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Roast Turkey No. 1
Use young fowl, when dressed. Wash several times and dry with cloth. Rub well with salt and brush with butter. Turning breast down. Put turkey in roasting pan, add 1 pint hot water and put in range to cook from 1 to 3 hours. Size of fowl makes difference in time it takes to cook, allow from 20 to 25 minutes to the pound. Make stuffing of bread crumbs, season with a little butter or stock, pepper, salt, a little sage, onion and one egg to hold in shape. Put some of this inside bird, make some of it into balls and lay them around in the pan. Cook the neck and giblets until tender, in enough water to make sauce. Have a pair of sweetbreads ready cooked and one can button mushrooms, which have been sauted in butter. Add to giblets a delicious sauce to be passed after guests have been served to the turkey. Make short baking powder pastry, cut in strips, bake and when turkey has been put on a pretty tray make fence rows around with pastry sticks and garnish with parsley.
Mrs. Wilson assumes a coal or gas range and a cook who judges doneness by eye. The method is sound; the timings and the food-safety math need updating.
- Oven temperatureNo number is given; the recipe expects the cook to judge the fire by eye, as with a coal range or an unregulated oven. Roast at 325F throughout; 350F if you want faster browning on a bird under 12 lb.
- Cooking timeTwenty to twenty-five minutes to the pound will leave the breast dry. Modern practice is roughly 13-17 minutes per pound unstuffed and a little longer stuffed, at 325F. The "1 to 3 hours" figure fits only a small bird at the recipe's own rate -- three hours at 20-25 minutes to the pound is a 7-9 lb turkey -- so it will be far short for a large one.
- DonenessUse an instant-read thermometer: 165F in the thickest part of the thigh without touching bone, and 165F at the centre of any stuffing cooked inside the bird. This is the one point that matters most, since the stuffing sits in the cavity absorbing juices and lags well behind the meat.
- "When dressed"Means plucked, drawn and singed, which is how a bird came from the butcher. A supermarket turkey arrives dressed; remove the neck and giblet bag, and skip the repeated washing, which spreads bacteria around the sink rather than removing it.
- Breast downThe instruction is deliberate and still good: starting breast-down lets the back fat baste the breast. Turn the bird breast-up for the last third of the roasting so the skin colours.
- The pint of waterA pint in the pan steams the underside and keeps drippings from scorching. It also stops the skin crisping if you leave it in the whole time; let it cook away in the last hour, or omit it and baste instead.
- Stuffing ballsThe balls arranged around the bird are safer and better than the cavity filling, since they cook through and brown. Bake them separately on a sheet if the roasting pan is crowded, about 25 minutes at 350F.
- Sweetbreads and canned mushroomsSweetbreads need ordering from a butcher and must be soaked, blanched and peeled before use. Canned button mushrooms were more of a treat than an everyday store cupboard item at the time; fresh cremini sauteed in butter give a better sauce.
- Baking powder pastryA quick biscuit-type dough rather than puff. Roll thin, cut in finger-width strips, and bake at 425F for 8-10 minutes until dry and firm enough to stand up as a garnish.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield. Allowing roughly 1 to 1.5 lb of undressed turkey per person, a 14 lb bird serves about 10-12 with the stuffing and giblet sauce.
Mrs. Wilson's turkey belongs to the era when the roast bird was staged as much as cooked: the finished turkey goes onto "a pretty tray," fenced with baked pastry sticks and banked with parsley, in the tradition of the elaborately garnished platters that ran from Victorian service dinners into early twentieth-century American entertaining. The giblet sauce enriched with sweetbreads and button mushrooms is the same impulse, turning the parts of the bird that would otherwise be thrown away into a separate sauce passed after the meat. Canned mushrooms were still something of an extravagance in this period, and their appearance here suggests a company dish rather than an everyday one. The sage-and-onion bread stuffing, by contrast, is old and English in origin, and appears in American cookbooks from the earliest ones onward.