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Turkey, Mashed
Cut the remains of cold cooked turkey into neat slices, dredge a little flour over them, put them into a stewpan, pour over them any sauce that may be left, and add a little pepper, salt, and grated nutmeg, if required. Shake the pan over the fire until its contents are quite hot, but do not allow them to boil. Draw it to the side of the fire, and let the hash simmer gently for ten or fifteen minutes. Cut the forcemeat-balls into slices, and warm these in the oven or before the fire. Arrange the turkey neatly on a hot dish, pour the gravy over it, and garnish with alternate slices of forcemeat and toasted sippets. A spoonful of minced pickled walnuts, pickled mushrooms, kernelled olives, or gherkins, simmered in the sauce, will pleasantly vary the flavour of the hash. When there is no sauce left from the previous day, a little may be made as follows. Put the skin, bones, and trimmings of the turkey into a saucepan with a pint of stock or water, a shallot, a spoonful of parsley, four or five cloves, and two or three sliced mushrooms. Simmer the sauce gently for half an hour, strain it, season with pepper, salt, and grated nutmeg, and thicken with the crushed liver of the turkey and a little brown thickening. Before sending to table, a spoonful of lemon-juice may be added or not. Time, half an hour, exclusive of the sauce.
A Victorian second-day turkey dish — the title is a printer's slip for "hashed" — built around whatever gravy and forcemeat survived the first serving. Most of what needs translating is vocabulary and one point about heat.
- Don't boil, but do get it hotThe instruction not to boil protects the sliced meat from going stringy and the flour-thickened sauce from splitting. Cooked poultry being reheated should still reach 165F/74C throughout; hold it just below a simmer and it will get there comfortably within the ten to fifteen minutes given.
- SippetsTriangles or small fingers of bread, toasted or fried in butter, stood around the edge of the dish. Cut them from a firm white loaf; they are structural as much as decorative, since the hash is soft.
- Forcemeat-ballsThe seasoned breadcrumb-and-suet stuffing balls served alongside the roast bird. If none are left over, sliced stuffing from the cavity does the same job, warmed dry in a 300F oven so it firms rather than steams.
- Brown thickeningA period standby: flour cooked in butter or dripping until nut-brown, kept in a jar and whisked into sauces. A dark roux, or a beurre manié with a spoonful of browned flour, gives the same colour and body.
- The liverCrushed raw liver stirred into the hot strained stock both thickens and enriches it, somewhat in the manner of a French liaison. Whisk it in off the boil, then bring the sauce back to a bare simmer and hold it there a few minutes so the liver is fully cooked through; do not let it boil, or the sauce will curdle.
- Shallot and clovesOne shallot and four or five whole cloves per pint of stock is a strong, distinctly Victorian seasoning. Three cloves is plenty for most modern palates; they are strained out with the bones in any case.
- The pickle variationPickled walnuts, pickled mushrooms, olives or gherkins simmered in the sauce are the most interesting line in the recipe. A tablespoon of finely chopped pickled walnut turns a bland gravy dark and savoury; add it late, as long simmering dulls the vinegar edge.
- Yield and timingThe recipe gives no quantity of meat or number of servings; the pint of stock will reduce over its half-hour simmer, so judge the sauce against however much cold turkey you have. Allow half an hour for the stock plus the half-hour stated for the hash itself.
Cassell's belongs to the great age of English leftover cookery, when a bird large enough to feed a household on the day was expected to reappear for two or three meals afterwards, and cookery books devoted whole runs of entries to the second life of a joint. Hashing — reheating sliced cold meat in a sauce built from its own bones and trimmings — was the respectable method, distinguished from mincing and from rissoles by the fact that the meat stayed in recognisable slices and was served as a dish in its own right rather than disguised. The stock made here from skin, bones, shallot, cloves and mushrooms is essentially a small brown gravy, and the liver used as a thickener recalls a practice found in both English and French cookery of the period, of enriching sauces with pounded offal rather than cream, though how widespread it was in ordinary households is uncertain. The pickled-walnut variation points to the Victorian taste for sharp bottled condiments — walnut ketchup, mushroom ketchup, anchovy essence — used to lift dishes that would otherwise taste of little but flour and reheated poultry.