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Roast Turkey
Dress, clean, stuff, and truss a ten-pound turkey (see pages 242-244). Place on its side on rack in a drippingpan, rub entire surface with salt, and spread breast, legs, and wings with one-third cup butter, rubbed until creamy and mixed with one-fourth cup flour. Dredge bottom of pan with flour. Place in a hot oven, and when flour on turkey begins to brown, reduce heat, and baste every fifteen minutes until turkey is cooked, which will require about three hours. For basting use one-half cup butter melted in one-half cup boiling water and after this is used baste with fat in pan. Pour water in pan during the cooking as needed to prevent flour from burning. During cooking turn turkey frequently, that it may brown evenly. If turkey is browning too fast, cover with buttered paper to prevent burning. Remove string and skewers before serving. Garnish with parsley, or celery tips, or curled celery and rings and discs of carrots strung on fine wire.
For stuffing, use double the quantities given in recipes under Roast Chicken. If stuffing is to be served cold, add one beaten egg. Turkey is often roasted with Chestnut Stuffing, Oyster Stuffing, or Turkey Stuffing (Swedish Style).
Fannie Farmer's method is sound, but it assumes a bird you butchered yourself and an oven with no thermostat. Two things need translating: the heat, and how you know when it is done.
- Temperature, not timeThe hinge of the whole recipe. Three hours for a ten-pound stuffed bird is a fair estimate, but cook to an instant-read thermometer: 165F in the thickest part of the thigh without touching bone, and 165F at the centre of the stuffing. A stuffed bird lags well behind an empty one, and the stuffing is the last thing to come up to temperature.
- "A hot oven," then reduceStart at 450F to set the flour-and-butter crust, then drop to 325-350F once it colours. The book gives no numerical temperatures; "hot" and "moderate" were judged by eye, and these figures are a modern equivalent rather than the author's own.
- Dress and cleanThis means pluck, singe, draw and remove the pinfeathers and oil sac. A supermarket bird needs only the giblet bag pulled from both cavities and a rinse-free pat dry.
- Turning the birdRoasting on its side and turning frequently was how cooks got even colour before reliable convection. It works, but a ten-pound bird slick with butter is awkward and dangerous to flip; roasting breast-up and shielding the breast with foil once it browns gets you to the same place.
- Buttered paperParchment or foil. Butter the side facing the bird so it does not stick to the skin and tear it when lifted.
- The flour-dredged panFlour scattered in the drippings, with water added as it darkens, is a gravy started in advance. Watch it: at 450F it can scorch in minutes, and burnt flour will taint the whole sauce.
- Stuffing quantityDouble the Roast Chicken stuffing, as directed. Pack it loosely; tightly packed stuffing insulates itself and will not reach 165F before the breast is dry. Baking the surplus separately in a dish is the easier path.
- BastingHalf a cup of butter in half a cup of boiling water, then pan fat, is generous but harmless. Each opening of the oven costs heat, so baste on a fifteen-minute rhythm as written rather than fussing.
- YieldA ten-pound turkey serves about six to eight with leftovers. Rest it 20-30 minutes under loose foil before carving.
Farmer's turkey belongs to the era when the bird arrived whole and feathered, which is why the recipe opens with "dress, clean" and cross-references earlier pages on trussing. The garnish tells you as much as the cooking does: parsley, curled celery, and carrot rings and discs threaded on fine wire belonged to a dining room where a roast was expected to be presented as a composed centrepiece rather than carved in the kitchen. Turkey itself was native to the Americas and already firmly attached to Thanksgiving by Farmer's day.