Home › November › Roast Turkey
Roast Turkey
Select a plump, ten-pound young turkey; dress, clean, stuff and truss in shape; place it on thin slices of fat pork laid in the bottom of dripping pan; rub the entire surface with salt, sprinkle with pepper and dredge with flour. Place in a hot oven and brown delicately. Turn and brown back of turkey; then turn breast side up; continue browning and basting every ten minutes until bird is evenly and richly browned. Add two cups water to fat in pan; continue basting every fifteen minutes until bird is tender, which may be determined by piercing leg with small wooden skewer. It will require from three to three and one-half hours, depending upon the age of the bird. If the turkey is browning too rapidly, cover with a piece of heavy paper well-buttered, placed over turkey buttered side down. Remove the skewer and strings before placing it on serving platter.
A straightforward high-heat roast from the era before oven thermostats, when browning was managed by turning the bird and shielding it with paper. Two things need translating: the oven and the test for doneness.
- The hinge: donenessA wooden skewer in the leg tells you the juices run clear, but not much else. Use an instant-read thermometer: 165F in the thickest part of the thigh, away from bone, and 165F at the centre of the stuffing. A ten-pound bird will likely be done nearer the three-hour end than three and a half, though the recipe pegs the range to the age of the bird rather than its weight.
- "A hot oven"Roughly 400-450F, the usual modern equivalent of the period term. Start there for the initial browning, then drop to 325-350F once the water goes into the pan, or the breast will be dry long before the thighs are done.
- Dress, clean, truss"Dress" here means pluck, singe and draw the bird — all done for you now. What remains is removing the giblets and any pin feathers, patting dry, and tying the legs and wings close to the body so the shape holds.
- Fat porkThin slices of salt pork or unsmoked fatback laid in the pan. Sliced pancetta or bacon works, though bacon brings smoke the original did not intend. The point is a layer of rendering fat under the bird so the skin does not stick and scorch.
- Turning a ten-pound birdTurning the turkey twice in a hot pan of fat is awkward and rarely worth it. Roasting breast-side up throughout, or breast-down for the first 45 minutes and then up, gives the same even colour with less risk of tearing the skin.
- Buttered paperThe 1913 heat shield. A tented sheet of foil over the breast does the same job; loosen or remove it for the last twenty minutes to finish the colour.
- StuffingStuffing packed into a bird slows the cooking of the thighs and must itself reach 165F. Fill the cavity loosely, or bake the dressing in a separate dish and put aromatics — onion, herbs, lemon — in the cavity instead.
- The pan waterThose two cups of water plus the drippings are the gravy base. Skim the fat, deglaze the pan, and thicken with a little of the flour dredge that has fallen in.
- Rest and yieldLet the bird stand 20-30 minutes under loose foil before carving. A ten-pound turkey serves eight or so at table, with some left over.
52 Sunday Dinners arranges its menus by month, and a roast turkey is doing exactly the work you would expect: the American Thanksgiving bird, wild in origin and domesticated in Mexico before being carried to Europe and back again. Ten pounds was a reasonable market weight for a young bird at the time — the enormous broad-breasted birds now standard are a mid-twentieth-century breeding development. The technique on show belongs to the coal or wood range: no dial, so heat is judged by how fast the surface colours, and the cook corrects with a sheet of buttered paper and a basting spoon rather than by turning anything down. Salt pork under the bird guarded against a hot spot in the oven floor, and the habit of adding water partway through is the direct ancestor of the modern pan gravy.