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Roast Turkey, with Truffles
Truffles must be peeled, chopped and pounded in a mortar; one and a half pound will do for one turkey. Rasp the same amount of fat bacon and mix with the truffles and stuff the turkey with it. This dressing is usually placed in the turkey two days beforehand, to impart its flavor to the fowl. Lay thin slices of fat bacon over the breast of the turkey, cover it with half a sheet of white paper, and roast two hours. Chestnuts dressed in the same way as truffles are found an excellent substitute.--Mrs. S. G.
This is the classic French truffled turkey as it reached a Virginia household in the 1870s, and the two features that define it — a raw stuffing left in the bird for two days and a two-hour roast — are exactly what puts it out of reach now.
- The two-day hold is the problemA raw turkey stuffed with raw pork fat and held forty-eight hours so the perfume migrates into the flesh is a cavity full of moist, fatty, low-acid food in direct contact with raw poultry juices. The text gives no indication of where or at what temperature the bird was held; presumably a cold larder was assumed. No modern food-safety guidance permits stuffing a bird more than immediately before it goes into the oven.
- Two hours will not do itA stuffed turkey heats far more slowly than an empty one, and a pound and a half of pounded truffle bound with rasped bacon fat is dense, insulating and slow. The center of that mass would still be well short of a safe temperature when the two hours are up, which is precisely the part that has been sitting in raw juices for two days.
- Raw pork fat in the stuffingThe 'fat bacon' is rasped raw into the truffles rather than rendered. Whatever its cure, at this ratio it should not be relied on for any preservative effect, and it adds raw pork to the hazard already described.
- No temperature anywhere in the originalThere is no oven setting, no internal temperature, and no indication of the size of the bird — Mrs. S. G. assumed a cook who knew her own range and her own turkey. Nothing in the text can be scaled into a safe procedure, so a current roasting recipe should be used instead.
- What the paper was forThe half-sheet of white paper over the breast acts as a barding shield, used before foil existed to keep the bacon from scorching and the breast from drying. That part of the technique is sound and survives, in foil, in modern roasting instructions.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia, compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree and published in 1879, gathered contributions from named and initialled Virginia housekeepers, and this one comes out of the French repertoire: dinde truffée, the truffled turkey Brillat-Savarin had written about earlier in the century as a prized dish of the Paris winter table. The method — pound the truffles with pork fat, stuff the bird well ahead so the aroma penetrates the flesh, bard the breast — follows the standard French treatment, and its appearance in a Southern household book suggests how far French cookery had been absorbed into the aspirational end of Virginia entertaining. Truffles were an import; chestnuts fell from trees across the American South before the blight of the early twentieth century wiped out the native chestnut, and a cook who wanted the texture and the richness without the expense had them free for the gathering.