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Scalloped Turkey
Make one cup of sauce, using two tablespoons butter, two tablespoons flour, one-fourth teaspoon salt, few grains of pepper, and one cup stock (obtained by cooking in water bones and skin of a roast turkey). Cut remnants of cold roast turkey in small pieces; there should be one and onehalf cups. Sprinkle bottom of buttered baking-dish with seasoned cracker crumbs, add turkey meat, pour over sauce, and sprinkle with buttered cracker crumbs. Bake in a hot oven until crumbs are brown. Turkey, chicken, or veal may be used separately or in combination.
A leftover dish built on a plain velouté made with turkey-bone stock. Everything depends on the sauce being thin enough to moisten the meat without turning to paste in the oven.
- Oven temperature"Hot oven" in books of this period is usually glossed as somewhere around 400–450°F; the book itself gives no figures. The dish only needs long enough to heat through and brown the crumbs, roughly 20 minutes.
- The stock is the pointSimmering the picked carcass and skin for an hour or two gives a stock with enough body to set the sauce lightly. Canned broth works but is thinner and saltier — cut the added salt and taste before assembling.
- Sauce consistencyTwo tablespoons each of butter and flour to one cup of liquid is a medium white sauce. It will thicken further in the oven, so err on the loose side; a stiff sauce leaves the meat dry and pasty.
- Cracker crumbsThese are crushed common crackers or soda crackers, coarser and blander than modern seasoned breadcrumbs. Saltines crushed to a rough crumb are the closest substitute; panko browns well but sits differently.
- Buttered crumbs"Buttered cracker crumbs" means crumbs tossed with melted butter — roughly a tablespoon of butter to a quarter or third of a cup of crumbs. Unbuttered crumbs colour less evenly.
- Seasoned crumbsThe bottom layer is crumbs with salt and pepper. They soak up sauce and keep the base from turning watery.
- Reheating cooked meatThe turkey is already cooked, so the bake is about heating and browning only. Extra time in the oven dries the meat out; pull it as soon as the top is coloured.
- YieldOne and a half cups of meat with one cup of sauce fills a small gratin dish and serves two, or three at a light lunch. Scale in that ratio — the sauce should just coat, not swamp.
Scalloped dishes — meat or fish layered with crumbs and a cream sauce, baked until brown — were a fixture of the late nineteenth-century American kitchen, and Fannie Farmer's 1896 book gives a number of them. The name is generally traced to the shell-shaped dishes such mixtures were once served in, and by Farmer's day it had loosened to mean anything baked with crumbs and sauce. This particular entry is a piece of household economy as much as cookery: the bones and skin of the roast go into a stock, the picked meat goes into the dish, and nothing of a costly bird is wasted. The closing line, offering chicken or veal in place of turkey, is typical of the Boston Cooking-School method — teach a formula, then show the reader where the variables sit.