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Braised Turkey
Prepare as for roasting, brown lightly in frying pan or quick oven. Remove to braising pan and braise with onions, sweet herbs and vegetables. Cover and cook slowly 4 hours, or till tender. Allow 3/4 lb. raw turkey per person if vegetables are used.
A telegraphic professional-style formula that assumes the cook already knows how to dress a bird and set up a braise. The essentials it leaves unsaid are the liquid, the heat, and the finished temperature.
- The browning stage"Quick oven" is roughly 400-450F; ten to fifteen minutes is enough to colour the skin. A heavy pan on the stovetop does the same job faster if the bird is small enough to turn.
- Braising heat"Cook slowly" here is probably in the region of 300-325F in a covered pan, or the barest simmer on the stovetop. Four hours at that heat suits a medium bird; a very large turkey may not fit a covered braising pan at all and is better roasted.
- Liquid, which the recipe omitsA braise needs roughly an inch of stock or water in the pan, not full immersion. The onions and vegetables release more as they cook, and the lid must seal well or the pan will run dry.
- Sweet herbsThe period term for the mild aromatic kitchen herbs: thyme, marjoram, parsley, savory, bay. A bundle tied with string is easier to fish out than loose leaves.
- Doneness beats the clock"Or till tender" is the operative phrase. Check the thigh with a thermometer: 175F there, with the breast no lower than 165F. Four hours of covered cooking will usually overshoot on the breast, which is the trade-off braising makes in exchange for moist legs.
- YieldThe three-quarter pound of raw bird per person allows for bone and shrinkage, and the recipe explicitly ties that figure to the braised vegetables stretching the plate; without them, allow more.
- The pan liquidStrain and skim it, then reduce or thicken for gravy. It carries the concentrated vegetable and herb flavour that justifies the method over plain roasting.
- SkinBraised skin goes soft. If that matters, uncover the pan for the last twenty minutes at 425F to firm and colour it.
Braising a turkey rather than roasting it suited the hotel and institutional kitchen, where a covered pan of moist heat produced reliable, carvable meat and where nobody was carrying a whole browned bird to the table for show. The three-quarter-pound raw allowance reads like a costing note, though per-person allowances of this kind also appear in ordinary household books of the period. Turkeys were generally older and tougher than the young broad-breasted birds sold now, and long slow cooking with aromatics was a sensible answer to a stringy leg. Terse formulae like this one appear in books that addressed household and professional readers alike, expecting the reader to supply the details the shorthand leaves out.