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Roast Turkey
Follow directions for roast chicken. An eight-pound turkey should be allowed three hours in a moderate oven (350-480 degrees F.). It may be dredged with flour a second time about one hour before it is to be served. Serve with giblet sauce.
A cross-reference entry that assumes you already know the roast chicken method: bird cleaned, stuffed if you wish, trussed, rubbed with softened butter and dredged with flour, then roasted and basted with the pan drippings. What is worth translating is the timing and the finishing.
- The ovenThe recipe's own parenthesis gives a very wide range, 350-480 F, for a moderate oven (the upper figure looks like a misprint). 350F is the figure that suits an 8 lb bird; anything near the top of that range would scorch the skin and dry the breast long before the thighs were done.
- Three hours is longModern guides put an unstuffed 8 lb bird at 350F closer to 2 to 2 1/2 hours, so the book's three hours will likely take it past done.
- Cook to temperature, not the clockTake the bird out when the thickest part of the thigh reads 165F and the juices run clear. If it is stuffed, the center of the stuffing must reach 165F as well, which is the usual reason a bird gets overcooked.
- The second dredgingFlouring the bird again an hour out is a period trick for a crisp, browned, slightly crusted skin. It works, but flour the bird only after basting so the flour has fat to brown in, and expect a matte rather than glossy finish.
- Basting and restingBaste every 20 to 30 minutes with pan fat, and let the finished bird stand 20 minutes under loose foil before carving. The rest matters more to juiciness than any amount of basting.
- Giblet sauceThat means the neck, heart and gizzard simmered in water with an onion and a little salt for an hour or more, chopped fine, and added to a gravy made from the pan drippings and the strained giblet broth. The liver is best added only in the last 15 minutes or it turns bitter.
- YieldAn 8 lb turkey serves about 8 with a stuffing and side dishes, with some left over.
The New Delineator Recipes came out of the Butterick publishing house, whose Delineator magazine reached a large middle-class readership, and it belongs to a period when turkey was more a holiday bird than a year-round meat. Cross-referenced entries like this one are common in American cookbooks of the era, which often treated roasting as a single technique scaled by weight rather than as a set of separate recipes.