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Turkey, with Truffles
Take a nice fat turkey the moment it has been killed; empty it, and put plenty of salt inside the body to draw the blood out. Then let it cool, and prepare some truffles in the following manner. Take two or three pounds, peel them, and smell whether they are all of a good flavour, and not musty. Pick out the smallest from amongst them, and chop them very fine. Take some fat white bacon, and rasp it, so as to obtain the fat only, without any of the sinews. When you have rasped a sufficient quantity to fill the body of the turkey, put the chopped truffles with the rasped bacon into the mortar, pound them, season well with salt, pepper, spices, etc., then mix this with large truffles, and put all in the turkey. Let the turkey remain thus for two or three days to acquire the flavour of the truffles; sew the bird up as soon as you have finished it, and when you want it roasted, put it on the spit, covered with bacon on the breast and a few sheets of white paper, and take great care when you remove the paper that you do not loosen the truffles. Serve with a clear Spanish sauce. This dish is one of the best possible if it is well seasoned and roasted. It is scarcely necessary to observe that the carver must serve the inside of the fillet, as that is one of the best parts of the dish.
This is a classic French truffled turkey of the sort Carême and his successors set down, and it is printed here as an example of period technique rather than as something to attempt. The method depends on a butchering chain and a tolerance for risk that no longer exist.
- The fatal step is the resting periodThe bird is stuffed with uncooked pork fat and raw truffles and then held for two or three days so the aroma penetrates. The recipe does not say where or how cold it is kept, and a moist, fat-rich stuffing sitting inside a cavity at any larder temperature is favourable to Salmonella, Clostridium perfringens and Staphylococcus aureus. The salt rubbed inside the body is not applied in any measured quantity, so it is a seasoning and not a cure.
- "The moment it has been killed"The recipe assumes a bird killed on the premises and worked on while still warm, before chilling. Modern poultry reaches you already chilled and already several days old; the whole timetable the recipe is built around cannot be reproduced, and adding two or three days of unrefrigerated holding to a bird of unknown age compounds the problem.
- A densely packed cavity will not reach temperatureEven roasted well, a turkey stuffed solid with pounded fat and whole truffles cooks from the outside in. The centre of the stuffing lags far behind the breast, so the part the recipe prizes most is the part least likely to be safely cooked. Contemporary practice is to cook stuffing separately for exactly this reason.
- Truffles here are fresh, not preservedTwo to three pounds of fresh black truffle, peeled and pounded, is a quantity from a period when Périgord truffles were an expensive luxury rather than an extraordinary one. The instruction to smell each one for mustiness reflects a real hazard of the trade: truffles ferment and spoil quickly, and a single off tuber will taint the whole stuffing.
- Rasped bacon"Fat white bacon" means unsmoked cured pork back fat, scraped or grated with a rasp so the fat comes away as a paste and the connective tissue is left behind. The nearest modern equivalent is fresh or lightly cured fatback; supermarket streaky bacon is smoked, lean and wrong for the purpose.
- Spit and paperThe bird turns on a spit before an open fire, barded with bacon over the breast and covered with sheets of white paper to keep the surface from scorching.
- Spanish sauce"Clear Spanish sauce" is sauce espagnole, the brown mother sauce built on veal stock and a brown roux, in its lighter strained form rather than the heavily reduced glaze. Any modern brown sauce recipe will explain it; nothing about the sauce itself is unsafe.
- If you want the flavourTruffled roast turkey is still made in France, but by current methods, with the aromatics applied shortly before cooking and the bird kept refrigerated throughout. Use a present-day recipe.
Truffled turkey belonged to the grand repertoire of nineteenth-century French cookery and to the Christmas and New Year tables of the wealthy on both sides of the Channel; Brillat-Savarin, writing in 1825, treated a truffled turkey as a benchmark of a well-off household, and the dish recurs through the century in the writing of the chefs who followed Carême. The turkey itself had arrived in Europe from Mexico in the sixteenth century and by the 1800s was the standard large festive bird in France as well as England. The practice of letting a bird sit stuffed so that the aroma of truffle permeates the flesh made sense only in an age of home slaughter and cold larders, and food safety practice has since ruled it out.