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Minced Turkey
To one cup cold roast turkey, cut in small dice, add onethird cup soft stale bread crumbs. Make one cup sauce, using two tablespoons butter, two tablespoons flour, and one cup stock (obtained by cooking bones and skin of a roast turkey). Season with salt, pepper, and onion juice. Heat turkey and bread crumbs in sauce. Serve on small pieces of toast, and garnish with poached eggs and toast points.
A leftover dish from the days when a roast turkey was expected to yield three or four further meals. It comes together in about fifteen minutes once the stock exists.
- The stock is the dishEverything here rests on the broth simmered from the carcass and skin; water plus a bouillon cube will taste flat and salty. Simmer the bones with an onion and a bay leaf for an hour or two, then strain and reduce slightly.
- Soft stale bread crumbsNot dried or toasted crumbs. Tear day-old white bread and pull it apart with your fingers into soft, irregular pieces so it dissolves into the sauce and thickens it.
- Onion juiceA period seasoning made by cutting an onion in half and pressing the cut face against a grater to release liquid without pulp. The recipe gives no quantity; season to taste, and finely grated onion works as a substitute.
- Sauce consistencyTwo tablespoons each of butter and flour to one cup of stock gives a medium-thick white sauce, and the crumbs thicken it further. Hold back a little stock and add it at the end if the mince stiffens too much to spoon.
- Reheating the turkeyThe meat is already cooked; fold it in and warm it through over low heat for two or three minutes. Held at a simmer it turns stringy and dry.
- Poached eggsPoach them last so they arrive hot; a soft yolk running into the sauce suits the dish, though the recipe specifies only that the eggs be poached.
- YieldOne cup of diced meat serves two as a light supper or lunch. Scale up in direct proportion, keeping the ratio of one cup sauce to one cup turkey.
Minced meat on toast was a common answer to a picked-over roast in nineteenth-century American and English kitchens, and Fannie Farmer's book gives a number of variations on the formula: cold meat, a cup of white sauce, a starchy binder, something to serve it on. The economy is structural rather than incidental — the bones and skin become the stock, the stale bread becomes the thickener, and nothing from the Sunday bird is wasted. The poached egg and toast points are what lift it from scraps to a dish fit to bring to table, and the same trick shows up across the period in creamed chipped beef, chicken à la king and any number of "à la" preparations that were really leftovers in a white sauce. Turkey in this era was a seasonal, celebratory bird rather than a weekly one, which is why the recipe assumes a roast has recently happened.