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Wild Turkey Braised
Cover the turkey twenty-four hours before cooking with sweet herbs and spice, and put in a bath of wine and vinegar. On the day it is to be cooked, cover it with a complete coating of sweet herbs and slices of fat pork, well spiced and tied firmly over the bird. To be cooked in a large stewpan, with a bed of pork, herbs and seasoning at the bottom before putting in the turkey. Pour over it a little wine, cover well and let it cool for several hours. When nearly done, remove the pork, etc., and brown in the oven, basting with the liquor from the pan.
Baste a turkey as you would a pig, with cold lard, as it makes the meat crisp and brown.
A game recipe written for a lean, muscular bird that would be ruined by roasting alone. Read the whole thing before starting, because it contains at least one printer's error.
- "Let it cool for several hours"This is almost certainly a misprint for cook. The turkey goes into a covered stewpan on a bed of pork and herbs with a little wine and braises gently for several hours; nothing in the sequence makes sense if the bird is allowed to cool at that stage. Treat it as a slow braise at a bare simmer, 300-325F in a covered pot if you prefer the oven.
- The marinade belongs in the refrigeratorTwenty-four hours in wine and vinegar was done in a cold larder or cellar. Do it in the refrigerator, in a non-reactive container, turning once or twice. The acid tenderises and tames the gaminess; it does not preserve the bird.
- Fat pork and barding"Slices of fat pork" means fatback or unsmoked salt pork, tied over the breast and legs as a barding jacket. Unsmoked pork belly or thick-cut fresh side is the closest supermarket equivalent; bacon will push the dish toward smoke. If the pork is salted, go very light on additional salt in the pan.
- Sweet herbsThe period term for the mild green kitchen herbs rather than anything sugary: thyme, marjoram, savory, parsley, a bay leaf. "Spice" here means pepper, allspice, mace, cloves, used sparingly.
- Finishing in the ovenStrip the pork and herbs, then brown uncovered in a hot oven, basting with the pan liquor, until the skin colours. The braise does the cooking; this step only builds colour and crispness.
- Cold lard for bastingThe recipe simply claims cold lard makes the meat crisp and brown; the reason it gives none. Ordinary lard is fine, and the comparison to basting a roast pig is the author's shorthand for the same method.
- DonenessWild turkey is far leaner and denser than a supermarket bird. Braise until the thigh meat pulls easily from the bone, around 175-180F at the joint, rather than stopping at the 165F you would use for a roasted breast.
- Sourcing and yieldWild turkey is not sold in supermarkets; use a farm-raised game bird, a heritage-breed turkey, or a legally taken bird, checking a hunted one for shot. A 10-12 lb bird treated this way serves 8-10, with the strained braising liquid as sauce.
Braising was one American answer to wild turkey, and the method here is essentially a French daube or braise transplanted into a game cook's kitchen: a long acid marinade, a bed of aromatics and fat pork in the pot, then a hard finish in the oven for colour. The wild bird is all working muscle and almost no intramuscular fat, so barding with pork and cooking it wet in a sealed vessel replaces what the animal does not supply. That such a recipe sits in a general household cookbook says something about the period: wild turkey still passed through city game markets in quantity, though populations were collapsing under market hunting and habitat loss, and the bird would nearly vanish from much of its range within a generation before twentieth-century restoration programmes brought it back. The instruction to baste "as you would a pig, with cold lard" is the kind of cross-reference these books expected a reader to catch without further explanation.