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Boiled Turkey
Singe and draw a turkey and truss it as for boiling. Wrap the gird in a cloth, place it in a saucepan with plenty of hot water and remove the scum as it rises to the top; when the water boils move the saucepan to the side of the fire and let it simmer from one hour and a half to two hours, according to the size of the bird. When cooked drain the turkey, remove the cloth, put it on a hot dish, pour a small quantity of parsley and butter over it, and serve with a sauceboatful of sauce.
Boiled Turkey, English Style Select a very fine tender turkey of about five pounds in weight, singe and draw it, and truss with a needle from the wing to the leg. Place it in a soup pot, cook for one hour and remove it to a hot dish. Decorate the dish with one pint of cooked spinach, English style, and six slices of hot cooked lean ham. Serve with one-half breakfast cupful of hot broth poured over the turkey so as to keep it moist.
Two versions of a dish that has largely fallen out of the American repertoire: a whole turkey poached rather than roasted, served pale with a butter sauce. The instructions assume a coal range and a cook who knows what "trussed as for boiling" means, so a few things need spelling out.
- "Wrap the gird in a cloth"Almost certainly a typesetter's error for "bird." The turkey is wound in a cloth so the skin stays intact and the legs do not splay in the water. Tie it at the ends and at the middle.
- "Move to the side of the fire"On a range, the side of the firebox was the low-heat zone. On a modern burner this means the barest simmer, roughly 180-190F, with the surface only trembling. A rolling boil will shred the breast and cloud the broth.
- Cook to temperature, not to the clockAn hour and a half to two hours suits a modest bird, though the recipe gives no weight and leaves the time to "the size of the bird"; the English-style version's single hour for a 5 lb turkey looks short. Poultry needs 165F in the thickest part of the thigh, away from bone, and an instant-read thermometer is the only way to know. Give it more time in the pot if it is short.
- Turkey sizeNeither version anticipates the 16-20 lb supermarket bird, which will not fit most pots and cannot be poached evenly. Buy the smallest whole turkey you can find, or use a large capon-sized chicken.
- "Parsley and butter"Not a garnish but a sauce: butter melted with a good handful of chopped parsley, sometimes thickened with a little of the poaching liquid. The recipe does not say what the separate sauceboat held; celery sauce, egg sauce and oyster sauce were common partners for boiled fowl in this period.
- "Breakfast cupful"A breakfast cup is usually reckoned at 8-10 fl oz, so half of one is about 4-5 fl oz of hot broth spooned over the bird to keep it from drying.
- "Spinach, English style"Spinach boiled in salted water, drained hard, chopped fine and finished with butter and pepper. A pint means a pint of the cooked, pressed spinach, which takes something like two pounds of raw leaves.
- Keep the liquidThe poaching water, skimmed as directed, is turkey broth. Strain and save it; it is the base for the sauce and for soup the next day.
- YieldA 5 lb bird with ham and spinach serves six comfortably.
Boiled or poached fowl was standard on nineteenth-century English and American tables, and Oscar Tschirky's inclusion of it in The Cook Book (1896) reflects a Waldorf kitchen that still worked from a broadly Anglo-French repertoire rather than an American holiday one. The point of poaching a turkey was gentleness and pale, moist flesh, which seems to have been prized in a way that browned skin was not; the bird arrived white, cloaked in butter sauce, with ham and spinach supplying the color. The pairing of boiled poultry with a salty cured meat and a green vegetable is an old English arrangement, and the second version's name most likely signals that spinach and ham treatment rather than any difference in the bird. The technique of binding the fowl in a cloth before it goes into the water is likewise traditional English practice, meant to keep the skin from tearing during the long simmer.