singeing off pinfeathers, drawing the bird and trussing it with needle and twine. A modern supermarket turkey needs only the giblet packet removed, a check for ice in the cavity, and the legs tied.
- ChestnutsFresh chestnuts must be scored, boiled or roasted, and peeled while hot, inner skin and all. Vacuum-packed cooked chestnuts are the same thing without the work; sweetened chestnut purée is not, and canned water chestnuts are a different plant entirely.
- Oven and temperatureThe recipe gives no temperature; roast at 325F. "Baste in the usual manner" is left undefined here; in a modern oven, basting three or four times is plenty.
- The number that mattersCook to temperature, not time. 165F in the thickest part of the thigh and 165F in the centre of the stuffing, taken with a probe. Stuffing inside the bird is the slowest thing in the oven, and this is the one place the recipe's silence is a real risk.
- Sage and sweet marjoramBoth were common kitchen-garden herbs. Dried sage is far more assertive than fresh: start with 1-2 teaspoons dried sage and 1 teaspoon dried marjoram for a large bird's worth of dressing and taste the raw mixture for salt before it goes near the turkey.
- Resting and yieldRest the bird 30 minutes tented under foil before carving. A 12-14 lb turkey serves 10-12 with the dressing.
- Currant jellyRed currant jelly, not blackcurrant preserve or dried-currant anything. It is tart and barely sweet; cranberry sauce fills the same role if currant jelly is hard to find.
Chestnut stuffing came to American tables through both English and French practice, and by the end of the nineteenth century it was often served as a "company" dressing for turkey. Chestnuts were cheap and abundant then: the American chestnut was a dominant forest tree in the eastern states, and street vendors sold the nuts roasted by the paper bag in autumn cities. The blight identified in New York in the first decade of the twentieth century all but erased that tree, which is why chestnuts today are mostly imported, from countries such as Italy, Spain and Turkey, and are treated as a luxury rather than the commonplace ingredient this recipe assumes. The currant jelly served alongside belongs to the same period's habit of pairing roast meat and game with a sharp fruit preserve, a convention that survives now chiefly in cranberry sauce at Thanksgiving and mint jelly with lamb.