Boned Turkey
2 turkeys. 1 corned tongue, already cooked. 1 pound of dry salt pork. 8 hard-boiled eggs. 1 cupful of aspic jelly. Seasonings. Take a large and a small turkey unopened, singe and wash and then bone them, cutting first down the whole length of the back. When boned lay them skin downwards on the table and season with pepper and salt, or with spiced salt. Cut the cooked red tongue and the fat unsmoked bacon into strips pencil size and lay them alternating on the turkey meat, lengthwise of the fowl, cutting gashes in the thickest parts to receive them evenly. Cut the yolks of the eggs in quarters and dispose them evenly among the strips, then chop the jelly and strew it over.
You are now able to supply to the hotel patrons that long felt want, a turkey all breast.
Roll, or rather double up carefully the smaller turkey and place it inside the other, remembering to turn it so that there will be found when the galantine is cut a breast at each end. Bring the two edges of the outside turkey together and sew it up with cotton twine and a large needle. Butter a cloth and roll the galantine up in it tightly and with a good many wraps, and either tie or sew it securely. Boil in soup stock with the turkey bones added.
This is a hotel-scale galantine: two boned turkeys, one stuffed inside the other, poached in stock and served cold in slices. The original assumes a cook who already knows the technique, so the two things it leaves out entirely are cooking time and cooling.
- The hinge: it is cooked, then pressed coldA galantine is poached, cooled in its cloth under weight, and only sliced when thoroughly chilled. Slicing it warm gives a collapsing spiral instead of a clean mosaic of tongue, fat and egg yolk.
- No time is given for the boilingJudge by internal temperature rather than the clock: the centre of a rolled bird of this mass needs 165F/74C, which at a bare simmer will take several hours. Keep the stock at a shiver, never a rolling boil, or the skin splits and the fat renders out.
- ScaleTwo turkeys, one large and one small, is a banquet piece. A single 10-12 lb bird, boned and rolled around the same garnish, is the domestic version and behaves the same way. As written it would serve a large table many times over as a cold cut.
- "Dry salt pork" and "fat unsmoked bacon"Both mean the same thing here: salt-cured, unsmoked pork fatback, sold as salt pork or by its French name lard gras. Ordinary smoked bacon will dominate the flavour; if it is all you have, blanch it first.
- Corned tongueBeef tongue cured in brine, then simmered until tender and peeled. It is still sold at butchers and Latin and Jewish markets, usually as lengua or pickled tongue, and needs three to four hours of simmering before it is cut into strips.
- Aspic jellyA clarified, well-gelled stock. Chopped and strewn through the roll, it melts during poaching and re-sets on chilling, filling the gaps between the strips so the slices hold together. Powdered gelatine bloomed in strong stock does the same job.
- Spiced saltPeriod kitchens kept a jar of sel épicé: salt with pepper, nutmeg, clove, thyme and bay ground into it. Any charcuterie seasoning mix serves.
- The clothButtered muslin or several layers of cheesecloth, wrapped tight and tied at intervals like a roast. It holds the shape against the water and is unwrapped only after the galantine has chilled, when the cloth peels away cleanly.
- Cooling and keepingChill the whole roll, still wrapped, as quickly as the kitchen allows and refrigerate. Cut, it keeps three or four days; the poaching stock, strained and reduced, makes the aspic for glazing the finished piece.
A galantine is a boned bird reconstructed around its own garnish, poached and served cold — the name is generally traced to Old French words for jelly, and the dish belongs to the garde manger, the cold larder. The joke about "a turkey all breast" is the whole commercial point of the thing — a hotel steward carving portions from a solid, boneless cylinder has no waste, no wings and no arguments over who gets the drumstick, and the double bird gives a breast slice at either end of the roll.