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Hashed Turkey with Cream
This is prepared in the same manner as hashed turkey royal, substituting one pint of cold cream and one tablespoonful of butter for the bechamel sauce, omitting the truffles, and reducing the cream with the hash to one-half, which will take about four or five minutes. Pour the whole onto a hot dish, and serve.
A leftover-turkey dish written as a variation, so it only makes sense read alongside its parent recipe. The whole technique is a fast cream reduction, and nothing else about it is difficult.
- What the parent recipe suppliesHashed turkey royal is cooked turkey meat, hashed and warmed with sauce. Here the bechamel and truffles drop out, so what remains is turkey, butter and cream. The recipe gives no meat quantity; a pound to a pound and a half of picked meat against the pint of cream is a modern estimate, not something Oscar states.
- A pint of creamTwo cups. "Cold cream" here most likely distinguishes plain unwhipped cream from a cooked sauce; use heavy cream, as lower-fat cream is more prone to separating when reduced.
- The hinge: reduce, do not simmer idlyFour or five minutes over fairly brisk heat until the cream has halved and coats the meat. Push it further and the turkey — already fully cooked — turns dry and stringy inside a sauce that has gone greasy.
- ButterOne tablespoon, added with the cream rather than used to fry the meat. It is there for gloss.
- SeasoningThis variation says nothing about seasoning; any salt would come from the parent recipe. Season to taste, and a scrape of nutmeg or a spoonful of sherry would not be out of place for the period.
- ServingA "hot dish" means genuinely hot — a warmed shallow platter, since the sauce sets quickly as it cools. The recipe says only to pour the whole out and serve; yield and anything served under it are your own additions.
Oscar Tschirky was maître d'hôtel of the Waldorf and then the Waldorf-Astoria, and his 1896 Cook Book was compiled rather than being a straightforward record of what a large American hotel kitchen turned out, though it does register that kitchen's thrift. Hashed turkey belongs to the long tradition of hotel and household hashes, which existed because a roast bird was carved for the dining room and the remaining meat had to reappear in a form guests would pay for; the "royal" version dressed it up with bechamel and truffles, while this one strips it back to cream and butter. The habit of building a book from cross-references — prepare it as you did the last one, but change two things — is often said to be characteristic of nineteenth-century professional writing, which assumed a reader already standing in a kitchen with the earlier dish in mind rather than a home cook working from a single page.