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Roasted Turkey
Stuff two small hen turkeys with either mushrooms, chestnuts or oysters.
If mushrooms or chestnuts are used, boil them until tender, mince them with their liquor, mix with bread crumbs, butter, salt, pepper and cream. If oysters are used, parboil them slightly, mince them and use their liquor. Skewer legs of the turkeys close to the bodies, tuck their necks into the breast openings, spread the turkeys with a paste of butter and flour, add salt and pepper and cover with stalks of celery, using both the white and greenish-white parts. Add a little hot water to pan and baste frequently. Lay tiny sausages around the turkeys the last hour, remove celery to brown the turkeys.
Bake them two hours, then serve them on a platter neck to neck and garnish them with the sausages, watercress and lady apples, putting one cored apple on the end of each short drumstick.
Cook one tablespoon of butter with a teaspoon each of minced onion, carrot, parsley and celery, add a bit of thyme, tiny piece of bay leaf, a few peppercorns and three tablespoons of flour, when boiling add the strained liquor from the pan and the giblets boiled and minced.
Strain and serve in a boat. - Linda Hull Larned.
A holiday centerpiece written for cooks who already knew how to roast a bird, so the essentials — oven heat, weights, doneness — are all left out. The gaps are worth filling before you start.
- The two-hour figure is the problemNo oven temperature is given, and two hours will not bring a stuffed turkey to a safe internal temperature unless the birds are genuinely small. Roast at 325F and cook to 165F in the thickest part of the thigh and in the center of the stuffing, whatever the clock says. For two 8-10 lb hens that is closer to three hours.
- Stuffing, cooked separatelyBread crumbs bound with cream and butter, packed into a cavity, sit in the danger zone for a long time and force you to overcook the breast to bring the center up to temperature. Bake the dressing in a buttered dish alongside and season the cavity with aromatics instead.
- OystersParboiling then mincing is right, but keep it brief — thirty seconds until the edges just curl. Oysters held longer turn to rubber, and they will cook again in the oven.
- "Small hen turkeys"Hen turkeys were generally reckoned more tender than toms. A small hen of the period would have been something on the order of 8-10 lb, so two would serve roughly 16-20 with leftovers. One 12-14 lb bird works if you are not staging the neck-to-neck presentation.
- The butter-and-flour pasteSoftened butter worked with flour and smeared over the skin, a coating that does roughly what a foil tent does now. It browns slowly and holds the seasoning in place. The recipe specifies no proportions; roughly equal parts, a few tablespoons of each per bird, is a workable reading.
- Celery as a heat shieldThe celery stalks laid over the breast do the job a foil tent does now — they keep the skin from setting too early. Removing them for the last stretch to brown is the whole point, so do not skip it.
- Lady applesSmall heirloom apples, an inch or two across, still sold in autumn at farm markets. Crab apples or seckel pears substitute. They are garnish, not eating apples in this context.
- The gravyThis is a brown sauce built on a mirepoix and a roux: 3 tablespoons flour to 1 tablespoon butter is very lean, so add more fat from the pan or the sauce will be pasty. Cook the flour until it smells nutty before the pan liquor goes in, and strain out the bay, thyme and peppercorns as directed.
- RestingNot mentioned, as usual for the period. Let the birds stand 20-30 minutes under loose foil before carving; you have time to finish the sauce while they do.
Linda Hull Larned was a working American cookbook writer around the turn of the twentieth century, author of collections on made-over dishes and one-piece dinners, and her contributions turn up throughout the magazine-derived cookbooks of the era. The recipe is a set piece rather than a weeknight roast: two birds arranged neck to neck on one platter, ringed with sausages, watercress and lady apples, with a cored apple spiked on each drumstick. Elaborate garnishing of this kind belonged to the French-influenced formal dining of the period. Mushroom, chestnut and oyster were all common turkey stuffings in American books of the time, and oysters had long been cheap enough on the East Coast to be an everyday ingredient, though the beds were already under pressure by 1900.