Singe and clean a fat turkey. Season well with salt and pepper. Chop the giblets; add some chopped veal and pork, 1 onion, 2 cloves of garlic and parsley chopped, salt and pepper. Mix with 2 eggs and stuff the turkey. Put in the dripping-pan with some hot water. Dredge with flour; let bake until done. Baste often with the sauce. Serve the turkey with the dressing. Garnish with boiled beets sliced thin.
A terse turn-of-the-century turkey with a forcemeat stuffing rather than a bread one. Almost every quantity and temperature is left to the cook's judgement, so the notes below fill in what the original assumes you already know.
- The hinge: stuffing temperatureThis is a raw meat forcemeat packed inside a bird, so the centre of the stuffing must reach 165F on a thermometer, not merely "until done." Stuff loosely and immediately before roasting; a densely packed cavity will leave the middle short of temperature while the breast dries out.
- Oven and timingNo heat is given. Roast at 325F, allowing roughly 18-20 minutes per pound for a stuffed bird of 12-14 lb, and check the thigh as well as the stuffing, which must reach 165F. Older "bake until done" instructions assumed a wood or coal range whose heat the cook judged and managed by eye rather than by dial.
- SingeingSingeing burned off the hair-fine pinfeathers left after plucking. A supermarket bird needs none of this; pull any remaining quills with tweezers and dry the skin well.
- Quantities for the stuffingThe chopped veal and pork are unmeasured. For a 12-14 lb turkey, about 1 lb of each, ground, with the chopped giblets, works out sensibly; 2 eggs will bind that much. Fry a spoonful and taste it before you commit to the seasoning.
- GibletsThe recipe does not say which. Period usage generally included heart, gizzard, liver and neck; if you dislike the flavour liver takes on in a long roast, use heart and gizzard only and simmer the neck for stock.
- Dripping-pan and dredgingThe dripping-pan is simply a shallow roasting pan. Adding hot water and dredging the bird with flour was a way of producing gravy in the pan as it cooked; the flour browns in the fat and thickens the liquid. Keep about half an inch of water in the pan and top it up, or the flour will scorch.
- Basting and browningFrequent basting was standard when ovens were uneven, but opening the door repeatedly drops the temperature. Baste every 30-40 minutes and tent the breast with foil if it colours before the stuffing is up to heat.
- The beetsBoiled beets sliced thin are the whole garnish. Cook them separately and unpeeled, then slip the skins off.
- YieldA bird of this size with a meat stuffing serves 10-12, with the dressing counting as a substantial second dish.
The book runs a dish a day from around the world, and the German entry for October leans on what an American cook of the period would have recognised as German: a forcemeat of veal and pork rather than bread, garlic used openly, and beets on the plate. The stuffing here resembles the coarse Hackfleisch mixtures used across Central Europe for meatloaf and dumplings, bound with egg and pushed into the bird instead of shaped into a loaf. Turkey itself was a New World bird that had been raised in Europe since the sixteenth century, so the pairing is less incongruous than it looks, though goose was the more usual festive bird in Germany at the time. The instruction to add water to the dripping-pan and dredge the bird with flour reflects a period when gravy was built in the roasting pan as a matter of course, rather than made separately at the end.