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Turkey, Truffled
There is no dish more highly esteemed than a truffled turkey. The easiest and perhaps in the end the most satisfactory way of getting one is to procure it from a first-class house, such as V. Benoist, Ltd., of Piccadilly. It will be all the better for the winter's journey, as birds so stuffed are always kept for several days after to allow the perfume of the truffles to penetrate the flesh. The cost of a turkey thus prepared will vary from one to five guineas, exclusive of the carriage. When once obtained, a truffled turkey is easily cooked, as it simply requires to be roasted, plentifully basted, and served with its own gravy only, for though bread sauce and onion sauce are occasionally served with it, properly speaking no rival flavour ought to approach the truffle. Fine fresh truffles are, however, so expensive, that mushrooms or chestnuts are often substituted for them, pounded with bacon in exactly the same way, and a turkey thus prepared will prove to most people quite as acceptable as if really truffled. When it is preferred, however, that the turkey should be stuffed with truffles at home, procure a young, plump, freshly-killed hen turkey. Take a pound and a half of truffles for a moderatesized bird, and two pounds for a large one. Smell them, and reject any that are mouldy. Wash them carefully, and scrub with a soft brush till not a particle of earth or grit remains upon them. Cut about a pound of the truffles into balls an inch and a half in diameter. Pound the rest with the trimmings to a smooth paste, adding an equal weight of fat bacon. The bacon should be rasped and pounded separately, then mixed with the pounded truffles, and the forcemeat seasoned with salt and pepper only. When the forcemeat is quite smooth mix the whole truffles with it, and put the preparation into the body of the turkey. Let it hang for five or six days after it is stuffed, and, when it is to be roasted, lay a slice of fat bacon upon the breast, and a piece of buttered paper over that, and baste liberally whilst it is before the fire. If it is wished that truffle sauce should accompany this dish, a few truffles may be put aside for the purpose. Truffle sauce is made as follows. Mince four truffles finely, put them into a saucepan with a slice of fresh butter, and shake them over the fire for ten minutes. Add half a pint of brown sauce, a little pepper and salt, and a glassful of sherry; let these ingredients simmer for a quarter of an hour, skim off the fat, and serve. Time, roast the turkey the usual time.
This entry is two things at once: a shopping note for readers who would rather buy a truffled turkey than build one, and a method that turns on a step no modern kitchen can reproduce. The step is the problem.
- The five or six days of hangingThe bird is stuffed raw with a paste of truffle and fat bacon and then hung, at larder temperature, for the better part of a week so the truffle perfume can penetrate the flesh. A raw stuffed cavity held for days in the danger zone is an incubator for Salmonella and Clostridium perfringens; the dense forcemeat insulates the centre and slows any heat that later reaches it. No current food-safety guidance supports holding a stuffed raw bird this way.
- The forcemeat itselfRaw fat bacon pounded with raw truffle, seasoned and packed into a body cavity, is not a cure. There is no measured salt, no nitrite, no temperature and no time-at-temperature here; nothing in the mixture arrests bacterial growth during the hanging period. If you want a truffled roast bird, use a current recipe with a chilled, promptly cooked bird.
- "Roast the turkey the usual time"Victorian roasting times were reckoned before the fire by weight and eye, with no thermometer. Combined with a cold, dense stuffing, the usual time is precisely the circumstance in which the centre of the cavity never reaches a safe temperature while the breast is already dry.
- A guineaTwenty-one shillings, or one pound one shilling. One to five guineas for a ready-truffled bird was a very large sum in the later nineteenth century, which is why the entry opens by telling readers where to buy rather than how to cook.
- Half a pint of brown sauceAn imperial half-pint is 10 fl oz, about 285 ml. Brown sauce here means the classic reduced espagnole of the period, not the bottled condiment now sold under that name.
- Truffle quantitiesA pound and a half to two pounds of truffle for one bird is 680-900 g. At present-day prices for fresh black winter truffle this single ingredient would cost more than most whole Christmas dinners, which is why the text also offers mushrooms or chestnuts pounded with bacon as the everyday substitute.
- The truffle sauceThe sauce alone — minced truffle sweated in butter, brown sauce, sherry, simmered and skimmed — is sound cooking and stands apart from the turkey method. Ten minutes of shaking over heat is generous for minced truffle; the aroma is volatile and thins with prolonged cooking.
Truffled turkey was the great winter set piece of nineteenth-century French cookery, and Cassell's treats it as an import: the bird is French in conception, the supplier named is a first-class Piccadilly house, V. Benoist, Ltd., and even the advice to buy rather than make it assumes a reader shopping the same streets. The turkey itself had reached European tables from Mexico in the sixteenth century and was long a Christmas bird before truffles were added to it; the pairing is generally traced to Périgord and to the eighteenth-century French appetite for dinde truffée, which Brillat-Savarin discusses with some reverence. The insistence that no bread or onion sauce should approach it — "no rival flavour ought to approach the truffle" — is the authentic note of that tradition. So is the hanging: before mechanical refrigeration, game and poultry were routinely held in a cold larder to develop flavour, and the line between ripeness and rot was a matter of a cook's nose rather than a thermometer. That is exactly the judgement a modern kitchen cannot and should not attempt to reconstruct.