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Roast Turkey
Follow directions for roast chicken. An eight-pound turkey should be allowed three hours in a moderate oven (350-480° F.). It may be dredged with flour a second time about one hour before it is to be served. Serve with giblet sauce.
This is a cross-reference more than a recipe: the method lives under roast chicken, and what is given here is timing, a flour dredge and a sauce. A few numbers need correcting for a modern bird and a modern thermometer.
- That oven range is too widePeriod definitions of "moderate" vary, but the printed upper figure of 480F is a quick oven by any reckoning, and may well be a misprint. Roast at 325F; if you want browning, take the last 20 minutes at 425F rather than starting hot.
- Cook to temperature, not to the clockThree hours for eight pounds is a rough guide with no thermometer behind it. Modern tables give roughly two and three-quarter to three hours unstuffed at 325F, but the bird is the judge: pull at 165F in the thickest part of the breast and 175F at the thigh joint, away from bone.
- Stuffing changes everythingIf the cavity is filled, the stuffing itself must reach 165F, which can add half an hour or more and overcook the breast. Roasting the dressing in a separate dish is the reliable route.
- The flour dredgeA flour dusting, often over a buttered skin, was one common way to build a crust and help thicken the drippings; the book gives no reason for the second dredge an hour before serving. Salted, dried skin plus butter does the same job with less risk of pasty patches.
- Basting and restingWhatever the chicken directions say about basting from the pan, a tented sheet of foil over the breast for the first two-thirds does more good. Rest the bird 20 to 30 minutes before carving so the juices set.
- Giblet sauceSimmer neck, heart and gizzard (not the liver, which turns the gravy bitter and grainy if long-cooked) in water with an onion and a bay leaf for about an hour, chop the meat, and use the strained broth with the pan drippings and flour. Add the liver only in the last few minutes if at all.
- YieldAn eight-pound turkey serves about six to eight, reckoning roughly a pound to a pound and a half of raw weight per person; leftovers only at the lower end of that count.
Butterick's household books were sold alongside dress patterns to a broad middle-class readership, and their compression is deliberate: rather than repeat a full roasting method, the poultry chapter sets out a master procedure under chicken and cross-refers to it. The flour dredge described here belongs to an older tradition of spit and open-pan roasting; it survived in print well into the era of gas ranges. An eight-pound bird is also a reminder that the enormous holiday turkey is a later development, dependent on the broad-breasted breeds and refrigerated distribution of the mid-twentieth century. Giblet sauce, meanwhile, reflects a kitchen in which nothing sold with the bird was thrown away.