Home › Poultry and Game › Roast Turkey
Roast Turkey
Carefully pluck the bird and singe off the down with lighted paper; break the leg bone close to the foot, hang up the bird and draw out the strings of the thigh. Never cut the breast; make a small slit down the back of the neck and take out the crop that way, then cut the neck bone close, and after the bird is stuffed the skin can be turned over the back and the crop will look full and round. Cut around the vent, making the hole as small as possible, and draw carefully, taking care that the gall bag and the intestines joining the gizzard are not broken. Open the gizzard, take out the contents and detach the liver from the gall bladder. The liver, gizzard and heart, if used in the gravy, will need to be boiled an hour and a half and chopped as fine as possible. Wash the turkey and wipe thoroughly dry, inside and out; then fill the inside with stuffing, and sew the skin of the neck over the back. Sew up the opening at the vent, then run a long skewer into the pinion and thigh through the body, passing it through the opposite pinion and thigh. Put a skewer in the small part of the leg, close on the outside and push it through. Pass a string over the points of the skewers and tie it securely at the back.
Sprinkle well with barley flour, cover the breast with nicely-buttered white paper, place on a grating in the drippingpan and put in the oven to roast. Baste every fifteen minutes-a few times with butter and water, and then with the gravy in the dripping-pan. Do not have too hot an oven. A turkey weighing ten pounds will require three hours to bake.
Most of this recipe is a lesson in dressing a bird that arrives whole and feathered; the cooking instructions are only the last four sentences. If you start with an oven-ready turkey, skip to "Wash the turkey and wipe thoroughly dry."
- The hinge: temperature, not time"Three hours" for a ten-pound bird was a reasonable estimate for a wood or coal range, but modern ovens vary and so do birds. Cook to 165F in the thickest part of the thigh, away from bone, and check the centre of the stuffing as well.
- "Do not have too hot an oven"The book gives no figure; a moderate oven, roughly 325-350F, is the usual modern equivalent. A stuffed bird of this size at 325F generally takes about 3 to 3 1/2 hours, which is close to the original estimate.
- Stuffing inside the birdA packed cavity slows heat penetration and the stuffing must itself reach 165F, by which point the breast is often overdone. Stuff loosely, or bake the dressing in a separate dish and put aromatics in the cavity instead.
- Barley flourSold in health-food aisles and by mail order; plain wheat flour does the same job. The dusting absorbs fat and helps the skin brown evenly, and it is optional.
- Buttered white paperButtered parchment, or a loose tent of foil over the breast for the first two-thirds of roasting. The point is to shield the breast until the thighs catch up, so remove it near the end to let the skin colour.
- Skewers and stringThe pinion-and-thigh skewering described here is nineteenth-century trussing. Kitchen twine tying the legs together and the wings against the body achieves the same compact shape.
- BastingEvery fifteen minutes means a lot of open-oven time and a lot of lost heat. Every 30-40 minutes is enough, and dry-brined or buttered-under-the-skin birds need no basting at all.
- Giblet gravySimmering liver, gizzard and heart for an hour and a half suits the gizzard and heart, which are tough. The liver turns grainy and bitter over that time; add it only for the last 15 minutes, or leave it out.
- Resting and yieldRest the bird 20-30 minutes before carving so the juices redistribute. A 10 lb turkey serves roughly 8 to 10.
Cookbooks of this era assumed a cook who might have to deal with a bird as it came from the market or the farmyard, which is why two-thirds of this entry is butchery rather than cooking: singeing the down with lighted paper, drawing the tendons from the thigh, removing the crop through a slit at the back of the neck so the breast skin stayed whole for the table. The turkey itself is a North American bird, domesticated in Mesoamerica and carried to Europe in the sixteenth century. The buttered paper over the breast is an old solution to a problem cooks still argue about, that dark and white meat do not finish at the same moment; the modern foil tent is the same idea in a different material.