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Wild Turkey Plain,
1 Wash and wipe the turkey very carefully; wipe the cavity with a dry, soft cloth before you stuff. Have a rich force-meat, bread crumbs, some bits of fat pork chopped fine, pepper and salt. Moisten with milk, beat in an egg, two tablespoonfuls of melted butter; baste with butter and water for the first hour; then three or four times with the gravy; lastly, five or six times with melted butter. Dredge with flour at the last; with butter when it is of a nice brown; serve-skim the gravy, add a little hot water, pepper; thicken with the giblets chopped fine and browned flour; boil up and pour into tureen, or put giblets, one under each wing, when the turkey is dished. Garnish with sliced lemon or parsley-and send around currant jelly or cranberry sauce with it.
A late-Victorian roasting method written for a cook who already knew how long a bird takes and how hot her range ran. The gaps are the oven temperature, the times, and every quantity in the stuffing.
- Oven and timeNo temperature is given because none could be. Roast at 325F, allowing roughly 15 minutes per pound for an unstuffed bird and longer if stuffed, and cook to 165F in the thickest part of the thigh rather than by the clock. Wild turkey is leaner than a supermarket bird and dries out fast past that point.
- Stuffing safetyDressing packed into the cavity must itself reach 165F, which usually means overcooking the breast. Baking the force-meat in a separate dish, moistened with a ladle of pan drippings, gives a better bird and a better stuffing.
- The force-meat, in numbersThe original gives no amounts. For a 10-12 lb bird, roughly 8 cups dry bread crumbs, 4 oz salt pork or fatback chopped fine, 1 egg, 2 tablespoons melted butter, and milk to moisten -- the mixture should hold together when squeezed but not be wet.
- Fat porkThis is unsmoked salt pork or fresh fatback, not bacon. If you substitute bacon the smoke will dominate; rinse salt pork and taste before adding further salt.
- Larding the breastBarding the breast -- Wild birds carry very little breast fat. Barding the breast with sheets of fatback or bacon for the first two-thirds of roasting can do more than butter basting alone, and can be removed for browning.
- Dredging at the lastFlouring the bird near the end and butter-basting over it produces the crisp, freckled crust period cooks called frothing. Do it in the final 15-20 minutes, raising the oven heat if the crust is not colouring, so the flour does not taste raw.
- The gravyBrowned flour means flour toasted dry in a pan until nut-coloured; it thickens less than raw flour, so use about half again as much. Simmer the giblets separately from the start and chop them fine before adding.
- Sourcing the birdWild-shot turkey cannot legally be sold in the United States, so it comes from a licensed hunter, though farmed wild-strain birds are available from some producers. A mature tom can be tough enough to want braising rather than roasting, and a heritage-breed farmed turkey is the closest thing on general sale.
- YieldA 10-12 lb bird with dressing serves about 8 to 10, with the giblet gravy, currant jelly or cranberry sauce served alongside as the original directs.
Wild turkey was still ordinary American food when this book appeared: market hunting supplied city game dealers into the early twentieth century, and cookbooks of the period print wild turkey beside domestic turkey without comment. The treatment here is essentially the English roast-fowl method -- bread force-meat enriched with chopped pork fat, repeated basting, a final flour dredge to froth the skin, and a giblet gravy -- adapted to a much leaner bird by the heavy use of butter and pork. Currant jelly is the older accompaniment, long associated with game birds, while cranberry sauce is the American addition, and the recipe offers either. Populations later collapsed under hunting pressure and habitat loss, so that by the mid-century the bird had vanished from much of its range; the wild turkeys now common across North America are largely the result of twentieth-century restoration work, and they can be taken only in regulated seasons.