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Boiling and Pressing the Galantine
The largest and plumpest turkeys are naturally chosen for boning, especially by those who think boning difficult, but such turkeys are nearly always old and disappointment will be the result if they have not time enough allowed for boiling. Five hours is little enough allowed for boiling. Five hours is little enough for a large turkey stuffed as above, though two hours will be enough for a young one.
They have a nice letter press in the office and there is a clothes press in the housekeeper's room and another in the laundry, and a cider press in the milk house, that is only used once a year, but I don't think you have in the kitchen a press at all for galantines or pressed beef or pigs' heads or head cheese, a press with assorted moulds and shapes and a metal tray to catch the overflow.
Let the boned turkey when done remain in the liquor it was boiled in till cool enough to be handled, then place it between two large platters with a fifty pound stone or sack of flour on the top.
But if it is to be incased in jelly and decorated press it into a deep mould or pan of some sort.
The long and narrow sinks of the steam chest with their flaring sides, are suitable and make a handsome galantine, but common pans may answer if you have not special moulds. It is only the poor workman that finds fault with his tools. Many of the pretty but useless articles of the French menu may be as well dispensed with but boned turkey is (to be) an American national dish, more than the hunting beef or spiced round to the Old English squire, or than the boar's head to the Saxon thane or Norman earl; substantial, always welcome and when good highly appreciated, and therefore worthy of effort.
This is the finishing stage of a boned, stuffed turkey — the cooking, cooling and pressing — written in Whitehead's rambling hotel-kitchen voice. The instructions are sound, but the times and the cooling method both need adjusting.
- Simmer, never boilA rolling boil will burst the skin and stuffing of a boned bird and cloud the stock you want for the jelly. Keep the liquor at a bare shiver, 180-185F, for the whole cooking.
- Five hours is for an old birdThe long time assumes a mature turkey of the sort Whitehead was writing for. A modern commercial turkey of 12-14 lb, boned and rolled, is done well before that; cook to an internal 165F at the centre of the stuffed roll, which usually takes 2 to 2 1/2 hours, and stop there rather than by the clock.
- Cool it in the refrigerator, not the kitchenLeaving a large mass of cooked poultry to cool at room temperature in its own stock sits it in the bacterial danger zone for hours. Cool it quickly — the pot set in an ice bath, then straight into the refrigerator — and do the pressing chilled.
- The weightA fifty-pound stone is more than needed and risks squeezing the roll dry. Ten to fifteen pounds, evenly distributed on a board or second platter, gives a firm slice; canned goods or a foil-wrapped brick work as well as a flour sack.
- Press cold, overnightThe galantine sets as its gelatine chills. Twelve hours under weight in the refrigerator is the target; anything less and it will slump when carved.
- "Incased in jelly"The clarified boiling liquor is the jelly. Strain it, clarify with egg white if you want it clear, and check its set on a chilled saucer — a young modern bird may not give a firm enough set on its own, so a little added gelatine is often necessary.
- Steam chest sinks and other mouldsHe appears to mean the long narrow well of a steam table, which gives a neat rectangular loaf. A loaf pan, a terrine, or a foil-lined bread tin all serve; line whatever you use with plastic film so the pressed galantine lifts out clean.
- ServingA boned turkey will stretch a long way as a cold buffet dish. Slice it thin, straight across the roll, with a long knife and a wiped blade between cuts.
Galantine takes its name from the Old French for a jellied dish — the word is generally traced to the same root as gelatine, though some connect it to galine, an old term for a hen, the bird most often boned for it. Whitehead was writing for American hotel and restaurant cooks in the last decades of the nineteenth century, when a cold boned turkey in aspic was a dish of some ceremony. His complaint about the absence of a proper press is the running joke of the passage: the well-run household had a letter press, a clothes press, a cider press and the laundry press, but the kitchen — the room doing the hardest work — went without. The claim that boned turkey is an American national dish is aspiration rather than fact, but it reflects a real late-Victorian effort to argue that American cookery had set pieces of its own to place beside the English spiced round and the ceremonial boar's head.