Boned Turkey
The turkey must be full grown, moderately fat, and picked dry. Do not remove the entrails. Cut off the neck about one inch from the body. Take off the wings above the second joint and cut off the legs as usual. With a sharp pointed knife, split the skin from the end of the neck to the rump. Run the knife between the bones and flesh on one side, till you come to where the wing and leg join the body. Twist the wing and raise it, cracking the joint. Separate it from the body. Then proceed with the leg in the same way, on the same side. Run the knife between the bones and flesh till you reach the breast bone. Repeat this on the other side. Take out the craw. Carefully run a sharp knife under the rump, detaching it from the bone without cutting the skin, as it must come off with the flesh. Hold the turkey by the neck and pull the skin carefully down, until the upper part of the breast bone is uncovered. Cut the flesh from the bone on both sides, till the end of the bone is nearly reached. The turkey must now be laid on the back and held by the neck, the front of the turkey being toward you. Take hold of the skin of the neck with the left hand, pulling downwards with a knife in the right hand, separate the skin from the end of the bone. The whole of the turkey is now detached from the carcass. Lay it on a table with the skin down. Pull the bones from the wings and legs, first running the knife around so as to leave the flesh. Pull out all the tendons of the legs. Push them and the wings inside. Cut off the ring under the rump. All this must be done slowly and carefully. Have ready a half-dozen slices of salt pork, and a salad made of shoat, veal or lamb, chopped and seasoned, as turkey salad, with celery, etc. Mix with this salad three or four large Irish potatoes, boiled and mashed, with a spoonful of butter. Now lay the turkey on the table, inside up and the neck from you; pepper and salt it; lay three or four slices of pork on it, then a layer of the salad; pork again and salad alternately until filled; draw the two sides together and sew it up, giving it as near as possible its proper shape. Sew it up carefully in a cloth, place in a kettle of the proper shape, cover with boiling water, adding the broken bones, three pounds fresh lean beef, parsley, thyme, onions and two dozen whole black peppercorns, with salt to the taste. Simmer three hours, then take it from the water and remove the towel. Carefully remove all discolorations and settlings of the water from the turkey. Scald a clean cloth, wrap it up again; place it on its back, put a dish over it with a weight on it and set it in a cool place till next day. Unwrap and remove the twine with which it was sewed. Glaze it with a little meat jelly; just before the jelly congeals sift over a little cracker browned and pounded; decorate with meat jelly and serve. Directions for preparing meat jelly follow.--Mrs.
This is a galantine: a whole turkey boned out through the back, stuffed, poached in its own stock, pressed overnight and served cold in slices. The work is all in the boning, and the recipe assumes you are starting with a bird straight from the yard.
- Start with a supermarket bird"Picked dry" means dry-plucked rather than scalded, which keeps the skin tough enough to survive the boning; "do not remove the entrails" simply delays evisceration until the carcass is out. Both instructions are moot with an oven-ready turkey, which is already drawn and whose skin is intact. Buy a 12-14 lb bird and keep the skin unbroken from neck to tail, since it is the bag that holds everything together.
- The hinge of the whole thingEvery cut is made against bone, never through skin. Work with the knife edge scraping the carcass and the flesh peeling away toward you; a single puncture in the back skin will leak stuffing into the poaching liquid and collapse the shape. Chilling the bird thoroughly first makes the skin far less inclined to tear.
- "The ring under the rump"The recipe does not explain the term. It is most likely the vent, or the oil gland and tissue at the base of the tail; either way it is trimmed off and discarded as strong-flavoured.
- Shoat and Irish potatoesA shoat is a young weaned pig; pork shoulder is the modern stand-in. "Irish potatoes" distinguishes ordinary white potatoes from sweet potatoes, a distinction common in Southern usage. The forcemeat here is cooked meat chopped and dressed "as turkey salad," so use meat already cooked, and keep the potato binding stiff rather than loose.
- The poaching temperature"Simmer three hours" should be read as a bare simmer, 175-185F, with the surface barely trembling. A hard boil swells and bursts the skin and squeezes the stuffing out through the seam. Three hours is right for a bird of this size; the centre of the stuffing should reach 165F.
- The kettle and the cloth"A kettle of the proper shape" means a long oval vessel, a fish kettle or a large oval roaster, in which the bird can lie flat and stay covered by liquid. Wrap in scalded cheesecloth or a clean linen towel and tie at intervals; the cloth holds the shape and lets you lift the thing out without breaking it.
- Cooling and pressingThe overnight press under a weighted dish is what makes the galantine sliceable, but do it in the refrigerator rather than the larder or cellar the recipe assumes. A dense, stuffed 12 lb mass cools very slowly, and a cool room is not cold enough to keep it out of the range where bacteria multiply.
- Glaze and crumbs"Meat jelly" is aspic made from the poaching liquid, which the beef, bones and aromatics are there to enrich; strain, clarify and reduce it until a spoonful sets firm when chilled. "Cracker browned and pounded" is toasted cracker crumbs, sifted over the tacky glaze before it sets.
- YieldA boned and stuffed bird of this size, served cold in thin slices, will stretch a long way as part of a buffet. It keeps three or four days refrigerated, and cutting across the breast shows the layers of meat and forcemeat.
Boned turkey is an American version of the French galantine, a technique in which poultry is boned, stuffed, poached and pressed so that it can be sliced cold to show a pattern of meat and forcemeat. It was a display dish above all: the whole point of the labour is that the bird arrives looking like a bird, with no bone in it, and can be carved by anyone at a crowded table. Cold pressed meats of this kind suited the Virginia entertaining that Housekeeping in Old Virginia documents, where a Christmas or wedding sideboard held ham, turkey and jellies that had been made a day ahead and needed no last-minute cooking. Like most of the book, the recipe is signed by a contributor rather than an author; Marion Cabell Tyree compiled the book from receipts contributed by Virginia housekeepers, publishing it in 1878, and the abrupt closing "--Mrs." appears to be a truncated attribution of that kind. The origin of the word galantine is uncertain: it has been linked both to an Old French word for a hen and to older words for jelly.