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Turkey, Truffled Economically
Take a freshly-killed, plump young turkey. If large, half a pound of fine fresh truffles will be required for it; if small, a quarter or a third of a pound will be sufficient. Wash and scrub the truffles carefully as in the preceding recipe, drain and dry them, and cut them into thin slices without peeling them. Boil or roast some fine sound chestnuts; the quantity must be regulated by the size of the turkey. There must be sufficient, with the truffles, to fill the body of the bird. Before boiling them, make a little cut in the outer skin of each nut to keep it from bursting. When all are done, throw them into slightly-salted water, and let them boil quickly until tender: they will take from half an hour to an hour. Skin them, mix the sliced truffles with them; then fill the body of the bird with the mixture, and let the turkey hang for two or three days in a cool airy situation. On the day that it is to be cooked fill the crop of the bird with good veal forcemeat, truss it firmly, tie a buttered paper over the breast, and roast it before a clear fire. Hang it at first some distance from the fire, and baste liberally. A turkey prepared as above will be sufficiently flavoured with truffles to satisfy most people; indeed, all but those who are excessively fond of truffles. If liked, bread sauce or onion sauce may be sent to table with this dish, but generally a truffled turkey is served with its own gravy only. Time, an hour and a half to two hours and a half, according to size.
This is a Victorian spit-roasting recipe built around a step no modern kitchen can reproduce: a stuffed, undrawn-cool-larder hang of two or three days. The notes below explain where it fails and what the older language means.
- The hanging is the problemThe bird is filled with chestnuts and truffles and then left at ambient larder temperature for two to three days so the truffle aroma penetrates the flesh. Raw poultry held for days above refrigeration temperature can support growth of Salmonella and Campylobacter, and a packed cavity insulates the interior further. Cooking kills those bacteria, but it does not undo a heavy bacterial load, and some organisms that may grow in the meantime leave heat-stable toxins behind.
- Stuffing cooked separately, or not at allEven setting the hang aside, a densely packed cavity of chestnuts and sliced truffles delays heat penetration to the deepest point of the stuffing, which is exactly where contaminated juices collect. Modern practice cooks dressing outside the bird for this reason.
- The stated time is far shortThe stated time gives you nothing to check against -- An hour and a half to two and a half hours before an open fire assumes a bird radiating heat from all sides and a cook judging by eye. It gives no internal temperature and no target for the stuffing, and for a large stuffed turkey it is likely to be short. If you want a truffled turkey, use a current recipe with measured internal temperatures.
- "Freshly-killed" meant something differentThe phrase assumes a bird killed that morning at home or by a poulterer, plucked and drawn but never chilled. Supermarket turkey has already spent days at refrigeration temperature before it reaches you, so the premise the recipe is built on no longer exists.
- "Roast before a clear fire"This is spit roasting in front of a bright, smokeless coal or wood fire, with the bird hung at a distance at first so it heats gradually, and basted from a dripping pan. It is radiant cooking, not oven cooking, and the timings do not transfer to a modern oven.
- Veal forcemeat and the cropThe crop is the pouch of skin at the neck end, which was filled separately from the body cavity. Veal forcemeat is ground veal bound with suet, breadcrumbs, egg and herbs; ready-made veal forcemeat has essentially vanished from British and American shops.
- The trufflesHalf a pound of fresh truffle for a large bird is the one part of this that has changed mainly in price. Leaving them unpeeled and slicing them thin is defensible: the skin carries aroma, and thin slices put more surface in contact with the bird.
Truffled turkey was one of the set pieces of nineteenth-century festive cooking, and the older French method mixed truffles with pounded bacon fat inside the bird, then let it sit for several days so the perfume worked into the flesh. That waiting period, rather than the roasting, was treated as the important part. This version is called "economical" because it pads the expensive truffles out with boiled chestnuts, which fill the cavity, carry the scent, and cost far less; the same logic runs through the book, which was written for middle-class households aspiring to grand-house dishes on a smaller budget. The comfort with hanging a stuffed bird for days reflects a period in which the cool larder was the only cold storage, game was routinely hung until high, and a faint gaminess was read as flavour rather than as spoilage. Domestic refrigeration and the microbiology that came with it ended that practice, and the recipe survives now chiefly as a record of how differently the Victorian kitchen understood freshness.