Wild Turkey
If the turkey is old, after it is dressed wash it inside thoroughly with soda and water. Rinse it and plunge it into a pot of boiling water for five minutes. Make a stuffing of bits of pork, beef, or any other cold meat, plenty of chopped celery, stewed giblets, hard-boiled eggs, pounded cracker, pepper, and salt, and a heaping spoonful of butter. Work this well and fill the turkey. With another large spoonful of butter grease the bird, and then sprinkle salt and pepper over it. Lay in a pan, with a pint of stock or broth in which any kind of meat has been boiled. Place in a hot oven. When it begins to brown, dredge with flour and baste, turning often, so that each part may be equally browned. Put a buttered sheet of paper over the breast, to prevent dryness. When thoroughly done, lay on a dish, brown some crackers, pound and sift over it, and serve with celery or oyster sauce.--Mrs. T. A Simpler Way to Prepare Wild Turkey.
Prepare the turkey as usual, rub the inside with salt andcayenne pepper, and put in the baking-pan, with water enough to make gravy. Cut up the gizzard and liver with lump of butter. Mix with the gravy and serve hot To Roast Wild Fowl in a Stove.
Put them on a rack above a pan, so that the gravy will drip through. This makes them as delicate as if roasted on a spit. If roasted in a pan, they will be exceedingly greasy and have the stovey taste to which so many persons object.--Mrs. J. W. S.
Three related methods for wild turkey, from the elaborate to the plain. The governing fact is that a wild bird carries almost no fat, so everything here is aimed at keeping the breast from drying out.
- The hinge: fat and temperatureA wild turkey has perhaps a quarter the fat of a supermarket bird, and the breast will be dry and stringy before the thighs are done. The buttered paper over the breast is not a flourish but the whole trick — use parchment or foil, and pull the bird when the thigh reads 165F rather than cooking to a fixed time.
- "A hot oven"In a nineteenth-century wood range this is usually taken to mean somewhere around 400-450F, though such ovens were judged by hand and held no steady temperature. Modern practice is to start hot for 20-30 minutes to set the skin, then drop to 325-350F for the remainder.
- Soda and waterMost likely baking soda, though period sources use "soda" loosely and washing soda was also a household staple. The soda rinse and the five-minute plunge in boiling water were applied to old, strong-tasting birds; the recipe itself opens "if the turkey is old", so a young wild turkey needs neither.
- Pounded crackerUnsalted soda or water crackers, crushed to crumbs. Roughly 1 to 1.5 cups of crumbs will bind a stuffing for a bird this size. Plain unseasoned cracker crumbs or torn stale bread will both serve, though bread absorbs more moisture.
- The stuffingCold cooked meat, giblets and hard-boiled egg packed into a cavity heat slowly. Either stuff loosely and confirm the centre of the stuffing reaches 165F, or bake it in a separate dish moistened with pan juices, which is the more reliable result.
- A pint of stockTwo cups. Any meat broth serves; it becomes the basting liquid and then the gravy base. Top it up as it reduces, since a dry pan will scorch the drippings.
- Turning oftenWritten for a bird resting directly in the pan. On a rack — which the third note recommends — turning is largely unnecessary; breast-side down for the first half hour, then up, gives an even colour.
- YieldDressed weights vary widely, from around 6 lb for a hen to 15 lb or more for a mature gobbler; a mid-sized bird will serve 8 to 10. Expect a longer legs-and-thighs cook than a domestic bird of the same weight, as the muscle is denser.
- Celery or oyster sauceBoth are period white sauces: a butter-and-flour base thinned with stock or milk, finished with stewed celery or with oysters barely poached in their own liquor. Oysters need a minute or two only; longer and they toughen.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia, compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree and published in 1879, gathered contributions from Virginia households and credited them by initial — hence "Mrs. T." and "Mrs. J. W. S." here, answers to the same bird set side by side. Wild turkey figures in this book as ordinary market and woodland game, though by the 1870s overhunting and habitat loss had already left the eastern population heavily depleted; the twentieth-century restoration that made wild turkey huntable again across the state came much later. The closing note on roasting in a stove records a genuine transition: cooks raised on open-hearth spit roasting distrusted the closed iron range, and "the stovey taste" was a common complaint of the period — the remedy, lifting the bird onto a rack so it was not sitting in its own grease, is precisely what a modern roasting pan is designed to do.