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Braised Turkey
This is a very satisfactory way of cooking an old turkey that is unfit for roasting or boiling. Prepare a stuffing as for roast turkey, stuff the body and breast, and truss. Spread thin slices of salt pork over the breast and legs, and cover the turkey with a strong sheet of buttered paper, fastening the paper on by passing a string around the body. Spread in a braising pan large enough to hold the turkey the following: one-fourth pound of salt pork, sliced; one-fourth pint of chopped celery; one-fourth pint of chopped carrot; one-fourth pint of chopped onion; one-fourth pint of chopped turnip. Lay the turkey on this mixture, with the breast up, cover the pan tightly, and place in a moderate oven. At the end of thirty minutes add one quart of water, or stock, and baste the turkey every fifteen minutes with the gravy this will make, sprinkling once with salt and pepper. Allow twentyfive minutes to the pound. During the last half-hour take the cover from the pan, remove the paper and pork from the turkey, and thus permit the meat to brown slightly. When done, lift the turkey from the pan, untruss it, and lay it on a large platter. Serve with mushroom sauce, or with the gravy strained or thickened.
A braise for a bird too tough to roast, and it still works on the sort of large, older turkey that goes stringy in dry heat. The method is sound; the timings assume a bird nothing like a modern supermarket turkey.
- The hinge: cook to temperature, not to the clockTwenty-five minutes to the pound was calculated for a tough old bird and a stove-fed oven; on a 14 lb turkey that is close to six hours, which will shred a modern one. Braise until the thigh reads 165F and the centre of the stuffing reads 165F, then give it the final uncovered half-hour to colour.
- "Moderate oven"350F. If the pan is tightly covered and the liquid is barely trembling rather than boiling, drop to 325F for the long middle stretch.
- One-fourth pintHalf a cup, so half a cup each of chopped celery, carrot, onion and turnip. The quarter pound of sliced salt pork in the pan is separate from the slices laid over the bird.
- "An old turkey"Probably a bird past its first year, hard to find today outside small farms. A standard 12-14 lb turkey substitutes fine and simply needs less time; the braise mainly buys you a moist breast.
- Buttered paperParchment, buttered and tied on with kitchen twine. Foil does the job but conducts more heat and will not brown the skin as kindly when you strip it off at the end.
- Braising panA covered roaster or a large oval Dutch oven. If nothing has a lid, a deep roasting tin sealed with two layers of heavy foil crimped hard to the rim will hold steam well enough.
- Salt porkSold cured and quite salty; rinse it if it is heavily packed in salt, and go carefully with the seasoning sprinkle called for later. Thick-cut unsmoked bacon or fresh pork belly is the nearest substitute.
- The gravyA quart of liquid plus the rendered pork gives a very rich, salty base. Strain it, skim the fat properly, and taste before adding anything; it often needs thinning with unsalted stock more than it needs thickening.
- YieldA 12-14 lb bird serves 10-14, with the braising vegetables spent and best discarded once the gravy is strained.
Braising was the standard nineteenth-century answer to poultry that had outlived its usefulness in the yard: an old tom or a spent hen has plenty of flavour but a great deal of connective tissue, and only slow, moist heat with a tight lid will turn that into gelatine rather than string. The Butterick Cook Book (1911) came out of a pattern-and-magazine publisher writing for households that still bought birds whole, sometimes live, and needed to know what to do with one that would not roast. The technique has clear parallels in the French kitchen manuals that shaped American cookery instruction in this period, down to the bed of chopped root vegetables and the barding slices of pork fat over the breast, and the suggested mushroom sauce points the same way. What has largely vanished is the reason for the recipe: turkeys now reach market young and tender, and the problem the dish was invented to solve rarely arises.