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Turkey, Truffled, with Perigueux Sauce
Pick, draw, and singe a fat hen-turkey; scald the feet to facilitate rubbing off the skin, and cut off the neck, leaving the crop skin as large as possible. Clean and peel three pounds of truffles, and cut them into one and a half inch balls, reserving the trimmings. Put one pound and a half of grated fat bacon in a frying-pan, with three bay-leaves, two whole shallots, a sprig of thyme, a clove of garlic, and salt and pepper to season. Cook the bacon till tender on a slow fire, then let it cool; strain it into a basin containing the truffles and part of the chopped truffle trimmings (the other part being reserved for the Perigueux sauce). When quite cold, fill the turkey with this stuffing, and truss it as for boiling; cover it with thin slices of fat bacon, and wrap it in a sheet of buttered paper. Put it in a large stewpan, or braising-pan, pour in three pints of mirepoix (see MIREPOIX) and half a bottle of Madeira. When the turkey is done, drain, untie, and dish it; pour some Perigueux sauce (see PERIGUEUX SAUCE) over it, and serve some in a boat.
A grand nineteenth-century braise: a whole turkey packed with truffles in seasoned pork fat, cooked in an aromatic wine-and-vegetable liquor. Most of the work is buying and handling the truffles; the rest is a slow, moist braise in a covered pan.
- Stuff it the day beforeThe hinge of the dish is time, which the text leaves unsaid. A truffled bird was traditionally filled and left in a cold larder for a day or two so the perfume ran through the flesh; stuffed and cooked the same hour, three pounds of truffles are largely wasted. Keep it refrigerated for that rest, not in a modern larder.
- Grated fat baconThis means the hard back fat, grated or finely chopped, not sliced streaky rashers. Fresh pork back fat or unsmoked lardo is the closest thing; salt pork rinsed of its cure will do. The point is a soft, cold fat that sets around the truffles and bastes them from within.
- MirepoixIn Cassell's, mirepoix is not a bed of diced vegetables but a made braising liquor: stock cooked down with carrot, onion, ham or bacon trimmings and herbs, then strained. Three pints of a good brown poultry or veal stock with those aromatics simmered in it, plus the half bottle of Madeira, gives the same result.
- Buttered paperBaking parchment, buttered on the inner face. Under the bardes of fat it keeps the breast from colouring and drying; foil alone traps steam and will not do the same job.
- Oven or hobThe book assumes a covered braising pan on a slow fire; it gives no temperature. A heavy covered roaster at around 325F is a workable modern approximation. Baste with the liquor now and then and let the pan stay barely trembling, not boiling.
- DonenessA stuffed bird is the awkward case: the dense fat-and-truffle filling heats slowly. Take both the thickest part of the thigh and the centre of the stuffing to 165F before you drain and dish it. A 10-12 lb hen turkey braised this way generally wants three to three and a half hours.
- Périgueux sauceThe cross-reference is to a demi-glace finished with Madeira and chopped truffle -- here the trimmings the recipe told you to hold back. Reduce the strained braising liquor and use it as the base rather than throwing it away.
- Truffles and proportionThree pounds of truffles is a banquet-house quantity and would now cost more than the rest of the meal several times over. Scaling down to a few ounces of fresh black truffle, with the fat and aromatics kept in proportion, gives a recognisable version; tinned truffle peelings will perfume the fat but will not give you the balls of truffle the dish is built on.
- YieldA hen turkey of this size with its stuffing serves twelve or so, and the stuffing is rich enough that a spoonful each is plenty.
Truffled turkey belongs to the French festive table of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when the bird -- an American import naturalised in Europe -- became the standard Christmas and New Year centrepiece in Paris and the south-west. Périgueux, the capital of the Périgord, gave its name to the sauce built on demi-glace, Madeira and chopped black truffle, and the region's winter truffle harvest is what made a dish on this scale imaginable at all. Brillat-Savarin devoted admiring pages to the truffled turkey in the 1820s, and by the time Cassell's compiled its dictionary in the 1870s the preparation was a fixture of the professional English kitchen, copied wholesale from French practice down to the mirepoix and the bardes of fat. Its presence in a household dictionary says less about what most readers cooked than about what they expected such a book to know: the cross-references to MIREPOIX and PERIGUEUX SAUCE assume a cook working through a full classical repertoire, one entry leading to the next.