Roast Turkey
Wash nicely in and out. Plunge into boiling water ten minutes. Have ready a dressing of Bread crumbs. Hard boiled eggs, chopped fine. 1 tablespoonful butter. Minced parsley, thyme and celery.
After rubbing the cavity well with salt and pepper and putting in a slice of pork or bacon, fill with the above dressing. Do the same also to the crop, so as to make the turkey look plump. Rub the turkey well with butter and sprinkle salt and pepper over it. Dredge with flour. Lay in the pan with a slice of pork or bacon and a pint of boiling water. Lay the liver and gizzard in the pan with it. Put in a hot oven, basting and turning frequently till every part is a beautiful brown. When the meat is amber color, pin a buttered sheet of writing paper over it to keep it from becoming hard and dry. Cook three or four hours. Season the gravy with minced parsley and celery and serve with cranberry sauce.--Mrs. S. T.
Roast Turkey Wash the turkey thoroughly inside and out, having removed the insides. Make a dressing of bread soaked in cold water, drained and mashed fine, a small piece of melted butter or salt pork chopped, pepper and salt, sweet herbs, a hard boiled egg, chopped fine.
Any kind of cooked meat is good, minced fine and added to the dressing. The body and crop must be filled with the dressing and sewed up. The giblets ought to be boiled tender, if they are to be used. Use the water in which they are boiled, for gravy, adding a little of the turkey drippings, seasoning with pepper, salt, and sweet herbs, and thickening with a little flour and water, mixed smoothly. Place where it will boil.
When the fowl is put on to roast, put a little water into the dripping-pan. At first it should be roasted slowly and basted frequently. Tie up the wings and legs before roasting, and rub on a little butter and salt. Serve with drawn butter.--Mrs. W.
Roast Turkey.
Put the gizzard, heart and liver in cold water and boil till tender. When done, chop fine and add stale bread, grated, salt and pepper, sweet herbs, if liked, two eggs well beaten.
Fill the turkey with this dressing, sew the openings, drawing the skin tightly together. Put a little butter over the turkey and lay it upon the grate of your meat-pan. Cover the bottom of the pan well with boiling water. In half an hour, baste the turkey by pouring over it the gravy that has begun to form in the pan. Repeat this basting every fifteen minutes. In an oven of average temperature, a twelve-pound turkey will require at least three hour's cooking.--Mrs. A. D.
Three cooks' versions of the same bird, collected side by side. All three assume a wood- or coal-fired oven, an unbrined farm turkey and no thermometer; the fundamentals still work, but the temperatures and the stuffing need translating.
- Temperature, not timeRoast until the deepest part of the thigh reads 165F and the breast 160-165F. A 12-pound bird at 325F takes roughly 3 to 3 3/4 hours unstuffed, much the same range as Mrs. A. D.'s "at least three hours."
- The stuffing is the hingeBread dressing packed into the cavity must itself reach 165F, and it heats far more slowly than the meat. Pack it loosely, check it with the thermometer, and be prepared to keep roasting after the thigh is done, or bake the dressing separately in a dish.
- "A hot oven" and "average temperature"The book gives no figures. A hot oven is conventionally read as about 400-450F, useful for the first 20-30 minutes to set the colour before dropping to 325-350F; Mrs. A. D.'s oven of average temperature is usually read as around 350F, and Mrs. W. asks only that the bird start slowly.
- The ten-minute plungeThe scald was presumably meant to clean and tighten the skin of a freshly picked farm turkey. A supermarket bird has already been scalded at the plant, and the plunge only cooks the outer skin and splashes raw poultry water around the kitchen. Skip it.
- Buttered writing paperPaper was the period's foil. Use a loose tent of aluminium foil over the breast once it has browned, for the same purpose: it stops the skin hardening while the thighs finish.
- A pint of water in the panAbout two cups, which steams the underside and gives you basting liquid. It also keeps the drippings from scorching over three hours. Modern practice often uses less, or a rack over a dry pan, for crisper skin; either works.
- Giblets and drawn butterThe gizzard, heart and liver are simmered until tender: Mrs. W. uses their cooking water for the gravy, Mrs. A. D. chops them into the dressing, Mrs. S. T. lays them in the pan. Discard the liver if you dislike the strong flavour. "Drawn butter" in period American usage is a flour-thickened butter sauce, not simply melted butter.
- Crop stuffingThe neck-end skin flap is stuffed to round out the front of the bird. Fill it lightly and fold the flap under the back or skewer it; overpacking splits the skin as the dressing swells.
- YieldA 12-pound bird serves 10 to 12 with leftovers, allowing about a pound of raw weight per person.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1879), compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree, worked by gathering contributions from named and initialed Virginia housekeepers, which is why the same dish appears three times over with no attempt to reconcile the versions. The differences are the point: one cook grates stale bread, another soaks and mashes it; one binds with beaten eggs, another with chopped hard-boiled egg; one adds any leftover cooked meat. The turkey itself is a North American bird domesticated in Mexico and carried to Europe in the sixteenth century, and it was well established on Virginia tables long before it became specifically a holiday bird. The buttered paper shield over the breast is a technique found across English and American cookbooks of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and it survives essentially unchanged as the foil tent.