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Turkey, with Chipolata Garnish
Pluck, draw, and singe a plump turkey, stuff and roast in the usual way. Put it on a dish, and garnish with chipolata garnish (see GARNISH, CHIPOLATA FOR). Pour a little brown sauce over it, and send some more to table in a tureen. A good deal of taste is required to garnish this dish. Chipolata garnish is worth nothing unless it is tastefully arranged.
Cassell's assumes you know how to roast a turkey and sends you elsewhere for the garnish, so the work here is in the assembly. The chipolata is the whole point of the dish.
- What chipolata garnish isIn the French repertoire a garniture à la chipolata is a mixture of small chipolata sausages, glazed button onions, braised chestnuts, glazed carrots or turnips, and blanched bacon or salt pork cut in dice or short lardons, all bound with a little brown sauce. Each element is cooked separately and combined at the end so nothing collapses.
- The arrangement mattersThe original says so twice, and it is not decoration for its own sake. Build the garnish in distinct groups around the bird rather than tipping it over the top; chestnuts break down quickly and a heaped, sauced mound reads as stew.
- Brown sauceA Victorian brown sauce is a made sauce of browned roux and stock (at its most refined, espagnole or a reduced demi-glace) rather than gravy from the pan. A well-reduced stock-based sauce works; keep it thin enough to coat, since a thick sauce will glue the garnish together.
- Pluck, draw, singeAll three steps are done for you by any butcher or supermarket. Singeing removed remaining pin feathers over a flame; check the wing and tail ends for stubs and pull them with tweezers.
- Roasting numbersThe recipe gives none; "the usual way" is left entirely to the cook. For a modern oven, roast at 425F for the first 30 minutes, then reduce to 325F, allowing roughly 13-15 minutes per pound for an unstuffed bird of 12-14 lb and longer if stuffed.
- StuffingFill the cavity loosely and only just before it goes in the oven. Both the thickest part of the thigh and the centre of the stuffing need to reach 165F; if the stuffing lags behind, cook it separately in a dish rather than overroasting the breast to catch it up.
- RestingTwenty to thirty minutes under loose foil before carving. This is also the window in which to finish and arrange the garnish, which should go on the dish warm, not hot from the pan.
- YieldA 12-14 lb turkey serves ten to fourteen. Allow about 4 oz of garnish per person in total, divided between the sausages, peeled chestnuts, button onions, carrots and bacon.
Chipolata takes its name from the Italian cipollata, from cipolla, onion. As a garniture, chipolata belongs to the nineteenth-century French classical system that Cassell's was busy translating for British middle-class kitchens, where a roast was expected to arrive dressed rather than plain. The combination of chestnuts, glazed onions and bacon with poultry is strongly associated with winter and with Christmas tables, which is where a turkey of this size would have appeared in a Victorian household. The entry's cross-reference to a separate garnish article is characteristic of the book: it is organised as a dictionary, so a single dish is often assembled from two or three widely separated headwords.