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Braised Turkey Stuffed with Truffles
Singe and draw a fat hen turkey, cut the neck off, leaving the crop skin as long as possible, scald the feet and rub off the skin. Peel three pounds of truffles and cut them into small balls. Put one and one-half pounds of grated fat bacon into a fryingpan, put in two shallots, two bay leaves, two sprigs of theyme and one clove of garlic, season to taste with pepper and salt and fry over a slow fire. When cool, strain the melted bacon fat into a basin and put in the truffles and half of the truffle trimmings, chopped. Stuff the turkey with the above mixture and truss it as for boiling. Line a braisingpan with slices of fat bacon, place the turkey in wrapped in a sheet of buttered paper, and cover it with three pints of mirepoix and one-half pint of Madeira. When the liquor boils, move the braisingpan to the side of the fire, place hot ashes on the lid and braise the turkey. Make some hot perigueux sauce, using up the balance of the truffle trimmings. When cooked, drain the turkey, untie it, place it on a hot dish, pour some of the hot sauce over it, and serve with the remainder in a sauceboat.
Braised Larded Turkey with Chestnut Puree Singe and draw a small turkey, break the breastbone, cut the legs at the first joint and remove the bone to shorten the legs. When the legs have been singed, push them into the thighs by the opening of the drumsticks. Chop fine a quantity of beef-suet, mix an equal quantity of breadcrumbs with it, and truss the bird with a strong string. Set the skin of the breast and legs by singeing, and lard it with bacon. Put some trimmings of bacon and vegetables into a braisingpan, put in the turkey, moisten it to its height with broth and cover it with a sheet of buttered paper. When boiling, move the pan to the side of the fire, put some hot ashes on the lid and let the broth simmer till the turkey, which should be continually basted with its own cooking liquor, is done. Glaze the breast of the bird with a paste-brush, and when well browned, drain it and put it on a hot dish. Mix an equal quantity of white wine with the cooking liquor, skim off the fat, strain it through a fine hair sieve into another stewpan and boil it quickly until it is reduced to half-glaze. Serve the turkey with the sauce in a sauceboat and a separate dish of chestnut puree.
Turkey Breasts, Spanish Style Proceed as for turkey breasts chipolata, but after cooking for twenty minutes only take the turkey off, place it in another saucepan and baste it with its own gravy, adding one-half pint of Spanish sauce. Blanch one-half pint of chicken or turkey livers, cut them into two or three pieces each, according to their size, and put them into a saucepan with the turkey, adding one-half wineglassful of Madeira wine. Cook for twenty minutes longer, and serve with the livers placed round the breasts and the gravy poured over.
Three separate turkey preparations run together in one block of type here; the first, with its three pounds of truffles, is the showpiece. All of them assume a coal range, a lidded braising pan buried under hot ashes, and a kitchen brigade to keep it basted.
- The hinge: it is a braise, not a roastThe bird is wrapped in buttered paper and cooked in a covered pan with liquid, so it steams and poaches rather than browning. Held at a bare simmer, a low oven of about 300-325F is a reasonable stand-in for the side of the range with ashes on the lid, though the book gives no temperature. Take the thigh to 165F.
- "Fat bacon"In this period the phrase generally means unsmoked pork fatback or salt pork, not the smoked streaky rashers sold today. Grated fatback rendered with shallot, bay, thyme and garlic gives the perfumed fat that carries the truffle; smoked bacon will bully it.
- Three pints of mirepoixHere mirepoix is the old braising preparation -- diced carrot, onion, celery and bacon trimmings moistened with stock -- not the modern dry cut of vegetables. Three pints of it plus half a pint of Madeira is the braising liquor; treat it as roughly six cups of stock-and-vegetable base.
- Truffles and their trimmingsThree pounds of peeled black truffle is a sum most kitchens will never spend. The peelings and offcuts are not waste: half go into the stuffing, the rest into the sauce. If you scale down, scale the stuffing fat down with them or the bird will be swimming.
- Perigueux sauceA demi-glace finished with Madeira and chopped truffle, taking its name from Perigueux in the Perigord. The recipe assumes you have brown sauce standing by; without a made stock reduction there is no sauce here at all.
- "Half-glaze"In the larded turkey, half-glaze is demi-glace -- the strained cooking liquor and white wine boiled until it coats a spoon and pours in a sheet. Skim the fat before reducing, or the reduction turns greasy rather than glossy.
- Larding and glazingLarding with strips of pork fat drawn through the breast compensates for a lean bird cooked in moist heat. The glaze applied with a paste-brush is reduced stock, brushed on at the end and set under high heat; it is what supplies the colour braising cannot.
- Scalded feet, singed skinScalding and skinning the feet and singeing the pinfeathers belong to a kitchen that received birds in feather. A supermarket turkey needs neither, though it is worth checking the cavity and the wing tips for quills.
- YieldMarket hen turkeys of this period were commonly somewhere in the 8-14 lb range, and a stuffed bird of that size, served as one course among several, would stretch to a dozen or so. Rest it well before carving; a braised bird sheds a great deal of juice if cut hot.
Oscar Tschirky ran the dining rooms of the Waldorf and later the Waldorf-Astoria from the 1890s, and his 1896 book records the French repertoire as it was cooked for New York money -- essentially the grande cuisine codified by Careme and passing into Escoffier's hands, transplanted whole. Truffled turkey was the emblem of that repertoire: the dinde truffee had been a fixture of Parisian holiday tables since the early nineteenth century, when Brillat-Savarin wrote about the traffic in truffled birds, and it survived in American hotel kitchens as a way of demonstrating that the house could obtain three pounds of Perigord truffle in December. Braising rather than roasting is the older prestige method -- it perfumes the flesh from within and keeps the meat pale -- and the instruction to bank hot ashes on the lid belongs to an older hearth tradition that long predates the coal range, a way of bringing heat from above as well as below.