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To Roast A Turkey
When the turkey is prepared as above, fill the place from which the crop was taken with a force-meat of bread crumbs, salt pork, sweet marjoram, [125] pepper and salt; mix well, draw the skin down over it, securing well with a small skewer. Dredge with flour, and if the turkey is not very fat, use bits of butter about the breast. Turn the fowl frequently until the flour begins to brown; baste often with salt and water from the dripping pan ; when half done, dredge it again with flour; if the breast seems to be browning too fast, place a piece of paper over it. Fifteen or twenty minutes before you wish to serve it drip a little melted butter over it. For gravy, boil the neck, heart, liver and gizzard in a pan, adding a pint of water; when very tender, remove from the water, chop all fine, rejecting the neck, and return same to liquor in which they were cooked; add to this the liquor in the dripping pan of the roaster; skim all the fat from the surface of the stewpan; set the pan over the fire, boil a few minutes, thicken gravy with a little browned flour. Serve with Cranberry sauce.
The instructions assume a cook who already knows how long a bird takes and stands over it, so the two things missing are a temperature and a time. Everything else translates directly.
- Oven and timeThe book gives neither, because turning and basting were judged by eye. Roast at 325F, allowing roughly 13-15 minutes per pound for an unstuffed bird and closer to 18-20 for a stuffed one; a 12-14 lb turkey runs 3 to 4 hours.
- The one temperature that mattersTake the bird to 165F in the thickest part of the thigh, away from bone, and check the centre of any stuffing packed into the neck cavity as well. Force-meat sitting against raw poultry is the slowest part of the whole thing to come up to heat.
- "The place from which the crop was taken"This is the neck cavity, the loose pocket of skin at the front of the bird. Modern supermarket turkeys come with that flap intact and it will still hold a cup or two of dressing, secured with a skewer or a couple of stitches exactly as described.
- Force-meatBread crumbs, finely chopped or ground salt pork, sweet marjoram, pepper and salt, bound by the fat as it renders. Salt pork is still sold; unsmoked pork belly or fatty bacon stands in. Salt the mixture lightly, since the pork brings plenty.
- Turning the fowlA holdover from spit and tin-oven roasting, where one face met the heat at a time. In a modern oven, start the bird breast down for the first hour and turn it up to brown, or simply leave it breast up and skip the turning entirely.
- Basting with salt and waterThe dripping pan liquid here is water the cook added, lightly salted, plus rendered fat. It steams the skin more than it crisps it. If you want crisp skin, baste sparingly and rely on the butter and the final flour dredge.
- The paper over the breastA loose tent of foil does the same job and is easier to keep in place. Put it on when the breast has the colour you want.
- Browned flour for the gravyFlour toasted dry in a pan until nut-coloured, used to thicken without a raw taste and to darken the sauce. About 2 tablespoons browned flour, slaked with cold water, will thicken the pint of giblet liquor plus the pan juices.
- GibletsSimmer neck, heart and gizzard for an hour or more; add the liver only in the last 15 minutes or it turns bitter and grainy. Discard the neck once the meat is picked off.
- YieldReckon 1 to 1 1/4 lb of raw bird per person, so a 12 lb turkey serves 10 to 12 with leftovers.
Roast turkey with a bread-and-pork force-meat and giblet gravy is the American holiday bird as it had settled by the end of the nineteenth century, and books of this period print it as a matter of course rather than as a novelty. Two details point to its hearth ancestry: the flour dredge, a technique inherited from open-hearth and tin-oven roasting, where repeated dustings of flour built up a browned crust, and the instruction to turn the fowl frequently, which makes most sense if the heat is coming from one side. Cranberry sauce as an accompaniment was well established by this date, cranberries being one of the few native fruits that kept through the winter in barrels of water.