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ESCALOPED TURKEY
Moisten bread-crumbs with a little milk, butter a pan and put in it a layer of crumbs, then a layer of chopped (not very fine) cold turkey seasoned with salt and pepper, then a layer of crumbs, and so on until pan is full. If any dressing or gravy has been left add it. Make a thickening of one or two eggs, half a cup of milk, and quarter cup butter and bread-crumbs; season and spread it over the top; cover with a pan, bake half an hour and then let it brown.
A frugal Thanksgiving-aftermath dish that gives no quantities for its main ingredients, on the assumption that you are using up whatever turkey is left. A few decisions have to be made for you.
- The hinge: moistureLeftover roast turkey is dry, and this dish supplies almost no liquid of its own beyond milk-damped crumbs. Leftover gravy is not optional in practice — if you have none, moisten each turkey layer with stock so the finished dish is succulent rather than sawdusty.
- Oven temperatureThe recipe gives no temperature, only 'bake half an hour and then let it brown'. A moderate oven, around 350F, is a reasonable modern reading: half an hour covered, then uncover and give it however long it needs to take colour, usually 10 to 15 minutes.
- "Cover with a pan"An inverted pan or pie plate would have served as the lid here. Foil does the same job: it traps steam so the topping sets and the crumbs soften instead of hardening into a crust too early.
- Bread-crumbsThese are soft crumbs torn or grated from day-old bread, not the dry sandy packaged kind. Dry crumbs will drink the milk and turn pasty.
- Proportions to aim forFor a 2-quart dish, about 3 cups chopped cooked turkey, 4 cups soft crumbs, 1 cup milk for moistening, and any gravy you have. The topping as written — 1 or 2 eggs, half a cup of milk, quarter cup butter and crumbs — is roughly right for that size.
- The toppingMelt the butter, whisk it with the egg and milk, stir in enough crumbs to make a spreadable paste, and season it. It sets into a thin savoury custard, which is what holds the top layer together.
- Temperature and food safetyYou are reheating cooked poultry that has been refrigerated. Bring the centre to 165F; the half hour at 350F will do it in a shallow dish, longer in a deep one.
- YieldA 2-quart dish serves four to six with a green vegetable or a salad.
"Escaloped" here is the older spelling of scalloped, generally traced to the shell-shaped dishes that such mixtures are said to have once been baked and served in; by the late nineteenth century the word simply meant anything layered with crumbs and baked in a shallow pan. Its reported placement in Buckeye Cookery's "Fragments" chapter is the whole point: that section exists to convert remains into a second meal, and a roast turkey in an 1870s Ohio household was too large and too costly to waste. The pattern of crumbs, chopped meat, and a bound egg-and-milk topping was often applied to cold roast anything — chicken, veal, fish — and it survives today as the crumb-topped casserole, though the modern version often leans on a canned soup where this one leans on yesterday's gravy.